Good Morning Friends! I’ve yet to really talk about it but I am now the proud owner of an Xbox Series X, that I acquired after much following of twitter alerts and after six months of this finally lucking into one. You might be asking yourself… but Bel, don’t you already have a PS5 and barely use it? Yes… that is in fact true but the heart wants what the heart wants and also Game Pass is a phenomenal offering and I miss out on a bunch of titles by not having an Xbox console. My old Xbox One 1980s VCR model just was not cutting it anymore and I needed to upgrade it to something more modern and viable. Additionally I am really wanting to play around with developer mode… but that is another story for another day. For those who may not have me on Xbox you can check out my profile here.
After setting up the Xbox this weekend, one of the first things that I started doing was downloading games that were available on Game Pass. One of the ones that I had really been wanting to try out is The Gunk. The tale centers around Rani and Becks a couple of what appears to be purposefully ambiguous terms… who happen to have a mortgage on a starship called the “Bunny” and refuse to each dinner without each other. You play as Rani who acts as the chief explorer and scavenger while Becks effectively is the pilot and maintains it and your robot buddy CuRT. You land on the planet in search of an energy signature which hopefully will lead to a source of fuel that you can scavenge and make some profit off of. What unfolds instead is a pure joyous exploration experience of uncovering a lost civilization and revitalizing this dead rock into a lush planet.
I’ve called this game a love child of Mario Sunshine, No Man’s Sky, and Ratchet and Clank. The first part of that comparison arrives as soon as you land and are confronted with this organic pollution that ends up getting referred to as “The Gunk”. This bubbling semi-sentient oil slick serves as an obstacle preventing you from moving forward. Thankfully you are equipped with your faithful prosthetic arm that happens to have a number of functional modes… one of which serves as a vacuum cleaner allowing you to suck up all of the bad stuff and clear the way. Once you have cleared an area of these pollutants it magically springs back to life and with it brings all sorts of flora and fauna.
All sorts of things happen once the gunk is gone, flowers grow and unfurl into bridges, vines spring forth giving you access to higher or lower areas, and plant life blooms giving you access to things like natural explosives and seeds that you can plant which will allow to to bridge gaps and reach new areas. This creates a really interesting gameplay loop of cleaning up the gunk, and then exploring everything that just opened up. In the above screenshot there is a plant growing that will ultimately flop over and serve as a bridge between two areas giving you access across the river.
While roaming the world you can gather a number of resources… which makes it feel a bit No Man’s Sky in that aspect as you collect metal, fiber, or organic matter with your multi-purpose prosthetic called “Pumpkin”. Scanning new life forms unlocks upgrades that you can then apply to your trusty tool. This is far less of a “talent tree” sort of situation and more of a series of unlocks that improve your efficiency of exploration and ultimately “combat”. The truth is I think over time you will have easily unlocked everything if you are spending any time trying to scan new planets or vacuum up new resources.
I threw combat in quotes because this isn’t a game with much ACTUAL combat. You do have a limited amount of “life” but for the most part any time you take a death you spawn back immediately where you left off. Combat instead serves more as a puzzle to solve with little gunk monsters that come from the larger free roaming gunk globs that you can suck up with pumpkin and then throw at other gunk monsters. Later there are also stationary turrets that you stun and run up on to pull them out of the ground before they wake back up. The game as a whole feels very “puzzle platformer” which is I guess where I get the Ratchet and Clank comparison, because movement and traversal matters and often times involves solving some minor puzzle to unlock a new pathway.
While exploring you can plant beacons in specific locations allowing you to fast travel back and forth between them and your base cap back at the “Bunny”. Generally speaking by the time I unlock a new beacon, I have gathered up enough resources or found enough new scans to unlock new ways to upgrade pumpkin. I can’t say that this is a terribly complicated game, but I do think it would be an ideal experience to play with kids. The game is not terribly demanding with the hardest interaction being to shoot a plant to knock off the part of it that explodes, and then pick it up and throw it to some destination. The game is exceptionally forgiving of death and if you fall from a jump, you start back where you leapt from without any need for backtracking.
Everything I have described is pretty basic, but what really sets this game apart is the interaction between its characters. Becks and Rani are very much committed to each other, and each time you are in danger you can hear the fear in Becks voice. One of the side effects of the Gunk is it keeps causing you two to lose radio communication, and each time you re-establish the link there is a palpable sense of relief. Storytelling through radio chatter is a pretty tried and true mechanic, but this game gets so much impact out of it. You come to love the pair and their robot CuRT… which at some point was programmed to say “You Got Served” but now apparently can ONLY say that…. regardless of the situation.
One of the complaints that I have heard about the game is that it is very short, somewhere in the four to six hour range. There are some that feel that this game was “designed for gamepass” and that it somehow devalues the experience. There are others that are seemingly scared of the very obvious queerness of these characters, and they can rightly fuck off with that noise. For me it is this amazingly heartfelt and charming adventure about two scavengers trying to find something that can make their lives a little less painful, and maybe afford a better meal that gruel. I am having a blast and am in the 5th chapter out of what are apparently 8 in total. I am very happy that I chose this as one of my first XSX gaming experiences.
Right now it is available through Game Pass as part of the subscription or you can buy it outright for $25. Unfortunately at this very moment it seems to be only available through the windows store. My hope is over time it will release on other platforms because this game really does need to get more love. It isn’t a game that will move any consoles, but it absolutely adds a lot of value to that Game Pass subscription. If you have access to it then I highly suggest you check it out. If you can stomach actually downloading something from the Windows Store, then you can check it out here as well.
