"Goat Simulator is a small, broken and stupid game. It was made in a couple of weeks so don’t expect a game in the size and scope of GTA with goats. In fact, you’re better off not expecting anything at all actually. To be completely honest, it would be best if you’d spend your $10 on a hula hoop, a pile of bricks, or maybe a real-life goat."
—Coffee Stain Studios
Pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Goat Simulator is a simulator game in which you play as a goat. Originally a silly experiment done internally by Coffee Stain Studios, but it unexpectedly gathered interest from gamers. Goat Simulator is a treasure trove of deliberately broken physics and silliness.
Several additional areas have been added or released as DLC:
- Goatville - the original area.
- Goat City Bay - added with the multiplayer patch.
- Goat MMO Simulator - a free update with an area largely satirising World of Warcraft
- GoatZ - a Zombie Apocalypse themed area that incorporates (bizarre) weapon crafting and (obnoxious) survival mechanics.
- Goat Simulator: PAYDAY - a desert area themed after PAYDAY 2, right down to having several assets directly incorporated.
- Waste of Space - a sci-fi themed area with an overarching mockery of Kickstarter built in.
Buy it here
or on Steam here. An Xbox One version was released in 2015, a PS4 version was released in 2016, and a Nintendo Switch release in 2019. A sequel, Goat Simulator 3, was announced at Summer Games Fest 2022 and was released in November 2022 on the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and on PC via Epic Games Store.
Provides examples of:
- Absurdly High Level Cap: Goat MMO Simulator has a level cap of 101. This is pretty difficult to reach without exploiting Angel Goat. Leveling up does nothing, but you get an achievement for reaching it.
- Action Bomb: Microwave Goat's special ability makes it explode, ragdolling the microwave and knocking over anything close by.
- Adjustable Censorship: You can opt to turn off adult elements in the game. For example, the "No penis-shaped food" protest signs will change to read "No pointy food". Averted in the mobile and console versions, however, where the censorship cannot be disabled.
- Alien Abduction: You can trigger one on the Goatville map. You get stranded in space until you choose to respawn.
- Animate Inanimate Object:
- Shopping Goat, a shopping cart.
- Goat MMO Simulator has Microwave Goat, a microwave on legs.
- Goat Payday has a small bag stall near the drive-in cinema with a box that will transform your character into a black duffel bag if they run into the floating bag in the box.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Given the many hilarious ways you might get yourself stuck, there's a handy respawn option that drops you back at the spawn point.
- Averted with Goat MMO and Goat Payday, where you cannot respawn back into the main world once you are trapped on the treasure dimension and moon respectively (the latter being worse as all four crew members will appear on the moon, regardless if they were on the pirate ship or not).
- Artistic License – Physics: One of the first things you'll notice about the game, as shown in the page image. The game is not just a simulation on how to play like a goat on the streets, but the hilarity that comes with it. How did they manage to incorporate such level of comedy? By breaking several laws of physics and making ragdolls out of anything mobile, so as long as it doesn't crash the game outright.
- Ascended Glitch:
Word of God says that the only bugs that will be fixed are the crash bugs. Everything else, particularly the variety that involves the physics engine doing weird things, will be kept in because it's funny. The boxed version even boasts that it has "More bugs than any other game!" - Awesome Moment of Crowning: Becoming King/Queen of the Goats. Which coincidentally confers the power to make it rain goats.
- Awesomeness Meter: You can get points for stuff like making things explode, crashing parties, and doing 360 flips.
- Bilingual Bonus: The traffic signs above the road tunnels in the first map are written in Swedish. They translate into "Heaven" and "Hell", respectively.
- Blatant Lies: Much like Surgeon Simulator 2013, the veracity of this simulation is questionable, to say the least.
- Blow You Away: Finding the Wind Statue on the beach map and returning it to the Wind Altar gives you the power to create localized tornadoes.
- Body Horror:
- The physics in this game can result in some fairly disturbing-looking positions for anyone involved. Walk up any ladder and watch the goat's head twist in all sorts of unnatural ways. The Demon Goat power activates a black hole in front of your goat that can inflict this on other objects and people.
- Combine two or more goats when at least one isn't just a cosmetic change. For example, Space Goat and Ripped Goat. The June 2014 update actually added this example as Slendergoat on the beach map.
- Bowdlerise: The console ports changed dialogue to remove uses of the F word.
- Breath Weapon: How the zombie virus is spread, and also your special ability in GoatZ.
- Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": The various "goats":
- Ripped Goat: A muscular goat
- Tall Goat: A giraffe
- Feather Goat: An ostrich
- Giant Goat: A whale
- Classy Goat: A penguin
- Old Goat: A T. rex
- Mermaid Goat: A fish with legs
- Snail Goat: An elf from Goat MMO Simulator performing an imitation of its namesake
- Circle of Standing Stones: Goathenge. Destroying it is a unique action worth more points than normal.
- Combos: Like a skateboarding game, you get points for doing flips and spins. Hilariously, the "combo counter" doesn't settle for boring double, triple, and quadruple. Using various tricks, it's possible to go right past real numbers and into Integer Overflow numbers, which when done enough can actually net the Hard level high score achievement in a single combo. In fact, if you go too far, it is possible to achieve a literal integer overflow and do a combo so insanely high that the score resets to 1.
- Cool Mask:
- You can earn these by completing some of the objectives, such as going to the Goat Castle and proclaiming yourself King/Queen of All Goats by sitting on the throne.
- You can purchase different masks from BAA Machines and wear said masks on top of the Payday crew masks in Goat Payday. One achievement requires you to purchase and wear 30 masks at once.
- Creator Cameo:
- Almost all of the NPC models found in Goatville and Goat City Bay are named after the developers, with GoatZ adding the Gone North Games developers to the roster.
- Coffee Stain Studios is an actual building in the map, and you get an achievement for finding it and going inside. You'll find the developers working on Goat Simulator.
- You can find this house again in GoatZ, now shared with the DLC's creator Gone North Games. Inside you can find a developer weeping at a large screen as negative reviews for the game are displayed.
- On the other hand, you can find the developers again on an island separate from the mainland partying it up like there's no tomorrow, complete with music, a money cannon, a wine paddle pool, a giant gold goat statue and a stripper cage where the developer inside it performs a very convincing Snoop Dogg impression.
- A Prank in Goat Payday involves you using a drillcopter to save a dev from the prison. You complete the mission by returning the dev to the other developers, who can be found in the casino showering a gold goat statue with money.
- Deal with the Devil: You can sacrifice five humans or goats to the Blood Goat to become Devil Goat. You can also sacrifice the two Walker statues and the G-2 robot to become Sanctum Goat.
- Defeat Means Playable: After completing the quest to vanquish Old Goat, you unlock it as a Mutator. Of course, "defeat" is probably a strong word here...
- Developer's Foresight: It's possible to destroy the hang glider by licking the Boulder of Death and dragging it to the top of the crane. Doing so will net the message "How? Seriously, how did you manage that?"
- Developer's Room:
- In Goat MMO Simulator, you can find the game's servers in a hidden room. Hitting them repeatedly messes up the graphics, starting with the textures failing, and then everything becoming wireframe and removing the status displays, until eventually the player is booted from the game. You get an achievement for it.
- Die, Chair, Die!: There are very few things in this game you can't headbutt for points. Pretty much anything not nailed down is fair game.
- Donut Mess with a Cop: The police station's sign in Goat Payday is a giant doughnut like the one at Randy's Donuts painted white with a blue band and letters.
- Double Jump: The Double Jump mutation allows the player to jump a second time in mid-air.
- Episode of the Dead: GoatZ is a dedicated episode about the Zombie Apocalypse which also parodies titles like Left 4 Dead and Dead Island.
- Escort Mission: Parodied in Goat MMO Simulator, where one quest is to escort a painfully slow moving man halfway across the map. The intended solution is just to grab him with your tongue.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Parked cars will blow up if force is applied to them, whether from you headbutting them or something else hitting them at a high enough speed. Moving cars and cars found in the Goat Payday map, on the other hand, are the opposite.
- Everything's Deader with Zombies: The DLC GoatZ. Also a Take That! as it prominently advertises itself as the "First Survival Game Not in Early Access".
- Extreme Omni-Goat: One of the in-game mods lets you play as this as a Yoshi parody.
- Facepalm: Human Non Player Characters tend to do this in response to you making a ruckus if they don't run away or fall over.
- Fetch Quest: Most of the quests in Goat MMO Simulator are some variation of "Find x."
- Flying Saucer: There's a flying saucer in Goat Payday that abducts various protesters that stand on alien markings on the ground... as well as clip though buildings.
- Foregone Victory: It's basically impossible to die in Goat MMO Simulator, since nothing can actually hurt you, just repel at most. As such, you can accomplish quests at your leisure.
- Going Through the Motions: There is only one short animation loop for dancing. Finding a big crowd doing the same dance move over and over again, perfectly synched with one another to boot, is both hilarious and slightly unnerving.
