Hello Naaman. Why is everyone on Twitter suddenly screaming “UNTITLED GEESE GAME!!!”?
Hi Steph, don’t worry, those screams you’re hearing are honks of joy. The reason is simple: instead of one goose, there are two.
Untitled Goose Game has added a second goose. The geese are leese!!
What are you talking about? What is Untitled Goose Game?
You call yourself a culture editor?? We’ve only written around seven different articles on it – including two different reviews, a behind-the-scenes feature on “how they laid the golden egg”, another feature on how it was made, and there was also an incredibly abstract reference to its art style in a comic about Premier League managers.
The Australian-made indie game is a huge worldwide smash, and we’ve never been prouder. If you search “Guardian goose”, our review of Untitled Goose Game is the sixth result – after the Wikipedia article for “guard goose” (“The guard goose is a domestic goose that is utilised as a guard animal both on farms and in other situations.”)
OK yes I have heard of it. I have simply never played it.
In the game – which was created by Melbourne’s House House, and can be played on PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One – you control a horrible (yet beautiful?) goose whose role in life is to go around pestering the residents of an idyllic village.
You solve puzzles through pecking, stealing things in your wicked beak, honking and such. Previously you were limited, confined if you will, to the body of only one such goose. No more.
Oh dear! Two horrible geese!
— House House (@house_house_) August 18, 2020
A new two-player mode for Untitled Goose Game will be available for free on September 23rd.https://t.co/mLLf8rWG4b pic.twitter.com/9CYeIO1a5N
A free update to the game will be released on 23 September, granting you the second goose, so you can play with a friend. The makers are promising you can now “enjoy the entire game as two horrible geese, with a new horrible honk, teaming up to plan some horrible pranks, and generally being horrible to everyone together”.
A new horrible honk?
A new horrible honk!
untitled goose game introducing multiplayer, is going to have the villagers like this pic.twitter.com/5hjeGOSvom
— damian (@dhiabhori) August 18, 2020
This is truly the good news that 2020 needed. But I still have lots of questions. Why is it about a goose? Why does the game not have a title? Why is it so popular?
There’s something universally appealing about the simplicity of the goose. They are so awful, but so funny. Its success owes a lot to its meme-ability, which is something that the title leans into.
Its first trailer, in 2017, went viral just thanks to the aforementioned goose concept, and once it made it to PCs and the Nintendo Switch in 2019, it took off around the world. It’s just a goose: a celebration of a silly idea, but incredibly well-designed and with a beautiful art style.
As the makers of Untitled Goose Game said back when it was but a twinkle in their eye, “let’s make a game about this [image of a goose]”.
People think game development means you get to play games all day, but they're wrong - it means you talk about geese pic.twitter.com/I8XvTWy7b1
— Michael McMaster (@mjmcmaster) August 11, 2016
Instead of Untitled Goose Game, it feels to me that it should now be called Geese Game.
Yes, it should be called Geese Game.
