Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Why. Why does this game exist? It's certainly worth asking, especially if you don't quite get the appeal of the already infamous Goat Simulator, a game which aims to simulate the mundane daily life of an average, run-of-the-mill goat.
Spoiler: I am lying. There is absolutely nothing mundane about it.
Much like Octodad, the experience of playing Goat Simulator is hard to convey through text. Thankfully I streamed this bizarre little game with my friends Austin Walker and Jack de Quidt over the weekend, and I've cut some of the best moments down into a video that's easily worth a thousand words and embedded it above.
But that still leaves us with "why"...
There's a very boring answer to the question of why this game exists. The developers at Coffee Stain Studios wanted to get a better handle on the Unreal Engine, so they got together and practiced. Goat Simulator started its life as a random and ridiculous learning project, but response to a gameplay video shared by one of the devs was so great that they wisely decided to flesh it out for a full release.
On April Fools Day, naturally.
Goat Simulator isn't the only game of its kind, and the appeal of these bizarre, clumsy, crazy games to fans is undeniable. When I wrote about Octodad: Dadliest Catch earlier this year, I compared this style of gameplay to slapstick comedy. Instead of the carefully choreographed fumbling and stumbling of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton you have the physics-based clumsiness of an octopus in a suit, or a goat with a jetpack.
Goat Simulator also has the benefit of a more realistic world and a slightly less friendly approach to mayhem. Violence in Octodad works against you, filling up a meter that leads the titular character to being caught. In Goat Simulator, however, everyone and everything is fair game, and in that regard it hits many of the same buttons that roaming freely in a Grand Theft Auto game does. Maybe it's the digital equivalent of squeezing a lump of Play-Doh between your fingers or kicking down your own sandcastle. Sometimes you just want to mess shit up.
Goat Simulator's not the first game to revel in mayhem and brokenness, and it surely won't be the last. It's chaotic and it's cathartic, and sometimes we all need a little dumb fun.
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