- Ground Pound: Tank Goat's special ability makes him pound the ground, damaging anything nearby.
- Happy Circus Music: In Cabrito Park, the Amusement Park in Goat City Bay, a traditional-sounding carnival waltz tune plays. The song sounds slightly off-key, fitting the game's Stylistic Suck nature.
- Hell Is That Noise: The dragon cry from the Goatborn setting will destroy your ears the first time you hear it. And that's before you start spamming it. Said dragon cry occasionally plays in place of a regular "baa" even when not using Goatborn.
- Hitbox Dissonance: In line with the intentional brokenness of the rest of the game, the player character in Flappy Goat has an extremely unforgiving hitbox in which even if you come within two pixels from an obstacle, you'll still lose.
- Hookers and Blow:
- On the beach map, it's possible to find a house with a pile of "sugar" neatly cut into a line. Licking it increases the game speed for 30 seconds or so.
- You can find an an RV and three blue barrels on the GoatZ map. Delivering all three barrels to the RV will cause small piles of crystal meth to pop up all over the map. Licking one of these piles will give you the Crystal Breath ability, allowing you to freeze Non Player Characters in front of you for a short time, turning them into breakable ice sculptures.
- Horse of a Different Color: You can get people to ride you with by jumping onto the bucking bull ride in the Goat City Bay map.
- Involuntary Dance: Deadgoa7's active power forces everyone in the area to dance, even when they're aflame or fleeing in terror.
- Jet Pack: You can pick up a jet pack on the city map. You cannot, however, control your flight. There's also Rocket-Skate Goat. In this case, your legs just bounce around in every direction and it does absolutely nothing. You can even walk around.
- Joke Character:
- Giant Goat. Understandably, a beached whale is a bit difficult to move around.
- Shopping Goat. A shopping cart is easier to move around, and can even jump, but it's an inanimate object that can't headbutt.
- The Microwave class in the MMO update. It has all the abilities of a normal goat, but moves slower and its special abilities aren't all that great.
- Knockback: As part of the messed-up physics, a lot of things will cause your goat to go flying across the map.
- Ladder Physics: Goats climb ladders by spastically spinning their head and tongue around while walking through the air by the ladder.
- Lightning Bruiser: Classy Goat (a penguin) is the slowest goat when walking, but has the fastest running speed in the game.
- Made of Iron: The player goat as well as all NPCs can get blown back by an explosion, hit by a car, fall hundreds of meters from the air, and the like, and the worst that will happen is that go into ragdoll mode (which can be undone for the player by pressing Q or moving) or respawn due to falling into the void below the map.
- Moveset Clone: Almost all of the "[x] Goat" Mutators change the species of the player character, but don't fundamentally alter the playstyle, though some have different physics or other properties to make them feel more distinct, such as Feather Goat's floatier physics.
- Mushroom Samba: The beach map has mushrooms you can eat by licking. Doing so causes parts of the goat's head to enlarge. You have to put down a few of them to get the full effect, or else it will only enlarge an ear.
- No Fair Cheating: While the slowdown feature slows everything down, including the music, it does not slow down Flappy Goat.
- Not Quite Flight:
- Angel Goat reduces gravity to a fraction of normal as long as its power is active. You can leap off the tallest building in the game and land with the grace of a cat. This makes getting absurd combos hilariously easy, and is great for general travel. The Flappy Goat mutator has a similar effect, giving the goat wings which grant a glide ability. Combining them is the closest thing to actual flight the game has.
- The MMO update adds in the anti-gravity mutator, which brings it even closer. However, it doesn't turn gravity off completely, but reduces it to a small fraction of normal. Your distances are greatly improved (far larger than the map's area), but turning in midair is hard and your goat will eventually start falling. Combining Anti-Gravity with the Tank's charge attack allows faster travel, and can be quite effective if you still have quests to complete.
- Fully averted in the Goat Payday DLC. one of the crew members you can play as is Valentino Salami, a flamingo capable of true flight.
- Our Zombies Are Different:
- Apparently, animals like goats, giraffes, penguins and even elephants are also highly susceptible to the zombie virus. The zombie goats can be difficult to escape due to their high speed and ramming abilities.
- Unique NPCs including The Governor and fortune teller will have a different appearance when zombified.
- If you survive for long enough, you can encounter the stronger, crimson Dead Ghost zombie varieties.
- Overly-Long Tongue: Licking something causes the goat's tongue to stuck to it... and stretch to freakishly long distances if that thing gets stuck somewhere, or gets hit by a car.
