At the heart of The Gunk is a neat ecological allegory, so it has a moral and ethical sweetness from the start. Crucially, though, The Gunk is also a game about decluttering, so the moral and ethical sweetness is tied to something else that borders on compulsion.
This is the latest release from the team that made the brilliant SteamWorld adventure, and despite the move to 3D, it shares the same qualities as those games – a certain brightness, a love for layering of detail, and a pleasingly compact nature. Everything here is fun, everything is fun and smart. Once you’ve done something fun, interesting, clever, it’s game over. Gunk is a treat.
Stickiness is a treat. The game casts you as one of two space porters. Anyway, I think that’s the idea: these two jets around the galaxy trying to find anything that can be turned into energy and sold. As the game begins, they land on a beautiful planet filled with strange, colorful wildlife and the promise of wealth. Oh yes, and that junk.
The sticky stuff is black and grey, brown, deep, blood red. Ribena from Hades! It bubbles, jumps and goes everywhere. It blocks the game’s beautifully chunky levels. At times, it moved through the air, like the murmur of some terrifying starling. Reader: I love this gooey stuff. Just by seeing it you know how bad it is and what you want to do with it. You want to clean it up. In The Gunk you can.
The standard tool in The Gunk is the vacuum cleaner, which apparently has unlimited storage space. It sucks up garbage like anything else. Refreshing! Traveling around the world is a joy, a pudgy little guy covered in handcrafted gadgets that can walk through the mud whenever you find it. The vacuum also serves a purpose once the trash starts showing up with enemies: you can suck them in and then spit out the terrifying bouncing toothed basketballs that came early. As for rooted spitters, you can suck their heads in and pull them out of the ground. Even bigger foes showed up — not many, since it’s not a real fighting game — and they all ended up suffering the same vacuum fate. It’s a joy.
Once you free a part of the world from trash, color and life come back. The grey faded and the leaves emerged from the ground with rubbery leaves and oddly characteristic leaves. New paths are forged – there’s some friendly low-stakes platformer in The Gunk as you travel through the world – certain kinds of plants provide resources or items for use in puzzles.
These resources are tied to some fairly simple upgrades, but the plant-driven puzzles are generally a treat. This isn’t a hard game to play, instead, it’s a game that has a cute zipper for most activities. You can climb higher by finding the right seed to put into the glowing pool, so it sprouts huge bouncy platforms for you to use. Debris in the way may need another seed that explodes seconds after being picked. forward!
A satisfying cycle soon followed. As the story progresses and your reasons for staying on the planet start to move away from simply scavenging for resources, you’ll find yourself clearing out junk areas and then exploring, opening up new areas that must also be cleared. Cleaning things up is so satisfying, even if the map isn’t constantly unfolding, the fast-travel locations aren’t declaring themselves, and the puzzles aren’t getting more complicated, which I’ll probably do. That’s not bad, isn’t it?
There are more loving details in The Gunk, like the chunky Game Boy the main character clips into her suit, or the relationship between the main characters who emerge and develop as you explore, to old friends struggling with new challenges A beautifully observed study of the gig economy, a spatial form of the gig economy, and the pressures on their personal notions of each other that may have ossified into caricatures. It’s done elegantly, and I think it’s kind of a shame that some swear breaks into what would otherwise be a perfect game for children.I think I must have reached that age, but I also think there is a harmony problem: in a game so cleverly constructed, swearing just doesn’t fit.
At the heart of it all is a real flash of steel as the journey turns and gets darker. If you’ve played a SteamWorld game, you’ve probably expected this, but it’s still nice to see a game like this built with such fine craftsmanship and unmistakable humanity. I started The Gunk worried about how a great 2D design team would deal with three dimensions. The truth is they dealt with it so easily that I spent the next four or five hours gloriously lost in what they built.
