More ideas and charm and cleverness and charm and personality and charm than anindie puzzle game has any right to have.
Back in the day (several years ago now in fact) there was a little game called Tower of Goo, knocked out by the fantastically-named Kyle Gabler. It was a simple proof of concept, a prototype - use little balls of black goo to construct a tower into infinity. Drag a goo ball near others and it will form little struts, out of which all manner of weird structures can be assembled, the goos chirping and squealing as you build. For such a simple game, with no ultimate goal, it was astonishingly addictive. I sank whole weekends into playing it when I first discovered it, and if you fancy a go it can still be found at The Experimental Gameplay Project.
Fast forward to now. Gabler, together with just two other people (under the banner 2D Boy), have used that simple construction mechanic and their charming goos and taken them to a sublime new level. World of Goo, as the title might suggest, is literally a world away from little old Tower of Goo, packing in more ideas and charm and cleverness and charm and personality and charm than a simple indie puzzle game has any right to have. Did I mention it's got charm? World of Goo is absolutely brimming with it, and it's the first thing that will hook you - the animation of the goo balls is absolutely perfect, their little audio cues eliciting laughter on more than a few occasions. I'm nearly sure one or two have even got charisma. The aesthetic of the chapters and their constituent levels mixes a bold, colourful style with splashes of Gothic and the surreal, while the brief looping music suits the levels to a tee, continuously adding to the atmosphere. Loading it up will bring an instant smile to your face, and finishing it... well, that might even bring a tear.
Thankfully, underneath all of that artistic creativity is an extremely well tuned and crafted puzzle game. The objective of most levels is to move a collection of goos from a simple starting structure on one side to a pipe on the other. The first few levels are quite simple, teaching you the basics of goo manipulation as you build bridges or towers of goo to move the rest towards the pipe, which will suck them away towards the mysterious World of Goo Corporation facility. And then, once you've gotten comfortable with that, the game throws you a twist - often in the form of a slightly peculiar challenge and spicing things up further by introducing you to new types of goo. And it's here that World of Goo proves its worth over and over again. The mechanics never change, but it just piles new idea upon new idea as the chapters progress. There's black perma-goo, green goo that can be pulled out from existing struts and put somewhere else, inflatable goo, there's even... No. I can't possibly spoil it. A lot of the joy in playing is in sitting mildly bemused, wondering what new quirk the game can possibly surprise you with, only to have your expectations confounded on the very next level.
And there's even a meta game, harking back to the game's origins. All the goos you collect from the various levels end up at the World of Goo Corporation, an infinitely sized level where you can use your amassed goos to construct a tower up in to the sky. With an internet connection the game dials home and logs the height you've managed to reach, and it will visually represent other players' attained altitude with little labeled clouds. If that isn't enough to get you replaying levels in an effort to extract every last goo you can, each stage has a special "OCD" requirement, a difficult set condition such as collecting a preposterously high number of goo balls from a level or completing it in a certain number of moves. Even with out these inclusions the levels themselves are such a joy to play, and so well designed, that you'll find yourself dipping into them again and again, trying out new methods or routes to the goal. There's hardly a mis-step in the whole thing, and only one or two design niggles such as the difficulty of selecting a specific goo ball out of a crowd. The rest is so confident and consistent that you'll forgive such problems almost instantly.
The absolute insane thing though, is the fact that this is the first proper game this tiny indie studio has ever produced. World of Goo is just so polished, so perfectly formed and brilliantly conceived, the fact that three men can produce such an imaginative wonder should be putting other larger commercial developers to shame. And it's proof again that the indie gaming scene is absolutely brimming with great ideas and potential. One of the other great accomplishments of World of Goo a little down the line, I hope, is that it will show publishers that such strange, risky games really can be worth backing. The game is already a big hit on Steam and in massive demand from 2D Boy's own site, and we'll see a version on the Wii before too long now.
I realise I may be gushing a little. My praise could be a little over the top, but really, I'm just utterly convinced you need to play this game. It's rare to see something like this, done to such a high standard and with such panache, and that alone makes it important. And it's a true indie success story, which makes it all the more worthwhile supporting. You'll laugh, you might even cry, and you most definitely will be entertained. It's an experience that will leave you feeling all gooey inside.