World of Goo/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Basically the entire soundtrack; it makes little balls of goo with eyeballs absolutely epic. Available for free from the artist at [1].
  • The World Of Goo Is Jesus In Purgatory: Quite possibly the biggest social commentary from a simple indie game about solving physics-based puzzles using goo balls.
  • Fan Dumb: 2DBoy released the game with no DRM whatsoever because they thought they could trust their audience. Their reward was a 90% pirate rate.
    • They actually expected this; by 'audience' they meant 'not pirates,' and, true to expectations, despite the number of pirated copies, the game sold very well, especially thanks to it being available on Wii-Ware. As expected, in 2008, Gaming journalists proceeded to cry What the hell, gamers? after the independent developers reported the 90% piracy rate. (Mysteriously, all these people who pirated the game were nowhere to be found despite proudly linking others to torrents before.)
  • Fridge Brilliance: The unveiling of product Z, analog with the product X and Y, leads the game to (falsely) announce "World of Goo is now in... 3d!!". As in X, Y and Z axises on a three dimensional coordinate plane, hee hee.
    • The "server farm" level involves building a tower of goo on a platform that tips depending on how you distribute its weight. So in order to reach the exit pipe, you must "load balance" the server -- a real computing term.
  • Fridge Horror: It's not the goo balls fault or the Corporation's fault the world is now polluted and destroyed. It's YOURS.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Since it's a physics-based game, it can be broken, resulting in amazing OCD results.
  • Nightmare Fuel: By the end of the first chapter you'll likely be pondering the mental stability of the game's writer.
  • That One Level: "Incineration Destination"
    • The level immediately before it, "You Have To Explode The Head", can make "Incineration Destination" look like a Breather Episode. Good luck with that swaying tower!
    • Tower. Of. Goo. IN THE FIRST CHAPTER!
  • Ugly Cute: Most of the goo to some extent, but the skull goo is particularly cute while still managing to look somewhat macabre.
  • Unfortunate Implications: So, the pale pink goo balls are the "beautiful" ones, and the brown ones are "ugly"?
    • Intentional. The peachish-brown ones are before makeup, the pink ones are after.
      • So, brown people are ugly and should put on makeup to become pink and beautiful? That's not better.
        • That depends on whether you look at the game as a Take That to modern society. Because let's face it, in the fashion world, makeup = beautiful.
          • They do make makeup for dark-skinned people. "Makeup must be pink to make you beautiful" is still unfortunate.
        • Another interpretation is that the brownish colour is meant to look natural rather than the artificial looking pink. It probably wasn't meant to represent any particular race.
          • Then they should have picked green and blue. Unfortunate Implications are usually unintentional. (And "natural" = "ugly" is also unfortunate.)