World of Goo, the indie puzzle game, is now available on Steam.

Created by a couple former EA employees, World of Goo is chock-full of offbeat humor, lovely artwork, beautiful music, and absolutely oozing with charm (and goo).  The game is simple to learn — build a goo-structure to lead your swarms of squirming goo-balls to a distant intake pipe — but is never content to let you just play around with the same dynamic for long.  At its heart, World of Goo is a physics-game:  your goo towers and bridges will wobble and topple as you build them, put too much weight on one end of a see-saw and it’ll tilt, and goo floating in water will bob and roll. But it’s constantly introducing new challenges, new puzzles, new mechanics, and new kinds of goo.  Nearly every level throws something different at you, adding you what you know, and each new chapter changes the game, often in big ways.

For such a bizarre gaming landscape, it’s generally pretty intuitive — a quick scan of most levels and you’ll be able to guess what they want from you, and most times you find yourself wondering “Hey, will this work?”, it will.  Hints are also scattered around in the form of signs painted by a mysterious (and very busy) do-gooder.  My favorite feature is the undo-bug — little winged creatures that hover at the fringes of your screen like fireflies.  Click on one and it will jump you back in time, erasing your last move.  Absolutely essential when you’ve been building for minutes only to watch your structure collapse from some misplaced glob.

There are a couple minor niggles.  When you have several different types of goo all racing around in the same spot, it can hard to grab the one you need.  The screen scrolls if your mouse gets close to the edge, sometimes inadvertently moving your view around while you’re trying to grab something.  There also tends to be generally just one overall solution to a level — some more wiggle room to allow players to be creative with their solutions would be a nice match to such a creatively made game.  For example, a level that let you choose the types of goo you’d like to use to solve it, instead of them automatically being present at the start, would have been neat.  I guess the point is I just never felt terribly creative while playing it (except on one level I totally cheated my way out of by flinging a ball of goo at something that needed to be knocked over, thus circumventing the puzzle I need to solve in order to knock the thing over).

Apart from that, it’s an enjoyable experience.  Dedicated types will find replay value through a series of “OCD” challenges, where you’re tasked to complete a level within a minimum amount of time or moves, or guide the maximum amount of goo balls into the pipe.  I’m not really one of those types, so $20 feels a bit steep for a fairly brief experience, though the overall beauty and devastating charm of the game, I think, make up for that, and it’s all the more impressive considering only a couple of people worked on it.

A final note that may not belong in a game review, but I’m gonna mention it anyway.  When I pre-ordered World of Goo, a couple days passed and I still hadn’t received my download link for Chapter 1.  I wrote to them asking why it was taking so long.  Within the hour, they wrote back, confirming they had my order and that it takes e-checks a bit longer to process than, say, a credit card (I’d used PayPal).

I mention this because I’ve also recently been trying to get some customer service for EA on Spore.  For some reason, all my achievements were wiped from their server, and I sent in a ticket to see if they could fix that.  A couple days later I got a completely robotic reply, probably based on a keyword search of my ticket, that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was asking.  I wrote back, explaining that their answer was of zero value, and restated my issue.  Never heard back, and my achievements are still nowhere to be seen.  This was last month.  I also have a friend who, for weeks now, has been trying to get some information on a problem she’s having with Spore (one that is preventing her from even playing the game at all) and she’s come up empty despite repeated attempts.

I know you can’t really compare 2DBoy with EA.   EA probably has thousands and thousands of incoming tech support issues — but, on the other hand, they also have roughly 60 jillion of dollars and a full staff.  2DBoy has nowhere near the amount of mail to answer as EA, but, from what I gather, they’re just a few people handling everything.  And they’re handling it well, as evidenced by the immediate response I got.  Not to mention, they’re working on letting people who preordered their game activate it on Steam after a just few customers asked it if was possible to do so.

2Dboy > EA.  Go indie.