The graphics are not the most realistic out there but they look very nice for a low budget project and the Gunk looks truly otherworldly. What they also got right is the feeling of the planet. Becks and Curt are your buddies on this adventure.
#Games like the gunk upgrade#
You also use a scanner to scan things, which unlocks new upgrade blueprints for reasons that are never explained. The vacuuming animation is pretty satisfying though, so they got that right. It gives you something to do in the environment and reasons to explore but it never gets particularly complex or difficult. You’ll be sucking them up as you go, and there are some optional paths to get more resources which you can then spend on upgrades if you want. There are four kinds, organic, fiber, metal, and fiber. Speaking of collecting resources you’ll be doing that too. You can also go back to camp to talk to Becks if you want, and you can upgrade your equipment with some mostly superfluous additions like the ability to heal by collecting certain resources or a more powerful blast from your glove that can stun or kill enemies.
There is some combat against some corrupted creatures, of which there are only a few forms, and that occupies about 10% of the game. It’s really not much more mechanically complex than that. The gameplay mostly consists of doing some basic platforming to either get to the Gunk and clear it, or to get to the thing you need to use to clear it, and then opening a new path by, for example, taking a fruit you’ve caused to grow and throwing it into a pool of liquid where it sprouts into a plant whose leaves you can jump on. You mostly do this with Pumpkin but sometimes you’ll find an explosive plant you can use to blow up the Gunk in hard to reach places, or a few other means I won’t go into here because this is a short game and I don’t want to spoil the plot. These generally start out barren and then become lush and organic after you’ve cleared away the Gunk.
#Games like the gunk series#
I like that kind of representation in video games but she's also just a fun protagonist in her own right.Īs Rani and Becks try to unravel the mystery of the Gunk and figure out what’s going on with the planet and whether there’s anything they can take from it to sell back home you follow a mostly linear path through a series of somewhat similar environments. Rani is a minority, disabled, and at least implicitly queer. You reach an area, eliminate the gunk, and open new pathways to move forward. This forms the essential loop that will carry you through the game. Rani’s robot arm, named Pumpkin, can vacuum this gunk up and she learns that if she clears all the gunk out of an area the suppressed native plant life will bloom. When they land they find that their instruments are malfunctioning and they soon figure out that it’s because of the eponymous gunk that floats in bubbling clouds of fluid all over the surface. Rani and Becks have landed on an apparently desolate planet because they picked up an energy signal from it. Where does it go? Don't ask questions you don't want the answers to. They also have a culinary robot named Curt who cooks for you precisely once in the game but says “you got served” whenever you talk to him, which is an incredibly outdated reference that seems to be mined for absurdist humor. Becks is more levelheaded and cautious, and while Rani is out exploring she stays back on the ship and communicates via radio. Rani is a spunky and adventurous young woman, which is demonstrated by the fact that she’s missing half of one of her arms due to having put herself in an inadvisable situation. You play Rani, a scavenger cruising through the universe in a small space ship called The Bunny alongside her partner (business, life, and perhaps romantic, though that’s not made explicit) Becks. What The Gunk does have going for it is atmosphere. This is not a game that you play breathlessly, glued to your controller as you try to perfect your actions and master its intricacies.
It’s about 4 and a half hours long or so and most of the mechanics are revealed in the first hour and a half, leaving you with some very gentle iteration on those mechanics through the end of the game.
It is essentially a 3D puzzle platformer, except the platforming isn’t difficult and the puzzles mostly involve some very basic moving of object A to point B and hitting switch C to open up path D.
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