Review: Goat Simulator

Super BunnyHop

The map in Goat Simulator reminds me a lot of the user made

amateur maps you'd see for Uneral Trournament or Quake 3.

The ones where the mapper would just recreate someting that looks like their own street or their own town,

which is cute, but real locations aren't designed for good game play,

so you'd have this running undercurrent of creepy nonsense in there.

Some kind of uneasy contrast between the familiar environment and its unfamiliar emptyness

or the robotic zombie like pedestrians populating it.

Come to think of it, that's also the vibe that professional made Tony Hawk levels gave off.

That's the weird balance between amateure and professional qualities that Goat SImulator has to deal with.

It clearly wasn't designed to be an actual commercial release.

It's a playful test level, cobbled together during company game jam,

but it had to be spruced up to somehow justify the 10$ price tag and to make customers happy

'cause they didn't expect this game to have customers. They didn't expect this game to happen at all

They literally tossed the idea out nine weeks ago and 23000 people were like Yeah, Goat Simulator, that would be awesome.

We live in interesting times, my friends.

Although Goat simulator may feel like it's blazing on a frontier of clever wit,

the parity simulator joke has been done countless times before

and maybe that's because the simulator genre itself has steadily become a joke of itself.

I totally understand the appeal of flight simulators, 'cause I mean, planes are just rad,

how the hell can you not get excited about traveling 30000 feet in the air inside of a giant metal tube crammed full of people.

I don't know about you, but for some reason I think planes are just the coolest thing ever.

In the early 2000's train simulators started to come out and while I am not one of them

I know a lot of people out there who think that trains are just the coolest thing ever, so I can dig that.

But over the past say 5 years, the edutainment and job training people got wind of this whole simulator thing

and now things like Street Cleaning Simulator and Forklift Simulator and Woodcutter Simulator are coming out.

We've gotten to a point where warehouses and logistic simulator is actually a thing.

These games look and sound awefully silly, so of course people are gonna make jokes about how silly they are.

And so now on the freeware scene you see a lot of stuff like room simulator and sitting simulator and goat patting simulator.

But unlike those, Goat Simulator itself is a commercial product made by developers who have years of experience

and a bit of capital to spend on this project.

So what we ended up getting is a $10 mini game novelty about flopping a terrifyingly destructive goat around

and scoring points by knocking shit over.

It parities the glitches, the surreal physics, the utilitarian level design and the absentminded pedestrians

and even the white slanted font of simulator games,

while also providing a handful of surprises of its own.

And by handful I mean a literal handful, 5 surprises or less, depending on how easily surprised you are.

Despite being a fundamentally goalless and cathartic comedy game, Goat SImulator has a scoring system.

The crashes and chaos that your goat performs are numerically graded

which is a rating that actually takes the backseat compared to how many giggles and laughs those same moves elicit.

Goat Simulator also has objectives, it has a constantly updating checklist of challenges to complete.

And unfortunately a few of them task you with passing high scores.

The problem with that is that without a time limit or some kind of failure state

there is really no challenge to passing those scores.

You end up just walking in a crowded areas and clicking over and over again to ramp up that score multiplier.

Once that multiplier passes 20 or so, the game starts playing the music from that one

pre-release trailer that displayed a certain quote that makes it obvious what they are doing with this game.

Goat SImulator is not just trying to appeal to people who wanna giggle at a stupid goat flopping around,

they're trying to appeal to the Let's Players.

And why wouldn't they? After all, this kind of physics sandboxes really worked with that format before.

Octodad was a hit, happy wheels was a hit, Surgeon SImulator was a hit and it was pretty much the same joke.

The slapstick humor and the intentionable glitches behind the barely controllable clumsy characters in these games

makes them more fun to watch than to play.

At least in a clasicaly gamey kinetically pleasing kind of way.

You press some buttons, something unexpected happens and you giggle at the juxtaposition

between what you expected and what actually happened.

After all, comedy basically is the observation that something is not fitting your expectations or norms.

Soon you get bored after realizing that the difficulty behind driving the most basic player actions in these games

lessens the potential for the deeply player driven interactive systems that make for compelling game play.

That's why they are novelties, that's why they are little mini games and not fully fledged long lasting things.

