The first World Of Goo was a happy march of gooey engineering with a sense of endless novelty (actually, endless for about four hours). Each level introduced a modern kind of goo or twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that required a group of bubbling balls to reach the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with the same nervous fervor as its predecessor, throwing modern toys and gooeys at the player to keep them on their goo-covered toes. But that pursuit doesn’t always result in enjoyable modern levels. This time around, everything has a bit of a “hit and miss” feel to it. But those hits If hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for a more viscous build structure: I hope you like hilariously unpredictable fluids.
As before, the goal of each level is to deliver a set number of goo balls to a distant pipe, which is often suspended in the sky or hanging in a threatening void on one side of the screen. By wisely using the different goo, you’ll build rickety suspension bridges and teetering towers to “rescue” as many of the little blobs as possible. You can get a special reward for beating a certain time limit or using a constrained number of moves, as well as rescuing a vast number of gloopy boys.
But it’s rarely as basic as Bridge Constructor. Your building materials are bug-eyed weirdos who aren’t constrained to a single species. Some of the goo balls from the first game return, like flammable matchhead goo that causes fiery chain reactions. Or green goo that resembles Velcro and can be reused over and over again. Balloons also return, their floating action helping to keep your crane-like creations stable (“stable” is a relative term).
Many of the other gooes are modern, though. There are clear “conduit” gooes that act like hollow straws to suck up any liquid they come into contact with (more on those in a moment). There are cheesy yellow gooes that can form a solid surface, pink gooes that grow and stretch when damp with liquid, like grotesque “just add water” toys. And their opposite, pale blue gooes that slowly shrink when damp, creating structures that curl in on themselves like a melting chip bag in a campfire. In the game’s fourth chapter, some weird stuff happens that essentially turns the game into a series of goo-based gags. Before you know it, you’re playing with gravity, golf balls, and the species itself.
But it’s the fluid simulation that’s the main purveyor of puzzles here. Pools of black liquid must be absorbed and transformed into globs of goo. Streams must be redirected using petite water cannon heads. Some seas of fluid will power creatures with jet-engine mouths, which in turn will power goo boats or balloon-supported jet packs. Fiery lava creates its own problems (and sometimes solutions).
This Buckaroo-style stacking of puzzle components is impressive, and at times a little over the top. While one player might revel in the indulgent layering of goo, another might feel a sense of wasted opportunity, harboring visions of a game with twice as many levels, taking full and more focused advantage of all the goo-based possibilities. But this is not the kind of puzzle game 2D Boy seems interested in making. It’s as fast-paced and playful as the first game, and just as obsessed with rapid reinvention. Saying there’s too much newness in World Of Goo 2 is like going to a tender play and complaining that there’s too much color in the ball pit.
So yes, that sense of increasingly absurd stakes is still intact, even thematically. Levels range from peaceful islands of peace to breezy sunsets and stormy nights as hundreds of thousands of years pass between one chapter and the next. All the while, the music swells from tender flamenco guitar to epic horns and apocalyptic choral chants, giving each chapter a sense of marching progress that perfectly matches the increasing complexity (or madness) of the goo puzzles. It’s a soaring flight into clouds of gooey madness that will be familiar to anyone who stacked goo blocks or chatted with the smart search engine in the first game.
The developer’s characteristically featherlight satire is also in full swing. The World Of Goo Corporation is rebranded, and an early cutscene shows humanity rushing to do some “sustainable” shopping (but not before throwing their children’s plastic bottles on the ground as they flee). The game’s ironic characters also return, at one point insisting that erect pink gooes with their pulsating veins are perfectly normal. “An alternative interpretation of the natural behavior of the growth balls is neither intended nor should be inferred,” says one character, denying penis tissue altogether.
All of this makes for a good time. But then there are those “boxes” I mentioned. Not every level is a delight. For me, the worst offenders are the time-limited levels, such as one where a timer ticking on a pipe counts down to the moment when heated lava pours out, ready to destroy your goos. Or another where a pipe spewing useful liquid counts down to the moment when the liquid stops pumping. I’m not convinced that these mandatory time challenges feel right in a game that otherwise lets you play at your own pace. They seem designed to add a bit of pressure, but rather than forcing me to act quickly, they simply create a level where at least one restart feels expected. Similarly, I found levels where your featherlight sources are constrained, or ones where your surroundings are constantly moving, where the challenge is to build a structure when the structure itself refuses to stay put. Yes, part of the appeal of this game comes from the fickleness of its spherical building material. But there’s a point where the nitty-gritty becomes frustrating for me. It’s a blessing that you can skip any level without consequence.
There are other annoying things. The WASD keys control the camera, but the screen will also auto-scroll when the cursor is near the edge, and there’s no way to turn this off. So if the place you want to click is near the edge, the camera sometimes moves a petite but significant distance at the wrong time. On top of that, the whiteflies from the first game that act as an “undo” button return, but their gnat-like movements across the screen make them complex to click. They also mostly hang out near the edge of the screen, meaning that when you hover over them, the edge scrolling starts again – aggghhhh! It’s the video game equivalent of trying to follow a link in a browser, and HTML scrolling everything on the page down the moment you click. I suspect World Of Goo 2 is probably wonderfully designed for touchscreen tablets and other touchscreen devices. But with a mouse and keyboard, it can be awkward. A basic backspace key to swat the fly (wherever it is) would remove a lot of this friction. Maybe they’ll patch this, along with disabling the screen edges. It’s possible!
It would certainly sort things out. In the time I spent sucking my teeth on this sequel, I spent twice as much time in a satisfying, engineering-y “LEGO” trance. Some of the frustrations feel intentional—there’s a certain unpredictability to the game. Your components are never 100% trustworthy (they’re made of jelly, of course), and the physics simulation is as dependent on wild fluid or the impact of goo balls as it is on gravity itself. In that sense, World Of Goo 2’s misclicks and ball stumbles (oo-er) exist as incidental annoyances, and the challenging levels—while they annoy me—exist as a byproduct of the ingenuity that produces great moments elsewhere.
The biggest concern for anyone eagerly awaiting this sequel (hi, Graham) is that it won’t live up to the original’s insane creativity. And I can confidently confirm that’s not a problem for Goo 2. If you’re in the mood for another silly ride down a inactive river of black goo, then jump in. Goo is fine.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
