Honk!
For a while back in 2019, that’s the sound that was bellowing out of game consoles more than any other, as one unassuming indie game took the world by storm. Like this year’s Helldivers 2 or Palworld, it’s a game that it seemed everyone was playing starting the moment it was released — only in this case, it didn’t follow any apparent trend or even fit into established genres. Also, it’s the only one that lets you play as a goose.
Untitled Goose Game launched on September 20, 2019, to immediate honking acclaim. Most of the game’s premise is right there in the title. You play as a goose, doing goose things like honking at gardeners, chasing defenseless children into phone booths, and generally being a menace all across a quaint little town.
Despite, or maybe because of, its simplicity, Untitled Goose Game stood out even among massive hits like Sekiro and Apex Legends to be one of the best games of 2019. Part of that was because of the sheer joy of causing low-key chaos. There’s no shortage of video games that let you destroy and dismember, but not many let you simply disrupt. The goose in Untitled Goose Game isn’t stealing eyeglasses and ruining shopkeepers’ days because it’s evil or wants to get anything out of them — causing trouble is just in its nature.
“The goose is just a goose,” developer Jacob Strasser told Vulture in 2019. “The goose is this chaotic neutral character. They’re just an animal who’s not really aware of what they’re doing.”
It’s easy to interpret the goose as an agent of political change tearing down the status quo one stolen gardening tool at a time, but the game is just as enjoyable if your only interpretation is “it’s fun to be a goose.” Maybe that’s even what made it so popular. You can form a critical reading of Untitled Goose Game if you really want to, but it’s also fun to just surrender your anxious human mind to goose logic and revel in your own ability to make life hell for a bunch of innocent people for absolutely no good reason. You’re a goose, after all, so you don’t even have a conscience for it to weigh on.
It helps that underneath all the chaos is actually a well made game. Each stage in Untitled Goose Game consists of checking items off your to-do list. What sort of tasks could a goose possibly be writing in their daily planner? Well, things like shoplifting, shattering glasses, and locking people out of their own yards. Aside from a short description of each task, you’re given no further directions, and part of the joy of Untitled Goose Game is in figuring out how to follow the vague instructions without the aid of any more guidance — or even hands, for that matter. The result is a lot of trial and error as you poke and squawk your way through town, learning bit by bit how to manipulate and infuriate the locals to finish your silly little quests.
Even now, Untitled Goose Game remains a touchstone for players. It’s the first comparison point for any game based on naturalistic animal behaviors like Little Kitty, Big City, or even for games about absurd humor, like Thank Goodness You’re Here. And while plenty of games since its release have risen to indie star status, few have become the kind of breakout hits that Untitled Goose Game was for those weeks in 2019 where it seemed like everyone was playing it and sharing clips of their most devious moves on social media. Even fewer can say they’ve attained the sort of cultural cachet that would earn them a spot in a museum — a feat Untitled Goose Game just achieved with an exhibition at the Australian Center for the Moving Image, which features design documents and early prototypes on display until February 2025.
As for developer House House, it’s now moved on to what looks like a gentler kind of chaos. Its upcoming Big Walk, revealed at last year’s Game Awards, looks just as charming as Untitled Goose Game, but features four players working together to solve their problems, rather than one goose working to create them. However House House’s turn to prosocial hijinx goes, we’ll never forget that brief period in 2019 where everyone realized life is a little better when you make room in it for some goose-like chaos now and then.