- Ragdoll Physics: Knocking over human characters will cause them to flop to the ground in a very strange way. Your goat will do this too — in fact you can get it to "ragdoll" on command by pressing a button, which is actually vital to getting one of the trophies and one of the achievements.
- Raiders of the Lost Parody: The Boulder of Death, which is the only object in the game that can destroy moving cars.
- Rewarding Vandalism: You get points and achievements for breaking stuff.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: Sent up with the MMO update's Rouge class, which uses a variety of makeup without being seen. Yes, it's actually spelled "rouge".
- Rule of Funny: Why are the physics so messed up? Why can you lick things and then drag them around with your tongue? Why are there trampolines at the bottom of an empty swimming pool? This is why. The creators have outright admitted this: one of the key features on the Steam store page is "MILLIONS OF BUGS!", with the disclaimer that anything that doesn't crash the game is "hilarious and we're keeping it". You even get an achievement for crashing the game.
- Scoring Points: The "goal" of the game is to complete objectives and earn points. Some of these objectives are given to you, most you have to find for yourself. Some of the basic ways to earn points are by destroying things, jumping over things, or licking things.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Some things explode when you run into them. Also how you get the Michael Bay achievement, by blowing up the gas station.
- Stylistic Suck: Could easily be called Stylistic Suck: The Game. It's a mediocre premise in a game that's intentionally filled to the brim with glitches and terrible ragdoll physicsnote . It's essentially if someone made a terrible Garry's Mod video into a playable game.
- Super-Strength: Ripped Goat comes with a massive increase to headbutt power. The one you fight can headbutt you high into the air.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: In Payday you can find a sign reading "Selling totally not stolen stuff"
- Synthetic Voice Actor: The chat has the same text-to-speech chat as Moonbase Alpha.
- Take That!:
- The achievement for reaching level 101 in MMO is titled "Better than Warlords of Dredmor". The first of the two games referenced has a level cap of 100, one lower than Goat MMO Simulator.
- Waste of Space contains a lot of thinly-veiled satire toward Kickstarter through "Crowdkicker"; beyond the CEO of the company being named "Lawrence S. Windle" and many of the ultimately pointless stretch goals, one of the denizens' random commentary is "Star Citizen took all my money!".
- Teenage Mutant Samurai Wombats: Parodied. You can find the "Michael Bay Turdles" hanging out in a sewer in Goat City Bay. On the console edition, they look like normal humans wearing green tracksuits and bandanas, but in the PC and mobile versions they much more closely resemble the original Ninja Turtles, except with the head of Shrek.
- Too Dumb to Live: Most of the humans in GoatZ go about their daily activities, you know, as if there wasn't a mass Zombie outbreak.
- Unlockable Content: Collecting trophies and completing certain in-game events unlock new goat skins (some are applied immediately, others can be activated in a Custom Game). These include Tall Goat (a giraffe), Feather Goat (an ostrich), Giant Goat (a whale), and many more.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You're a goat, who cares about those pesky humans? Kick them off buildings, into traffic, and set them on fire! You can even mistreat your goat, like throwing it into traffic and have it smushed by a truck (though nothing can kill you, just hop out of ragdoll mode once you're done playing roadkill). You can also lick things in motion and be dragged along limply.
- Villain Protagonist: The goat can beat up innocent civilians, destroy stuff, and participate in a Satanic ritual, among other things.
- Violation of Common Sense: Getting hit by cars and licking random things gives you points! It's even an in-game goal.
- Walking Disaster Area: Repulsive Goat's ability emits a stench which is literally repulsive; anything that gets near/touches the goat is instantly repelled, assuming it is an object the goat would be capable of moving. Intact and moving cars aren't affected, instead causing the goat to ragdoll and stretch from the interaction.
- Wall Crawl: One of the new features in Goat Payday and it's pretty much the only way to escape the police jail (read: pit where police throw criminals). It should be stated that you don't climb just walls either, you can climb everything whether you like it or not.
- Wall Jump: Added with the June 2014 update, you simply jump in the middle of a Wall Run.
- Wall Run: A new feature added with the June 2014 update. By running and then jumping at a wall, the goat will run up the wall for a brief period. If there's another nearby wall, you can jump to that wall and keep running. Angel Goat can scale a sheer wall through its hover ability.
- Waving Signs Around: The group of people protesting against penis-shaped foods in Goat Payday.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: Beating Ripped Goat in the Goat Fight Club turns you into Ripped Goat, a sheep.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The entire premise of GoatZ's "After".