But since we are living in a bizarrely empathetic version of a cheesy 80's cyber punk dystopia,

kids these days don't wanna play games themselves, they wanna watch other people play games.

That's where the money is.

After all, PewDeePie has 25, going on 26 million subscribers.

He is the #1 YouTube channel across all genres and his sering quote of approval is emblazoned across the Goat SImulator trailer.

When he plays a game, it arguably is getting more exposure than it would through traditional game journalists.

This man and his colleagues are pretty much responsible for both the success

and the over-saturation of an entire new sub-genre of horror games.

And while I have a hard time seeing the appeal of his stuff, the reality is that it's just not made for me. Or my demographic.

After all, who has the time to watch all this stuff and what kind of audience finds

pretty looking grown males acting stupid to be hilarious? Children do.

Tween boys do. Back when i was a kid, the mooks behind Jackass and Tom Green were filling this role

and I guess few enterprising people of my generation grew up to be ComPewDeePie and MarkPlayer.

They are media icons, these people have audiences, they rival cable television

and they can turn struggling products into best sellers

And to be honest, I'm kind of thankful that the top spot on YouTube is going to someone who is pushing indie

and low budget games development rather than Mountain Dew and burritos.

'Cause it could be way worse.

And we may already be riding a slippery slope towards whatever's worse.

Media also keeps us mentally stimulated, relaxed, entertained and it has social utility.

The media helps address the basic human need to connect with others.

It gives us something to talk about with one another and in some extreme cases a few people end up using media

to help overcome loneliness.

You might even know a few people who develop para-social relationships

in which they develop feelings of emotional attachment to complete strangers they've only seen in the media.

And that is what Goat SImulator is designed to do.

It was made to be funny and it was made to be especially funny for the audience

of YouTube personalities who will drive its sales.

Much like the mutually beneficial relationship between yourself and the bacteria that live in your intestines,

Goat SImulator and Let's Players can benefit from each other as they entrance kids

who watch game play videos with their vicarious friends on YouTube.

But only the kids who aren't busy or social enough to play games with their real friends.

Otherwise they might notice that playing Goat SImulator alone is ultimately vapid

and pointless experience that becomes a chore very fast.

After the first 20 minutes of flopping this goat around, there is only a handful of surprises left.

But it could've been something more than just that.

With more maps, more modes and more challenges and maybe even a Tonny Hawk style unlocking system

that actually encourages you to learn how to get high scores efficiently or how to land difficult tricks,

Goat Simulator could have actually been a really valuable product instead of a flaccid joke.

But being a valuable product is not what it's supposed to be.

And that's not what it wants to be.

Otherwise the joke might be less funny.

No one is going to buy a Goat Simulator without knowing what they're getting into.

Goat SImualtor is a completely stupid game and to be honest, you should probably spend your money on something else,

such as a hula hoop, a pile of bricks or maybe pool your money together with your friends to buy a real goat.

At the end of the day, if I gave Goat Simulator either a positive or negative review,

It's not gonna stop it from selling a gazillion copies.

The marketing behind it is hilarious, there's incredible modding potential

and it would work really well as a quick party game if you can manage to somehow put it in a living room.

So while I'd advise that you actually be really careful about buying this game

I kinda think that it's nice to see that a product like this can live on the market.

Goat SImulator is ultimately a light hearted clean joke at the whole game industry itself.

And the fact that people are willing to spend money to produce it and people are willing to spend money to support it

might mean that the game industry is more healthy that we tend to make it sound.

I mean a Goat SImulator is the 3rd best selling game on Steam right now,

so they must be doing something right.

It's a testament to the viability of creative and unconventional products in a market

that actually supports those kinds of products.

But once the game is actually up and running, right in front of your face,

once you load it up and actually realize that Goat Simulator really is as dumb and pointless as it was always advertised to be,

you'll probably want to do something else.

Game gootage from:
FSX, Mictosoft Train Simulator, Happy Wheels, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Train Simulator 2012, Surgeon SImulator 2013, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Sitting Simulator 2014, Room Simulator 2014, Goat Petting Simulator

Other footage from:
The Tom Green Show (1996), Jackass (2000)
Screen capture of PewDeePie, Makriplier, TotalBiscouit, Game Grumps any others) Youtube channels

Written and edited by:
George Weidman

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