Three Quirky Indie Games

       I’ve been playing a ton of Switch games recently and thought I would share a couple of recommended quirky titles. These aren’t exclusive to Switch - I’m pretty sure they are all available on Steam and other consoles/platforms too - and each game comes recommended in their own individual ways.

      Why ‘quirky’? As well as being a nice alternative to the usual shooting/punching/adventuring genres that make up the vast majority of games out there, these three indie titles each also feature fun, unique and humourous game mechanics that make them particularly stand out.

      First up is Untitled Goose Game which puts you in the role of the said unnamed Goose, let loose upon a small rural English village. Each section of the village presents you with a shopping list of objectives to complete before allowing you to progress on to the next area, the fun part being that said objectives usually consist of you causing mischief and/or terrorising the village folk in some way. These range from the simple act of stealing an item to pulling chairs from underneath people as they are about to sit down or honking at the right moment to get someone to hammer their own thumb. Sometimes the objectives do require you to stop and think a little and you never feel rushed to progress leaving you free to explore and experiment at your leisure. Given that the two main actions available to you are to grab and to honk, these objectives are generally not too hard to work out and a preliminary completion of the game can be achieved in a matter of a few hours.

      Even if you haven’t already played it you are probably already aware of the memes spawned by Untitled Goose Game, though I do recommend you play the game for yourself if you can pick it up cheap. It’s refreshingly fun to waddle around as a feathered fiend with only the simple aim of trolling people.

 

     Next up we have Donut County, the central mechanic of which involves you moving a hole around the floor of each level to swallow up objects. Similar to the progression in games like Katamari Damarcy (in which you can only pick up objects of the same size or smaller) here you can only swallow objects that can currently fit in your hole and the hole enlarges the more stuff you swallow, allowing you to then move on to bigger objects. The fun here comes from the gradual progression in each scene of going from swallowing just a few rocks here and there before moving up to whole houses. There's something quite satisfying about clearing a whole scene of all its objects too.

      This one actually does involve a bit more of a story element, which whilst well written does slow the pace somewhat between each gameplay segment. Even so the game still does feel very short – you can probably finish it in 2 to 3 hours unless you really take your time. I did have fun with Donut County but despite the fun central mechanic would probably be the least recommended out of these three games.

 

     The final game is What the Golf?, which is probably the most easily accessible, universally hilarious and wilfully subversive of the three. You don’t even need to like or have any interest in golf to enjoy this one. Suffice to say, much of the fun comes from experiencing the games's surprises and mechanics for yourself, so I will not discuss too much about the here. The game even features a ‘show your friend’ mode at the title screen so that if someone has come round to yours and has no idea about the game you can quickly fire it up and show them the game’s delightful intro and let them experience it for themselves. (Minor spoilers to follow as I will briefly run through the intro here. Skip to the last paragraph if you want to avoid it).

      The game starts out like this: it opens with a standard golf scenario of you being presented with a ball and a hole. The controls are simply to aim in a direction and charge the power behind the shot. So you aim straight ahead and succeed in getting the ball in the hole. Simple. Second scenario, much the same as the first but there are a few cats sitting around on the green. Hitting one of them results in them falling over with a cute ‘mew’ but otherwise putting the ball between them is fairly straightforward. As the next scenario opens you now actually see a character standing over the ball ready to putt it. However upon charging and releasing the shot, the ball stays where it is and instead the man flings himself in a ragdoll manner across the green. You succeed by hurling him a few more times until eventually hitting him against the flag. The next scene involves the golf club throwing itself across the course. The one after that, a small house.

      This introductory sequence is so well crafted being both so simple to understand and progress due to its intuitive design, but also as it is delightfully humorous in its subversion of your expectations of what a golf game should be like to play. The rest of the game follows with many other wacky challenges involving different objects, obstacles, physics, mechanics and even homages to other games and franchises. And also puns – lots of puns. If you are going to play just one of these three games talked about today this is the one I would recommend.

26th May 2020