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New Delhi: 2D Boy is back after 17 years with a sequel to the incredibly popular World of Goothat released back in 2008. At that time I was working in Digit magazine (making the DVDs), and I remember that I just could not stop playing the game. It was the only time that my Editor actually told me to stop playing a videogame in an office that normally encouraged gaming, where the days usually ended with a few rounds of Quake III Arena on the office LAN. I gave it the highest rating for a game that I had ever given at that time, higher even than Mirror’s Edge, Prince of Persia and Prototype. I was glad to see that the game became even more successful when it was released on touchscreens a few years later, becoming one of the highest rated games on iOS, ever.

So I was really excited about World of Goo 2and I took my time playing the game, not rushing to put out a review. I knew this was a game that demanded close attention to the details, a game that revealed new surprises in every playthrough, a game that required careful readings of the hints peppered throughout, and I was not at all disappointed. This is a far more ambitious title, with many more varieties of Goo Balls, tougher maps, and a story that hurtles through time, with large jumps between chapters. The developers have doubled down on the twisted, dark and delicious humour, and they have come out with a title that invites you to indulge in mischief and mayhem.

Gameplay

The original game was pretty simple, relying on viscosity for visual stimulation, you get a bunch of Goo Balls and you have to build structures to get them into pipes. The narrative in the subtext was how civilisations and technologies tend to destroy the environment and mess up the planet. In World of Goo 2, the same basic mechanic is back, but there are a wide variety of Goo balls, and at least in some stages, the fundamental gameplay mechanics evolve. One chapter is more about golf or goolf rather than construction. There are Goo Balls that expand or contract on exposure to water, conduit balls that suck up liquids, matchhead Goo Balls, inert Goo Balls, structural Goo Balls that cannot be sucked out, and more complex machinery.

In most of the stages, you can figure out what you need to do as soon as you pan through the level, and this time around it is more about building complex engines and chaotic Rube Goldberg machines rather than the more simple structures in World of Goo. There are also familiar levels that are based on the principles required to solve puzzles in the first game, so returning players will often know what to do. Solving a level takes about five minutes, and players are rewarded for saving more Goo Balls, completing the level in as few moves as possible, and finishing the level as fast as possible, similar to the original game.

There are Goo Ball cannons introduced, that can shoot Goo Balls in a particular direction, or even convert liquids to Goo Balls. These cannons are apparently living creatures. Solving the levels requires creatively using the variety of Goo Balls and and the other living creatures in level in different permutations and combination, and getting this right is an incredibly pleasurable experience. This is a refreshing puzzle title, which is mostly intuitive, but some levels require iteration and careful planning. Some of the levels also require you to complete certain steps within time limits, which adds a sense of urgency to the gameplay.
Many of the levels are oriented towards finding out novel interactions between the Goo Balls and the various living gizmos, but a few are only about finding out ‘What does this button do’. There are also a few extremely challenging levels that just require lengthy and careful construction, but the game allows you to skip these levels if you want. For a few levels, you cannot help but burst out laughing when you understand what you are expected to do. The developers are far more insidious and inventive in this iteration.

Now we are trying here to keep the details sparse while giving gamers an idea of what to expect, but one level we would like to talk us absolutely blew us away. Flying a rocket through the lower layers of the atmosphere is the most expensive aspect of space exploration, which is why reusing the first stage has allowed SpaceX to dramatically cut costs. German scientists during World War II came up with the innovative concept of using a balloon for the first stage, with the launch vehicle called a rockoon. World of Goo has one level where you have to assemble a rockoon within the oesophagus of a creature, add the payload made up of Goo Balls, fill up the rocket with fuel and launch it! As fans of spaceflight, we enjoyed this level waay too much, and it does a great job of conveying the concepts of rocketry.

This game is an absolute pleasure on a Windows Touchscreen laptop. The experience with a touchscreen is definitely better, which was true for the original title as well. In a way, World of Goo 2 can be described as the most innovative precision platformer ever made. The gameplay has endless replayability, so much so that you are often tempted to replay a level just after completing it just to finish it faster, using fewer moves, or recovering more goo balls. Pulling you in the other way is the pressure to find out what happens with the story.

Story

The World of Goo Corporation is back, despite its dissolution towards the end of World of Goobut is now the World of Goo Organisation. This is an Organisation that is primarily concerned about keeping up appearances of caring for the environment, with the sustainability initiatives typically doing more harm than good. A long period of time seems to have passed since the events of the first game, with the Goo balls reappearing after an unspecified period of disappearance.

We get to learn a lot about the World of Goo, over vast durations of time, as the story rapidly hurtles through hundreds of thousands of years of progress. We also learn that the World of Goo is located at a distance of 100,000 lightyears from the Earth, or at least a planet where humanoids build a rocket, and dispatch it to the World of Goo. Some small portions of the story take place on Earth as well, as the World of Goo has an indirect influence on what happens on Earth.

Most of the story is told through cutscenes between chapters, and there are large gaps in time, at least covering a period of half a million years. There is some meta-commentary on sustainability, consumerism and the brainwashing by mass media, but towards the end, there is a hopeful and uplifting message, hinting at a shared biosphere extending beyond the surfaces of planets. The game makes you question resource use beyond a single world, and if the universe is really made for anyone to just take it. Despite a story presented in a silly manner, World of Goo 2 makes gamers confront some really difficult questions about the relationship between lifeforms and the universe that they inhabit.

Look and Feel

The game mostly features a cartoonish hand-drawn art style with soft pastel colours and smooth gradients. The environments are varied, ranging from serene ocean scenes with lush green islands to industrial wastelands, with old communication equipment, televisions and mechanical structures. The backgrounds have a dreamy and ethereal quality. The characters themselves are quirky and playful, and there are plenty of charismatic alien megafauna that you will encounter. The soundtrack is pretty varied, but matches well with the levels, at times they are calming, and at other times the create an atmosphere of urgency and speed.

There are dynamic levels with environmental special effects. While the background palette of every level is roughly the same, there is a lot of variety introduced by the ambient lighting, and weather conditions. One level is set entirely on a train hurtling through the landscape, and the expert use of parallax gives these levels a sense of speed and urgency. There are some surprising and dramatic shifts in the look and feel of the game in certain levels, which have a definite wow factor.

Verdict

World of Goo 2 is a must-play title. The sequel surpasses its predecessor in ambition, creative and depth. With the innovative gameplay and an incredible diversity of Goo Balls, the puzzles are challenging and endlessly replayable. The dark humour of the story, and the thought-provoking theme of cosmic sustainability are paired with a whimsical art style and dynamic soundtrack, making this a standout puzzle-platformer. World of Goo 2 proves that 2D Boy still has the magic, and makes you wish there was more of the game to play.