Good ol' Kyle Gabler still has a good head on his shoulders!

Epic Games said:

So why now?

“My knee makes a noise when I bend it,” explains Gabler. “If old age doesn’t destroy us first, AI is coming for us next. Soon, nobody will ever need to make games ever again, since computers will build custom pleasure palaces for us all.” Ahhhh. Should have guessed. “So,” continues Gabler, “before we become totally obsolete, we knew that if we ever wanted to visit World of Goo again—in that broken, hand-crafted, rickety, junkyard, human way we build stuff—this is our last chance.”

Epic Games said:

The side of World of Goo that perhaps gets mentioned less is that underpinning its cute puzzles and brilliant mechanics is a pretty furious commentary on capitalism. Given how well that’s been going over the last 15 years, I asked if they would pick up on that beef, or if there were other things they were angry about.

“We have so many beefs,” says Gabler. “I have to say, though, as a game designer I wish I could design something so clever as capitalism. It’s the reason cool stuff gets built cheaper over time. If no one bought stuff, we wouldn’t be able to get better and faster stuff all the time. And I love stuff! I think about this clip often.”

@Secret_Tunnel Yeah but see he actually explained pretty well why I'm for more equitable wealth redistribution. Rich people don't make things on their own, even huge corporations employing various people from various classes don't make things on their own. We all rely on each other for a million things, sometimes things we probably don't even think about much. So why should 1% of people at the top have 40%+ of the wealth while 50% of people at the bottom have 1% of the wealth when we all come together as part of the vast global economy that creates the tools and services and labor and everything else that allows wealth to be produced?

It makes no sense.

@Zero

I can't imagine many libertarians would oppose the US government auditing its multi-trillion-dollar annual budget, cutting out inefficiencies, and giving that money to the populace as cash.

Having replayed World of Goo and Little Inferno recently, I've realized that part of why Tomorrow Corporation's games resonate with me is because they're not strictly anti-capitalist or anti-progress. They're resigned to finding the fun in the bizarre postmodern world we live in. Underneath the irony, these games actually do want you to enjoy playing them in a very genuine and optimistic way, even if sometimes you're wearing a smirk while doing it. That's my philosophy in a nutshell.

@Secret_Tunnel I don't see libertarians ever wanting to give money to the "populace" as cash. They would just argue for less taxes / smaller government, which is fine but doesn't really address the core inequality. If anything that view just gives corporations even more power.

@Zero

I don't think we're anywhere close to the Pareto frontier where we need to make deeply philosophical trade-offs between anarcho-capitalism and democratic socialism though. The reality is that many, many jobs in our society actually produce negative value, and it'd be a win-win situation to just pay those people to stay home. There probably would be enough money to go around for the entire population to be taken care of if it didn't cost $300 million to build a bus lane and if tech companies didn't spend billions making their codebases needlessly complicated.

The world if JavaScript was illegal

It's out now, and I played through the first chapter! Lots of overlap with the first game so far, but the new stuff is juicy, often quite literally. Really curious what else this game has up its sleeve.

I was going to sarcastically say that I can't wait for the inevitable internet rage-debate over whether this game is WOKE or ANTI-WOKE, but judging by Braid: Anniversary Edition's sales performance, no one will even know it came out...

I finished the game! It's good. Of the four new games I've played in 2024, it's easily in the top three. The first World of Goo was a real mindblower for me—this of course wasn't quite up there, but it was a great little continuation.

I'm playing this now. It's good. It does rehash a bit, especially early on, but there have been enough new things as well too, and I'm only like 40% through it.

I have heard zero buzz about it so it probably didn't even sell a fraction of what the original did which sucks but hey, that's not my problem as a CONSUMER. A lot of the early indie darlings were great but they also had much less competition, now they're releasing in an overcrowded indie world with new darlings every other week. Gotta be tough to stay relevant.

Weird question, but how would this game be for kids? I noticed it's T-rated, unlike the original. My kids enjoy the original thanks to the local library having it as one of their playable games. Does this one have questionable stuff? ESRB suggests some sassy but non-vulgar dialogue that wouldn't be worse than anything in Foxtrot or Calvin & Hobbes.

Hmm, this is what ESRB says. Minor spoilers I guess?

World of Goo 2 is rated T for Teen by the ESRB with Mild Suggestive Themes and Mild Violence. This is a physics-based puzzle game in which players use balls of goo to create wobbly structures towards a pipe. A story mode allows players to follow a detective investigating a missing persons case. One sequence depicts a character dying after getting shot. The game contains some suggestive material: a red-light district sign reading "XXX"; a character shaking their buttocks; a man feeling a character's thigh; innuendo such as “He's a...gentleman of the night" and "two hot bullets in a revolver...romantically permeated”).

Yeah I didn't want to spoil anything and I couldn't remember specifics, but the detective stuff (which comes out of left field and is the most memorable part of the game for better or worse) seemed a tiny bit risque.

Alright, I finished it.

Overall pretty satisfying but also it's kind of weird in that the entire chapter 4 is just alternative stuff (sort of, though I guess the gravity stuff isn't far off) and then chapter 5 is so short so like... basically most of the "core" gameplay is just 1-3. I would have preferred that stuff just be like more mixed within all of the chapters or bonus stuff after beating the game or something? I dunno. The way everything was laid out so that you're done with most of the core gameplay long before you're done with the game just felt weird to me.

I only finished 2 of the "super hard" optional levels and I may go back and try some of the others. Maybe.

/EDIT Ok now I only have 2 left. Tough ones though!