“Untitled Goose Game” Is an Adorable Fifteen-Dollar F*ck You To Authority

I am a genuinely kind person and a rule-follower, to the point that it would be easy to mistake me for a Canadian. I hold open doors, I help strangers struggling to lift or carry things, I say “please” and “thank you,” and learn people’s names the first time they say them to me, and have absolutely no problem apologizing for my mistakes. I don’t do mayhem, even in role-playing games. I’ve never once joined The Dark Brotherhood in all my hundred play-throughs of Skyrim, and during Dungeons & Dragons, my friends say, “Your Heather is showing” because if I have the choice to stab a wizard with my sword and kill him, or clobber him over the head with the hilt of the sword and knock him out, I’ll clobber him every time. I’m nice, okay?

Except for when I am a goose.

Yes, like so many other Nintendo Switch owners around the world, I picked up “Untitled Goose Game” for fifteen dollars last week and found myself in an incandescent state of elation as I, a goose, ransacked a small English town. I knocked over a farmer who kept kicking at me and stole his hat. I trapped a mean kid in a phone booth. I sneaked into an electronics store and projected myself onto all the TVs. This one woman kept swatting at me with her broom, so I broke it in two and locked her in her garage. I smashed a vase. I smashed a pub glass. I picked a bunch of flowers that didn’t belong to me. I dropped a lot of stuff I nicked from a lot of townspeople into the river. I hid under tables and inside boxes and behind bushes and kept hopping out to HONK!!! at people to watch them fall over. I have never been such a jackass in my entire life. I have never had such fun playing a video game.

The premise of Untitled Goose Game is so simple (with a pay-off at the end that made me clap and laugh out loud): You are a goose with a to-do list and with the simplest tools at your disposal — walking, ducking, picking stuff up, dropping stuff, and honking — you have to accomplish each of your goals. Some of them involve some light thievery. Some of them involve some mild destruction. All of them involve you being generally horrible. There’s a brilliant piano soundtrack to accompany your shenanigans, gently alerting you to villagers’ level of engagement with your hijinks, elevating to full tilt as your fowl anarchy reaches its peak.

And it is anarchy, in its way. Kathryn VanArendonk interviewed the game’s creators over at Vulture. She mentioned that the alt-right has begun associating the goose with SJWs (Social Justice Warriors). Their response? They’re glad the goose is a leftist icon. “Anything the left can take joy in and pride in and have a bit of fun with, we love. And if it pisses off some alt-right people, then great.”

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Heather Hogan

Heather Hogan is an Autostraddle senior editor who lives in New York City with her wife, Stacy, and their cackle of rescued pets. She's a member of the Television Critics Association, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer critic. You can also find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Heather has written 1718 articles for us.

24 Comments

  1. YES

    I can’t do anything other than the heroic options in Dragon Age and I refuse to murder villagers for xp in Divinity 2, but this game is an absolute delight.

  3. I’ve overheard my coworkers talking about this game! So that’s nice they can bond and help my nemesis manager learn to be a better person.

  4. HEATHER YOU SPEAK MY SOUL. I am an actual kind and rule-abiding Canadian yet I cackle gleefully while causing as much chaos as possible in this game. And learning that I’m actually an SJW messing with MRA incels is even better.

    Although, I’m surprised you did not mention the butch woman in the suit at the TV store! She’s badass

  11. I almost never play video games (as I am bad at them) but I bought this one, for my laptop. Last night I finally finished most of the things on the first list and got to move on, and a friend was watching and “helping,” by which I mean she occasionally reached over and pressed the space bar so I’d honk at things. It was *delightful.*

  14. If geese have previously been my nemesis does that now make me Authority?
    Because if so I already have a to-do list.

  16. HONK.

    I bought this game on Sunday and made a binder about it on Monday. Now it’s Wednesday and we are all honking for human rights.

  18. I don’t play video games, but I cackled through the trailer for this. That plus Heather’s take on it makes me interested in trying it. It’s just so delightful

  19. This is exactly how I am about games Heather and exactly how I feel about this game too. I love being a source of hateful chaos as a goose and not feeling bad about it because I’m just a terrible little goose and not a human.

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