World Of Hurt
HIGH Intermittently brilliant physics puzzling. Beautiful music.
LOW Frustrating interface. Timed levels. The camera.
WTF The Undo “feature” is a war crime
Full disclosure — I am shamefully, abysmally bad at World of Goo 2.
I love physics games, I love building games, and I love puzzle games, but I labored over ever single level in Goo 2, and never connected with it. This innocuous little cutie raked my ass viciously across the coals for more than 10 hours. It turned my brain into flan, made me feel like my hands were flippers. I looked at my monitor like a stranger. My cat watched me in profound disdain as I hemorrhaged all honor and dignity. I am not a Goo Gamer.
Please bear that in mind as I kvetch at length about this game I don’t like very much.
World of Goo 2 is, of course, the long longed-for sequel to the 2008 classic, a true first wave indie success, but one that, unlike some of its peers, never became on ongoing franchise and did not spawn any real imitators. World of Goo didn’t establish a genre, and didn’t create a puzzle genus unto itself. There are plenty of titles out there with Goo DNA, but there has never been anything exactly like it – until World of Goo 2.
In each level, the goal is to usher a number of goo balls into a pipe. That pipe is always in some out-of-the way place, ensconced behind walls, or concealed behind chicanes lined with spikes or spinning gears that’ll pulverize the player’s fragile, viscous wards. Goo balls can stick to each other with strands of goo to form lattice-like structures, and the idea is that they must be built up in such a way that enough unused goo balls can crawl up the structure and reach the pipe. World of Goo 2 is an experience somewhere between a physics sandbox and a physics puzzle, with a soupçon of frustration-core elements from games like Getting Over It or Jump King.
Can a game be clever, but not smart? Some World of Goo 2 levels have an easy brilliance, where the solution is (sometimes literally) dangling right overhead, but only reachable through some particular, convoluted path, an accordion-stack of micro-puzzles folded lasagnalike onto itself. The solution/thought process is made up of several steps — how do I get over this gap, to reach those balloon goo balls, to float up to that outcropping, so I can wake up those absorbent goo balls, so I can drain that goo lake, so it can go into this goo cannon and flow down this hill and wake up another group of goo balls, so I can finally build a lattice and usher enough slime into the pipe?
These levels provide a pungent satisfaction that, befitting World of Goo 2’s chimerical genre-straddling, doesn’t feel exactly like the pleasure of solving a pure puzzle or building a bridge in a sandbox game, nor passing a section of the junk mountain in Getting Over It. If the design could maintain itself in this narrow and relatively unexplored ludological zone, I think I would be in love with it unreservedly, even if I could never be good at it. Unfortunately, the reality of World of Goo 2 is messier than that. The interface is a series of small annoyances that ramify into a big problem.
Players’ direct interaction with World of Goo 2 mostly boils down to clicking and moving goo balls. Not a problem in theory, but in practice, unpleasant friction gets kicked up at every turn.
Exhibit A: Goo balls not part of a structure crawl over it constantly — it is so easy to accidentally click on the wrong goo ball during a time-sensitive moment, when the difference between a wobbling tower staying upright or collapsing on itself and necessitating an undo comes down to two or three crucial seconds.
Which brings me to Exhibit B: the Undo.
World of Goo 2’s undo system may be the single most frustrating, backwards, misguided, cackhanded implementation of something that has long been solved I’ve ever seen. In lieu of the time-tested undo button, little fireflies float around and have to be clicked on to undo plays. These fireflies are minute, and they zip around like a flitting insect, almost as if they’re purposefully evading the click.
There is no excuse I can accept for making a key element of any puzzle-adjacent experience so unnecessarily obnoxious. I don’t care if it’s lore-friendly, I don’t care if it’s cute, I don’t care if it’s funny — this choice alone accounted for at least 40% of my frustration with World of Goo 2. Even in 2008, it would be questionable at the most absolute generous interpretation. In 2025, it’s a joy-devouring mega-gaffe.
There are smaller issues too. Not every level is a winner. There is a degree of openness to solutions, but not as much as it might seem. The camera is zoomed in way too close, and can’t be adjusted to a satisfactory distance — a bantamweight problem, especially on the more convoluted levels where a path through challenges has to be plotted out in advance. There are levels with very strict time limits, and I hated these (Thankfully there is the option to skip any level at any time).
In so many ways, World of Goo 2 is an honorable enterprise. The art is great. The theming is enjoyable, if not as deep as it sometimes seems like it thinks it is. There’s a melancholy goofiness to the World of Goo world that I like, and I love anything with its aesthetic roots in the glory days of the Flash- and browser-based gaming frontiers of the aughts. The music is absolutely beautiful. This is a mechanics-forward game, so I’ve routed most of ink to the highs and lows therein, but know that the audio-visual side of World of Goo 2 is an unqualified success.
World of Goo 2 as whole, I guess, could be classified as a broken success. I struggled with it, both because of my own ineptitude, but more crucially because of its quite serious design flaws. It doesn’t deserve to be hated, or ignored, but I don’t want to play it anymore. I’m goo-d, thanks.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by 2D Boy and Tomorrow Corporation. It is available on Android, iOS, PC, PS5, and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the game, and it was not completed (because I am horrible at it). There are no multiplayer modes in the PC version, but the Switch port does have multiplayer options.
Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Mild Suggestive Themes and Mild Violence. The official description reads: This is a physics-based puzzle game in which players use balls of goo to create wobbly structures towards a pipe. A story mode allows players to follow a detective investigating a missing persons case. One sequence depicts a character dying after getting shot. The game contains some suggestive material: a red-light district sign reading “XXX”; a character shaking their buttocks; a man feeling a character’s thigh; innuendo such as “He’s a…gentleman of the night” and “two hot bullets in a revolver…romantically permeated”).
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes present.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has subtitles for the spoken dialogue sequences. The subtitles cannot be resized. Almost all key information is conveyed visually as well as audibly, but certain levels have timed elements that are easier to monitor with sound than by sight-checking them.
Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable. Keyboard+mouse and touch screen are supported. In fact, the entire game can be played with just the mouse, which is used for picking up and plopping down the goo balls, panning around the screen, and (very sadly), undoing actions. WASD can also be used for screen panning, but the mouse is still necessary, and still the central control implement.
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I’ve long been waiting for more World of Goo, but I played this once and . . . yeah it’s more World of Goo. Maybe I’d been wearing nostalgia goggles, but I don’t have much motivation to keep at it.
Agreed – it’s strange how much of a non-starter this one felt like given how much of a polestar the original was!
THIS GAME IS SOO FUCKING ASS CANT BELIEVE THEY MADE THIS BULLSHIT