The thing which immediately hits you is an aesthetic one - it's a strikingly attractive game, which looks and sounds easily as slick as most mainstream games. It's the result of Kyle and Ron Carmel - both EA veterans running! running as fast as they can! - forming a two-man development team called 2D Boy to do the gig. It's the only game where you can construct an enormous tongue-facsimile for a frog. They do so in such a naturalistic way that when a level that's just a crafty nod to the basic Tower of Goo gameplay arrives it only underlines how far they've come. World of Goo manages to expand the basic physics-goo manipulation into a whole game. According to my friends who work in the highly competitive goo-construction industry, this is highly accurate simulation of what it's like to build of Tower out of Goo. The higher you get, the more imbalances in the structure are going to start the thing swaying, forcing you to try and work out a way to hurriedly counteract it, leading to another imbalance and so on, until eventually the whole thing collapses in a big gooey mess. Since the connections that appear between balls stretch and contract, it's trickier than you may initially think. Kyle Gabler's game was the web-hit Tower of Goo, based on trying to create a structure made of goo-balls as high as possible. And, as the name suggests, they're experimental. The EGF is based on three concepts: all of the games are made in a week, they're made by one person, and each game is based on a single common concept. World of Goo is, along with Crayon Physics Deluxe, one of the two Independent Game Finalists born of the principles of the Experimental Gameplay Project. See - fanboyism from a bloody splash screen. Hell, I was smiling from the second the developer's "2D Boy" logo splashed itself on the screen with agreeably brash confidence. Older readers will remember that first time: the absolute sense of wonder in mass of suicidal rodents, the wit of the animation, the sheer chaos that resulted from failing (or even, often, succeeding), the instant impression of being presented with something absolutely coherent and joyous. It's as instantly charismatic a character-lead puzzle game I've played since the first Lemmings way back in the days of the Amiga. World of Goo is about sticking Goo together. Thank the Lord of Eurogamer that I get to tell you lot about it, as otherwise it'd be straightjacket time. Except it was after 1am and no-one was awake, so I just paced and growled and generally acted as if someone had put a bunch of termites inside my head, and I had no way of getting them out. Having played through the preview code of this, the first twenty percent of the full game, I found myself desperately looking around for someone to tell about the thing. First up, an exclusive look at 2D Boy's World of Goo. So we thought we'd put that right, with a few hands-on previews of the best the IGF has to offer. And yet we don't celebrate them half as much. Around the same time, we also get to visit the Independent Games Festival, where the best indie devs in the world gather to show off. Towards the end of February, San Francisco hosts the Game Developers Conference, where you can spend the morning listening to someone talk about visual storytelling and the afternoon watching people argue about font rendering.
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