VideoGame Chaos, Thy Name Is Goose.
Geese, as the saying goes, are assholes, and few works of fiction illustrate this quite like Untitled Goose Game.
Playing as the eponymous feathery bastard, your objective is to harass, annoy, and otherwise pester the people of a quiet West Country village. You do this with remarkable aplomb considering you are a domestic farm bird who cannot fly, and must make do with a combination of honking loudly and stealing nearby objects.
Its main selling point is the Comedic Sociopathy, in that there are a multitude of ways for the titular goose to inconvenience others, ranging from the merely amusing (honking at villagers to distract them) to the downright sadistic (terrify a young boy into hiding in a phone booth, steal his glasses, make him trip and fall, generally bully him). The graphics are simple yet functional, the music is pleasant but limited, and the plot is neither particularly sensible nor particularly deep. However, it is an unfortunate fact that once you've done everything you can to disrupt the lives of the village folk, the game loses a lot of its engagement value.
However, if you want to have fun as an obnoxious honking git out to ruin everyone's day largely For the Evulz, there's few better ways to do it than Untitled Goose Game, and this one won't get you cited on disorderly conduct charges.
VideoGame Worth a Gander
Looking at Untitled Goose Game in the context of decades of videogame convention, I have to say that of any title I've ever played, I've never enjoyed the act of fetching things more than I have as a nasty goose rampaging around a quaint English village. Goose Game hearkens back to the good old British videogames, like Jet Set Willy or Theme Hospital, where mundane ideas are explored with a kind of sadistic and malevolent glee.
Untitled Goose Game is a stealth/puzzle title, in which you play a rampant wild animal who (for reasons known to no-one) has a literal 'to do' list of tasks to complete. Every last one of these tasks serves to cause mischief and mayhem amongst the blameless locals. Whilst the village people could have kept the local pond a bit cleaner, none of them seem have done anything to deserve this. But its fine! Because you are, after all, a goose. And geese are assholes by God's design, and no one can honestly hold malice for them or expect them to behave otherwise. Decades ago my mum once punched a goose for attacking my baby brother, and everyone else probably has similar memories of geese being dickheads.
I'd been looking forward to Untitled Goose Game for years - more than any other game in that entire time - and I am pleased to say it is as much fun to plunder, bully, and HONK! the locals with impunity as I'd hoped. At times I've been finding the puzzle solving a bit frustrating: one task involve's stealing the gardener's hat, and if you ambush him whilst he's removed his hat to wipe his forehead, he'll drop it and offer you a quick chance to bundle it away. I wasted half an hour waiting for one such opportunity to come up again whilst he potters around the garden, only to eventually discover there is a far easier way to do it whilst he's later incapacitated. Many puzzles can be solved by watching people's routine or by carefully looking at the surroundings, but sometimes you can end up chasing red herrings like the one above. The controls can also be a bit clumsy too, and repeatedly fumbling a puzzle can get a bit irritating.
Besides these infrequent annoyances, I was very much charmed by Untitled Goose Game. Assuming you're not a clumsy idiot like me, you can expect to finish the game within a few hours, but they will be very good hours.