Untitled Goose Game is available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and XBox One.
Untitled Goose Game is the best role-playing game I played in 2019.
Sure, it’s billed as a puzzle and a stealth game. But at its core, it’s the purest form of video-game sandbox that I’ve experienced in years.
The point of a sandbox is, in theory, its lack of structure. Set a child down in a literal one or a player down in a digital one, and they can set their own objectives or fulfill given ones in any which-way they choose. In practice, video games aren’t always great about enabling this. Nearly all “open-world sandboxes” feature a repeated set of structured activities; collect all the orc eyeballs, win all the footraces, scale all the grain silos. Not much actual freedom in going down a checklist.
And while the Untitled Goose Game does contain a literal checklist, that hardly feels like the point.