Tomorrow is April Fool’s day, a rather appropriate choice for the release of Goat Simulator - a game that began as a joke submission from developer Coffee Stain Studios to a Game Jam, but has since found itself released as a full commercial product thanks to public demand. We’ve been looking forward to the game for a while - it was on our list of most-anticipated games for the year - and now that it’s arrived, thankfully spending time with it reveals that it was worth the wait.
Forget driving a bus, a tractor or hauling cargo up and down motorways; Goat Simulator is the new standard for the Simulation genre (at least until Bear Simulator is released). As the name suggests, you play a goat and it’s your goal to cause utter mayhem within the confines of the relatively small map created by the developer. Goat Simulator starts off stupid and just gets progressively more daft as time goes on. Initially it might look as though there isn’t much to do - you can headbutt objects and people, jump, and perform forward or backward flips. You can also ragdoll yourself, which allows you to bounce higher and reach otherwise inaccessible places.
Your goat comes equipped with an impossibly elastic and sticky tongue. Lick something, and your tongue will stick to it - allowing you to drag items all over the map - crates, cars (which explode after a single headbutt), even people. Sprinting around the map with a giant car in tow is an excellent way to cause mayhem and destruction, allowing you to rack up large score multipliers. Knock something over, and you’ll get a number of points and an increase to your multiplier. Knock something over again, or perform a stunt, or do anything that game deems noteworthy - which is pretty much anything - and you’ll continue to rack up the score and increase your multiplier. Once your multiplier reaches a certain threshold, a ridiculous soundtrack kicks in that only adds to the fun.
There’s no real reason for any of this, other than the fact that the developers felt like it. There are leaderboards though, and it’s already rather daunting seeing some of the feats that people have accomplished - the highest jump, or the most back flips in a row, for example. There are also challenges, though completing them doesn’t appear to do much, if anything.
Goat Simulator is also incredibly buggy, but that’s intentional. Half of the game’s fun comes from trying to break as much about it as possible - and there’s even an achievement for making the game crash to desktop. Strap a jetpack to your back, and you can send your goat hurtling through the air outside of the playable area, becoming stuck outside of its confines. The people who populate the game regularly glitch through walls, while climbing a ladder simply sees your goat ascend the rungs without any animation. In any other game, bugs like these would be unforgivable; in Goat Simulator, they’re the source of constant laughter as you find yourself rag-dolling through the air with your jetpack, only to come crashing back down to earth and trigger a bug that sees you being flung halfway across the map. Amusingly, even some of the achievements are listed as “currently unobtainable”, though browsing the forums suggests that a few people have somehow managed to unlock them anyway, purely by accident.
Spend some time with the game, and you start to appreciate that it has hidden depths. Coffee Stain Studios has packed the game full of all sorts of secrets to be found; with enough exploration and experimentation, you can unlock the ability to become an Ostrich; you can find yourself transported to a castle where you’re crowned King of the Goats; you can even be abducted by aliens and find yourself floating in outer space. Tracking down these Easter eggs is half of the game’s fun. One corner of the map contains a satanic ritual ground, while a nearby boulder lets you literally crash a garden a BBQ after rolling it down a hill. There are collectable statues to be found, a miniature version of Stonehenge, and hidden away in a recreation of the developer’s own offices, you can even play a re-purposed version of Flappy Bird. While the game’s map initially looks as though it was put together without thought, some exploration reveals that there’s actually some clever level design in place, with plenty of hidden routes through the world.
Despite only shipping with one map and a handful of unlockable mutators, Steam Workshop support all but ensures that the game will receive a healthy modding community. There’s already a few creations available to download, such as a mutator which allows you to double jump, and another that lets you set a marker and teleport back to it at any time. One industrious player has even created a pinball table, with your goat replacing the ball. Before long, there should be a healthy selection of maps and new abilities, and the ability to combine different mutators means that you’ll be able to break the game in all kinds of new and hilarious ways. Some games receive community support and mods which fix their bugs; with Goat Simulator, such an act would be sacrilege and strip it of its appeal.
Goat Simulator is quite possibly the most ridiculous game ever invented. It induces frequent bouts of laughter, and while the lack of content may make people a little suspicious of its price tag, the amount of hilarity on offer is more than worth the price of admission. It will be interesting to see what other mods are created for the game, and whether or not the developer will update it with new content over time. The joke does eventually wear thin, its laugh-out-loud appeal diminishing to little more than the occasional wry smile, but even after prolonged play it still manages to surprise you.
Dale Morgan
@spamdangled
Latest posts by Dale Morgan (see all)
- The Last of Us’ Ashley Johnson on lack of playable women in AC: Unity - 21 July 2024
- Google to stop listing games with in-app purchases as free - 18 July 2024
- Jazzpunk Review - 18 July 2024
