World of Goo

"The millions of Goo Balls who live in the beautiful World of Goo don't know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious."

World of Goo is an indie Puzzle Game by, essentially, two guys, with some help. In it, the player constructs intricate structures from intelligent globs of goo, with the deceptively simple goal of leading the remaining free members of the swarm to each level's exit pipe. Deceptive, because this two-dimensional world is contrived to put as many highly varied obstacles into your path as possible.

Spun off from the simpler Tower of Goo student project, the gameplay is pushed into an increasing variety of directions by the long string of newfound species of goo, each possessing unique properties to experiment with. The slowly building story is told through a deliberately primitive, child-like art style in the rare cutscenes, and more profusely through the text of helpful signs posted in each level by Your Friend The Mysterious And Enigmatic Sign Painter.

The whole of Chapter 1 is in a free demo for Windows/Mac/Linux, and the full version can be bought and downloaded straight from the website, or through Steam or Big Fish Games. There's also a Wii version available through WiiWare. A bonus sixth chapter on the Moon was originally planned for retail, but may or may not ever get made.

Do not confuse with Word of God, even though it may apply.

Tropes:


 * Twenty Percent More Awesome: Tower of Goo Memorial Park and Recreation Center: Now 20% more infinite in all directions.
 * Alertness Blink: The ! of newly-awakened gooballs.
 * Alice and Bob: "Alice and Bob and the Third Party"
 * Arc Words: 'MOM'
 * Art Shift: Chapter 4.
 * Beast and Beauty: "Beauty and the Electric Tentacle"
 * Bottomless Pits: Present in some levels.
 * Brick Joke: At the end of the first world you send a tower of goo with eyeball balloons into the sky. They later appear at the end in space.
 * But Thou Must: In Chapter 4, you are asked for confirmation on undeleting all of MOM's junk mail. The two choices are "ok" and "yes."
 * Also, in the same chapter, if you try to get MOM to erase the cookies concerning your personal data, she accepts, then informs you that they may in fact not have been entirely deleted, and... you're back to the beginning of the discussion tree.
 * Color Coded for Your Convenience: It would be difficult to tell the different species of goo apart without this.
 * Cosmetic Award: The very-appropriately named "OCD" goals of each level.
 * Cursed With Awesome: "Grape Vine Virus": the benevolent infection
 * Cutscene
 * Cyberspace: "Information Superhighway," an entire chapter dedicated to programming jokes and New Media Tropes
 * Dialogue Tree: In very unique, spoiler-y circumstances. Given a fourth-wall-bending Lampshade Hanging.
 * Dem Bones: One species of goo confuses the Sign Painter as to whether they're "alive... or dead. Probably polite to pretend we don't notice." These skull-shaped goo are the only species invulnerable to the ubiquitous Spikes of Doom.
 * Does This Remind You of Anything: The goo is a black, viscous, gooey substance which is crucial to the economy, kind of like some other black, viscous, gooey substance in real life!
 * And also, MOM, an uber-powerful search engine with suspicious policies regarding privacy and user's personal data.
 * Along with a guy in the iPad version who says that there used to be a great market, only it fell apart because everything dropped to 99 cents. Hmm, who does that remind us of?
 * Ethereal Choir: One of the songs if you meet MOM and going to World of Goo corporation grounds after chapter IV.
 * Evil Versus Evil: A sinister, polluting, extinction-causing Mega Corp versus a crazed, identity-stealing spambot.
 * Fan Translation: 2DBoy relied on fans to translate the game to different languages. Results were good.
 * Fun With Acronyms: "Obsessive Completion Distinction" achievements, a.k.a. OCD.
 * Gainax Ending: Every chapter.
 * Genre Savvy: The goo balls often mention game-related facts, according to the sign pianter and the narrator.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: The level where the female goo balls are introduced. Notice the hairy, feminine leg-like structures... now look between them
 * Also, note that the goo balls are trying to get out from between the legs...
 * The Ghost: The Sign Painter
 * Loading Screen: While loading, the level's title is displayed with a piece of text just long enough for you to read in the brief waiting period. It varies from being descriptive to simply amusing.
 * And on startup, the game offers a series of such technical status updates as 'distilling beauty...', ' debating games as art ' and 'embiggening prototypes...'
 * Malevolent Architecture: Given an early Lampshade Hanging by the Sign Painter in the fourth level
 * Mega Corp: The bleak, faceless World Of Goo Corporation.
 * Mission Control Is Off Its Meds: The Sign Painter is a mixture of being insane and, by the end of the game, misleading.
 * Mundane Made Awesome: "Mail Received!"
 * New Media Are Evil: Played for Laughs
 * Our Time Travel Is Different: Time bugs.
 * Real Is Brown: Parodied -- after updating the "graphics card" in Chapter 4, most of the subsequent levels contain nothing but grays, browns, and bloom.
 * Powered By a Forsaken Child: Wildly theorized by the Sign Painter, regarding the world's power source.
 * Puzzle Pan
 * Scenery Porn: Can venture into this in some levels.
 * Sequel Hook
 * Sequence Breaking: You don't have to burn the man to complete the level. Or sacrifice any of the goo balls in Red Carpet level. Since it's a physics-based game, people have discovered tricks to break some physics in his game to allow players to get way above OCD requirements of some levels.
 * Shareware: The PC demo allows you to play through the entirety of the first chapter with no restrictions imposed, but you will need to actually buy the game to continue on. The Wii demo doesn't count as shareware since you cannot save and it automatically terminates at a certain point.
 * Shout Out
 * For one, the Puzzle Boss flash game You Have to Burn The Rope is sent up with the sever-the-overhead-support level "You Have To Explode The Head"
 * The introductory text for the fourth level contains a shout-out to Armadillo Run, another indie puzzle game with a similar premise. This borders on a Lampshade Hanging: the sign in that same level mentions an armadillo for no apparent reason.
 * There are also shout-outs to non-games: for instance, the above-mentioned Dialogue Tree includes the classic Glory Days exchange from the film Sunset Boulevard.
 * They tightened up the graphics in level three
 * In one puzzle, you have to start your web from a frog's mouth. Sign Painter suggests that the frog really wanted to shoot balls from his mouth in his own puzzle game.
 * A sign in "Ode to the Bridge-Builder" references the song "O Superman" by Laurie Anderson. Also Bridge Builder is one of the Chroniclogic's physics-based construction series. ODE is actually a physics engine World Of Goo is largely based on.
 * One of the loading messages is "challenging everything."
 * Sinister Surveillance
 * Speaking Simlish
 * Spikes of Doom
 * Sticky Bomb: A species of goo.
 * Story Breadcrumbs: The messages left for you by The Sign Painter and... someone else...
 * The Sign Painter also leaves you a message in the PC version's config file.
 * Take That: All done in the game's very quirky style of humor. Consumerism, marketing, search engines, ubiquitous surveillance, cultural standards of beauty, they all take some flak.
 * Word of God claims that World Of Goo Corporation is a metaphor for game publishers they had to deal with. Since they're ex-EA employees, it's probably not hard to tell which ones.
 * OCD pretty much mocks the player for trying so hard to get the achievement.
 * Timed Mission: "Super Fuse Challenge Time"
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: More like Videogame Cruelty Necessity. Not only the fate of the poor Matchstick Goo balls, but levels like "Genetic Sorting Machine" and "Red Carpet"... just, "Red Carpet"...
 * Videogame Caring Potential: Swinging back around, of course, with the practice of playing a level specifically to save as many Goo balls as possible. By using lots of tricks, you can save much much more of them than intended.
 * Wham Episode: "Product Launcher"