I loved World of Goo when it came out way back in 2008, and I’ve always thought it was too bad they never made another one. So it was really great to hear at The Game Awards tonight that finally, they are.
World of Goo 2 is coming from 2DBoy, the team behind the first game, and it looks and sounds a lot like the original—in a good way, to be clear. World of Goo is a clever, diabolical, occasionally intensely frustrating game with a simple premise: Balls of semi-sentient goo need to be rescued from various sorts of peril, and the only way to do so is by sticking them together in bizarre, wobbly contraptions.
Underlying it all is are bits and pieces of sharp commentary about corporations and consumer culture, which I thought pulled everything together just about perfectly. The puzzles themselves are so creative and clever that they stand on their own perfectly well—you can jump in anywhere and have a good time just smacking balls around.
I’m genuinely excited about this announcement. World of Goo is one of the smartest, most entertaining puzzle games I’ve ever played, and it really always has struck me as odd that we never got more. I don’t want to say it’s about time—I’m just happy it’s happening—but yeah, it’s been 15 years. It’s about time.
World of Goo 2 is set to come out in 2024 but at this point it sounds like development is pretty early on: Platforms haven’t been announced (“Let’s just let the vast expanse of uncertainty fill our hearts with wonder, while we fill our bank accounts with exclusive distributon contracts,” the World of Goo 2 website says) and apparently they’re still looking for help with the soundtrack. That’s actually a really important part of the game—the World of Goo soundtrack is great. (If you play an instrument and want to help out, you can drop the team a line at the Tomorrow Corporation website.)
In the meantime, if you’d like to see what World of Goo is all about, the original game, updated to run properly on modern hardware, is available on Steam and the Epic Store.
