The Barnacle Goose Experiment

The Barnacle Goose Experiment

released on Nov 20, 2022

The Barnacle Goose Experiment

released on Nov 20, 2022

An abiogenesis body horror idle clicker about a researcher locked in a biodome tasked with generating a working world out of their own body.


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This review contains spoilers

Had a nice time with this, even though I completely misunderstood the win condition and had the ending dampened by a game-breaking bug. Expect my rating to go up if I ever replay this, but since you clicked on the spoiler warning, two tips to improve your experience: make sure to whittle down your goose and egg stock, and don't assume any items are dead ends. Especially the ones that most seem like it.

The idea is excellent and the aesthetics very nice but it's still a clicker, and a boring one at that. I would recommend Universal Paperclips over this one but now I'm definitely interested in the corpus of work this dev has.

The infinite generation of spiderweb or shit to flies to plastic was genuinely frustrating and unsettling

Honestly, the choice to take the subject of "Abiogenesis" and turn it into an idle clicker game is inspired. Love or hate the genre as you may, this game is an excellent piece of design and I think the only thing I could even ask for is some UI and UX quality of life.

Mechanically, a clever variant on the idle genre that manages to hit the satisfaction of constant growth without ever actually giving you a thing that automates your clicks. You only get to the point where your clicks are the only limit to your progress well into the game, and even then in a constrained context—a logarithmic-scale idle game rather than exponential-scale, and to my mind more fun for it. The experiments at the heart of the game bring an aspect of exploration to the genre which my wife aptly describes as "the map discovery of a 4X + cooking in your kitchen + being four and combining dirt and leaves and water in the backyard to see what happens".

Thematically, haunting and intriguing and baffling in all the right measures—particularly once you brew up a radio and start listening to the excellent soundtrack. Evergreen Branca is a character whose only explicit personality comes from their opening letter, but they're well-defined even so by the empty space you see of them in the letters they abiogenerate. Even comes the brief descriptions of objects and locations feel like they come from Dr. Branca's wry and weary mind, rather than a separate narrator.

Altogether a short, quiet game but an affecting one.