For the first time in probably literally ever, I have played a new game, to completion, within a fortnight of its release[3]. Even accounting for its being a relatively short game, my counterpoint is that I didn’t play it for about a week in the middle, what with Christmas and having a child and all that this entails. My points are a) wow and b) look for this to never happen again, like, ever.

The Gunk is the story of a pair of… long haul truckers? junk traders? if I’m being real, what they actually do is not perfectly laid out, except that they for sure do it in space and in the future. But then they pick up an energy reading from an otherwise dead planet, and the idealistic exploratory character (as opposed to the hard-bitten cynical character or the helpful, low-vocabulary character) insists on checking things out. What follows is an exploration platformer game where you quickly discover that there are these piles of purple, bulbous, well, gunk all over the place, and that if you hoover it up using your power glove[1], all of the plant life recovers from a dormant state, and weird pools of energy that are for sure some portion of what the readings were and which have additional uses in the moment are also revealed.

And then you explore around, trying to figure out why and what everything is, and not incidentally make some money along the way, due to your semi-apparent day job overlapping with this kind of discovery. Later still, there are conflicts.[2]

As this kind of game goes, it is clearly not as good as your Marios and your Banjos-Kazooie for the fact of the game play and collectiony bits. But it has probably a better, more engrossing plot than those have, and also only plays for like six to eight hours rather than sixty to eighty. Those facts may be related, come to think of it. But also, they don’t handhold you. I thought I explored everywhere, and I certainly tried to, but even though I got the scan everything achievement, I could not manage the build everything achievement.

I’d play a sequel game with these characters, though, so.

[1] Where it ends up is not particularly a topic of interest to the game writers, who, to make two points in one footnote, were clearly enamored of but never owned a certain late ’80s NES accessory.
[2] What??? I know, right.
[3] And then forgot to post for nearly another week. *sigh*