When I first jumped into Goat Simulator 3’s massive new expansion during its preview period, the first thing I did was get thrown into the stratosphere.
I hadn’t planned on doing this, but it happened and I escaped the only way I could think of. I tried to land on the head/nose of this giant talking capybara that dominated this massive new map. Unfortunately, whether due to lack of speed or invisible walls, I was unsuccessful.
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After I hauled my Pirgo out of the ocean, I was able to enter three different areas of Capybara Territory. The first was Goat City, a slightly retro-styled urban environment, with the big twist being that the goats and humans were living in reverse, like something out of Planet of the Apes. The second was Toon City, which, as you’d expect, was filled with cartoony buildings and NPCs who looked like they auditioned for Goofy but got rejected. Then there was Olympus, which is basically a goat simulation of Ancient Greece, complete with robes, mythological characters, and at least one statue that you can ram your head into its heels to cause serious injury.
If you bounce around on the purple stones, helping to glue their shaky borders together, you’ll see that they’re designed to look like they’ve been smashed together by a kind of multiverse tearing and reassembling that only goats can cause, which in some ways reflects how creatively the folks at Coffee Stain stitched together DLC. “I think we just went crazy with what was possible,” senior sound designer and composer Stuart Docherty told me.[which] That explains why it took us a year and a half to make it.”
“When you have endless possibilities,” he adds later in our playthrough, when discussing the lessons developers can learn from making DLC, “it can be hard to hold back, and that’s how you get a lot of content, and we just kept thinking of interesting ideas that we had to do.” While this may have caused Nonsense Multiverse to take a little longer than expected, from the DLC I’ve played so far, you can really feel the ‘oh, we could do this, too’ design philosophy in a positive way.
As with the base game, the core loop is simply exploring the map – either solo or with up to three mates – and finding activities to engage in. There’s a lawn-mowing version of whack-a-mole, a goat version of a Trojan horse to drag up a hill, and some gnomes to exterminate – the latter of which has a high-pitched Swedish voice provided by one of the game’s character artists. When it comes to going beyond the base game’s nonsense, Docherty tells me the developers haven’t held back. “Surprisingly, it’s almost trivial,” he says. “I think we’ve been preparing for the base game, to be honest.”
Tying together all the boring stuff you’ll encounter when getting new items to make new areas feel less normal is the plot of the DLC, which tasks Pyrgore with gradually increasing the instability of this brave new world by getting into mischief and retrieving four special stones to add to the capybara god’s crown. Yes, you’re basically helping a rodent version of Thanos assemble a non-Infinity Gauntlet by amassing the energy needed to open multiverse rifts – large portals to sizable areas off the map, each with its own unique set of quests – where each stone is stored.
The first rift takes you to a crossover zone between Goat Simulator and Deep Rock Galactic, an area designed to mimic the hard work required to level up in many games today, where players will need to bang their heads and collect enough gems to earn a motorized mining paddle. According to Docherty, the Ghost Ship Games team was “very happy” when they learned their game would be featured in Goat Simulator, as the two studios had worked together to incorporate some of the actual assets and sounds used in Deep Rock Galactic into this rift event.
I must admit, while it’s always nice to see different teams working together under the same umbrella in such a natural way, without seeming like the kind of straight-up propaganda that could detract from Goat Simulator’s generally silly and non-corporate vibe, I can’t help but feel like it would have been better if the first Rift had been a little more quirky, something that would have been more memorable, a more “I wasn’t expecting that” feel, to really push the DLC forward.
I do like the fact that every time you complete a rift, some of the stuff in it leaks out into the DLC map, giving you a greater sense that you’re actually making the space more chaotic. There are also some new little details, like the characters overseeing events having proper scrollable speech bubbles for delivering more lore and jokes. Overall, this is a title that you can tell has transformed nicely from what started out as a lovely humble game jam project that became an overnight success and had to grow exponentially from there – as Docherty told me, it was even difficult to add new gear because of the way it was built – into a full-fledged game that now has its first batch of DLC, and it really capitalizes on the work that was put in, making it easier for a sequel to build on and add to.
While I’m not sure, from what I’ve played, that Nonsense Multiverse will change the mindsets of players who weren’t interested in the base game or thought it was just a joke that wasn’t worth their time, it seems to do everything that all good DLC does – give you more of what you loved the first time around, with enough twists to keep it fresh. Just like in the base game, your favorite jokes, activities, and references will vary from person to person.
The game is the same crazy mishmash of ideas the series is known for, this time with the addition of an unlockable capybara skin, which was heavily requested by fans. I’m pretty sure this will provide a nice weekend or weeks of fun for those of us who enjoy goat sims, and I’m curious to see if the developers can keep up the nonsense in the future now that Goat Simulator has evolved into a less chaotic game.
Hopefully, their continued efforts with the goat-shaped ball will have more success than my failed attempt to improvise a replacement for the giant capybara headdress. Or, as Docherty hinted when I asked him if he felt the inclusion of a capybara would betray the goat population, perhaps they have no choice but to rely on the rodents of the universe in which the game existed during development for ongoing inspiration.
