By the time you get within a few meters of the pipe, you're often a nervous wreck. The feeling is a lot like building a house of cards or playing Jenga. Knowing that your entire building could collapse at any moment adds an incredible amount of tension. Exit pipes are typically a long way from the beginning point of levels, requiring you to really think before you start erecting ridiculously tall skyscrapers or long, arching bridges. To compensate for this, you need to build by degrees, carefully balancing one side against the other to prevent the whole wobbly contraption from teetering over. Considering that you're dealing with, well, goo, buildings in the game are inherently unstable and tend to jiggle pretty much constantly. At times you even need to use special items such as balloon goo to help compensate for the height or length of a structure and keep it standing. Goo towers need to be carefully balanced so they don't become top-heavy and collapse into a pile of slime, whereas bridges have to be carefully reinforced underneath so they don't come tumbling down.

Real physics and the demands of gravity always have to be taken into account, which makes this one of those easy-to-play, hard-to-master puzzle games that gradually takes over your entire life. Final scores are based both on the number of goo balls rescued and the amount of time you spent in the level.

If you fall short of the required number, you do it all over again, trying to get your goo to safety in a more ecfficient fashion. If you pass enough goo balls through the exit pipe to the glass beaker waiting at the other end, you win to gather goo another day. Each level requires you to 'save' a set number of goo balls to succeed and move on, so you have to be economical in the amount of goo used as construction material. Well, at least to as much freedom as can ever be offered by getting slurped into PVC plumbing. When your wobbly structure is close enough to the level exit pipe, all of the goo balls that haven't been used as makeshift building blocks then roll over their former buddies to freedom.

This rather odd task is accomplished by selecting the cute, gibberish-spouting blobs and turning them into nodules in framework buildings that reach for the sky and stretch across yawning pits like sticky scaffolding. The objective here is rather similar, although instead of guiding lemmings to an exit in each level, you're leading globs of goo across similarly dangerous terrain to pipes that suck them up. Goo balls and balloons are a winning combination.Īctually, World of Goo's concept owes a big debt to Lemmings, the early '90s sensation that involved guiding suicidal green-haired goons across 2D levels loaded with hazards. Independent developer 2D Boy has hit the jackpot, turning what appears to be a simple building game into what could just be the next casual-gaming obsession right up there with classics such as Tetris and Lemmings.

World of Goo may ship in a plain-Jane box that makes it look exactly like the usual third-rate dreck that takes up space on a back shelf in your neighborhood department store, but this physics-based puzzler is one of the most innovative and addictive games to hit the PC in years.

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