In the later sections, the puzzles almost reach Portal-like levels of environment-manipulation, and you half-wish the whole game had been like it.Īs a story, The Gunk can’t quite stick the landing, and it’s where the full marks tumble down a half point. But the keys and locks are often natural elements of the environment, like seeds and puddles, so you rarely feel like you’re manipulating game mechanics. That tactility and confidence stretches to the puzzles, which mostly involve finding keys to certain locks. The audio and visual design are in unbelievable concert, making this one of the most immersive games in recent memory, and you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a studio who had been making indie rogue-lites up until this point. Hoovering up chunks of metal feels like getting coins caught in your hoover the Gunk slurps and gurgles like oil going down the plughole. Image & Form do such a superb job of making everything feel physical, when the Gunk could have felt like an abstract element. Hoovering up the Gunk is a joy, as you clear the unsightly snot from an area and then watch as a shockwave reinvigorates the environment. Which is a message that we all could do with hearing.Īnd supporting it all is a simple action that never gets old. Without ruining too much, it’s a plot that revolves around caring for your surroundings, of having enough hope and optimism that bad choices can be overridden. And they both want the best for the planet, getting whipped up in a plot to return it to past glories. Rani and Becks have a relationship that does get strained, but they’re clearly close. It Takes Two, Mutazione, Roki, Cozy Grove: these are all games that we feel a warmth towards, and The Gunk joins them. Some of our favourite games of the year have given us a world or cast of characters that we want to spend as much time with as possible. The Gunk is also endlessly optimistic and positive. Regardless, death and failure is barely an inconvenience. The emphasis is way, way over into non-combat exploration and lightweight puzzling, and knowing that combat sits at the bottom of the pile means you can take a bit of a breather. There are only a handful of enemies and barely a dozen combat moments, and we only felt panicked and swarmed twice. The Gunk can swing from claustrophobic in one moment to agoraphobic the next.īut what might surprise you most about The Gunk is how inviting it is. In the background, you have sweeping vistas that convey the size of the world and trivialise your role in it. In the foreground, you have tactile, high-contrast environments that demand to be explored. Rani is a wonderfully animated little action figure, but the real star is the world. The Gunk arrives at the tail-end of the year with a justifiable claim to be the best looking game of the year. This all plays out in third-person, and by golly does it look beautiful. And the post-Gunk levels will often reveal secret passages or the means to make a passage, as you suck up seeds to plant them in energy pools, or explode blockages with combustible seeds. You can also find resources like metals, ‘organic’ and ‘alien’ materials, which can be spent on constructing those upgrades. You can scan and classify various plants and minerals once they’ve been de-Gunked, which gives you that Charles Darwin feeling that we talked about, but it also contributes to a research bar that unlocks upgrades. Lots of joyful distractions spin off from this simple loop. Once the Gunk is gone, an energy wave causes the immediate area to flourish into life. Think the Luigi’s Mansion backpack, or a Ghostbusters proton pack with more of a ‘suck’ function. Luckily you are outfitted with something to deal with it: a prosthetic on your arm that can suck it up and store it. Hovering around like some zero-G snot, it’s a phenomenon rather than a creature. So, you land on a desolate planet that has an unusual energy signature, and you set off to explore with a view to making some moolah. But you’re both in the same (giant, steel) boat: you have got barely any money between you, so the next job needs to earn you both a windfall. You are Rani and your partner is Becks you are the gregarious, excitable one, and she is the more pragmatic one. You play as one half of a space exploration and mining team.
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