Goat Simulator

Behold, ye mighty, and despair

By Kevin Kauffmann on April 1, 2014 at 6:35am

I just spent 30 minutes mastering Flappy Goat, a game hidden inside the developer’s studio in Goat Simulator.

30 minutes.

That’s 30 minutes I could have been using doing something useful with my life. That’s 30 minutes I could have used elsewhere in "Goat Simulator’s" little town: destroying fences, becoming the King of Goats, getting flung from explosions like I was in an action movie. Instead, I was content to waste my time on a Flappy Bird clone buried in the wreckage of the ingame developer’s studio.

See, that’s the magic of a game like "Goat Simulator;" you can just find yourself completely absorbed in the little details. The closest I can describe playing this game is turning on "Katamari Damacy" for the first time. Admit it. You squealed a little bit when you rolled up the first human into your "Katamari." When you fling a civilian into the treadmill in "Goat Simulator," you’ll get that same feeling.

That’s because "Goat Simulator" is a pure game. There’s no narrative or multiplayer or anything else distracting you from the glory of the goat. It’s just you - as a goat - playing and destroying things in a third-person sandbox world. You can headbutt anything, do stunt tricks in the air, or lick things, which creates a tether. As a sort of tutorial/game, the game assigns you to become airborne for 10 seconds or perform a successful back flip. Your assignments progressively climb in difficulty until you’re faced with goals like destroying Goathenge or completing demonic rituals. I was done with almost all of them after just a few hours, but I loved every second of it.

What makes the game so glorious are the rampant bugs that were left in the game on purpose. When confronted with all the hilarious errors, the developers were amused with their mistakes that they kept all the bugs that wouldn’t crash the system, and that decision changed the direction of the game entirely. If your head gets too close to a wall, the head will flop around and stretch. The jet pack sends you careening off your path almost instantaneously. After abusing a combo system, I achieved an insurmountable negative score when I encountered an integer overflow, and so I had to restart. I didn’t even mind. The little issues that you normally find annoying in a standard game seem endearing when viewed from a goat's perspective.

The only real negative side to "Goat Simulator" is how short it is. I wanted more - still want more - and I’m running out of things to do and panicking about it. This game had the perfect blend of humor and discovery, and I was filled with childlike glee the three hours it took me to finish the game. Even the 30 minutes I spent on Flappy Goat was enjoyable, but now I look at the goat’s world and see everything I’ve already done. You can only headbutt a basketball into a burning passerby so many times, and I’ve already taken to getting my friends to play it just to live vicariously through them.

"Goat Simulator" is pure fun. It’s turning on all the cheats in "GTA" and seeing the chaos you create in 10 minutes. It’s getting lost in the "Simpsons: Hit and Run" just so you can see all the Easter eggs. It’s playing "Dungeon Keeper" after you’ve completed the objective of the map. You’re not going to get a major narrative or incredibly good gameplay, but you are going to tell a lot of stories about the way you glitched out and landed halfway through a wall or how you lost control on the trampoline and still got an achievement. You'll ramble about how you ransacked a party and the people kept dancing.

All of that is well worth the $10 I paid for early access, and you should grab it as soon as you can before anybody spoils it even more. With that said, I need them to have incentive to make a sequel. I’m already suffering withdrawal.

Goat Simulator 8 / 10 Read our Review »

Release: 4/1/2014 [NA]

ESRB Rating: Teen

Publisher: Coffee Stain Studios

Platforms: PC

Full Game Details »