lovingly crafted and well paced adventure

doesn't overstay it's welcome; when the fun stops the game stops and things wrap up nicely

sooking up The Gunk feels Good and Right

unlocks are a little underwhelming and a progressively more sooky sooker would have been suffice

a couple of tricky-ish puzzles nail the 'I'm smart' thing

gorgeous score, great voice acting, believable characters - well worth an afternoon/evening of your time

The most "just ok" game ive played in a while. The game centers on clean up gameplay a la Super Mario Sunshine but with a vacuum. Its fun restoring an areas nature when you suck up the dirty gunk with your arm vacuum but it gets old half way the 5 hour runtime. The last half of the game has a nice pace and ups the challenge a bit from its almost walking simulator like beginnings. At least the Unreal Engine 4 graphics are not terrible because of the decent art style.

Level design is subpar, the scan mechanic is half baked, puzzles feel more like inconveniences than fun, story is deus-ex machina filled generic save the world plot and the voice acting is terrible.

Seriously, whomever decided to have a mom like character say be careful every 5 minutes needs to get over their fetish and get help for your childhood abandonment issues.

Play Kena: Bridge of Spirits instead.

This came along at the right time. A nice wee game that looks fantastic and has a fun story. Finished it in about 5-6 hours and I had a great time playing it.

I loved cleaning the gunk and having lush greenery appear in its place. A nice change of pace after playing Halo Infinite pretty solidly for over a week.

Looks great, plays great and was a nice little distraction to play over a couple of evenings.

The Gunk is pretty enjoyable for what it is, even if what it is is nothing too flashy. The game feels pretty good to roam around in, even if the core mechanics run out of steam pretty quickly. The removal of the titular gunk feels decently satisfying the first few times, but then gets tedious and borderline painful to squeeze the triggers for extended periods of time.

The Gunk feels fallen out of the PS2 or even PS3/360 era where there were tons of 3D adventure games that got lost in the shuffle but resonate with people that decided to give them a chance, maybe as one of their first games growing up or due to an appealing cover artwork. I have a soft spot for these kinds of games and grew up playing them, so I can't help but feel fondness for what The Gunk ended up being. It is small, it is unambitious, but at the same time there is something precious to it.

The music is one aspect that definitely stands out as really good and so does the environment art with the transitions from corrupted to lush floral meadows and interesting overgrown ruins. It is nothing you haven't seen before, but will no doubt resonate with people in the right spot for it in their lives. The perfect Game Pass game in that sense and I hope this will be someones first adventure game that they will too have fond memories for in the future while nobody around them will have heard of it.

Dissapointingly average in nearly every way save for the sci-fi pulp art style. Incessant amateurish voice acting, thin writing and characterization, and a frictionless platforming gameplay with little challenge. It's also yet another example of a game taking a sort of anticolonial stance about unchecked greed and exploitation in its story, and yet its gameplay mechanics are literally about hoovering up plant life and natural resources to upgrade your abilities. Props to the art direction however. Marking as "Completed" even though I have about an hour left, not worth finishing unfortunately.

Jings, I'm conflicted on this one folks. There's something here, for sure. It's just... There's not a lot of it? There's a lot of half measures. A lot of "that'll do". The game is gorgeous, I love the way the character models look like... Well, models! Handpainted minitures, almost! The music is sensational, classical electronic ambient beauty. The two leads give enjoyable pperformances despite an occasionally clunky as fuck script. But like... I don't think it justifies its length, and it's only about 5-6 hours. It tells a very predictable tale, mechanically you've seen everything interesting to do in the first hour. I just dunno. In a landscape of games absolutely desperate for your time, it's a hard sell, but if you've got 6 or so hours to kill and want to clean up some gunk, you literally cannot do much better. Name one better. A 6 hour gunk cleaning game. You can't. Gotcha, bitch.

الرسوم والعالم والإضاءة جميلة، قصة خربوطية عادية
‏لعب ممتع هادئ وبسيط
‏لعب هادئ وبسيط
‏لعب بسيط
‏لعب ممل
‏لعب ممل ومزعج

‏اللعبة تعيد تكرار نفسها بطريقة شنيعة، الاستكشاف معدوم واللعب واحد، اشفط وامش وألغاز سخيفة مثل ألغاز GoW
‏كان ممكن تكون أفضل، بكثير

If you've ever enjoyed watching those carpet/stuffed animal deep cleaning videos, I guess this is the 4 hour distraction for you? Based on the name and the silly font for the "boxart", I hoped for something significantly more campy and ridiculous. This was entirely unremarkable, bland story with nothing you haven't seen before, the characters feel barely fleshed out beyond Rani is adventurous and Becks is not, and the gameplay and puzzles are pretty rudimentary. It's not bad, but it's nothing special and frankly if it wasn't for the fact that I use websites like this I would absolutely forget that it even exists, let alone that I ever played it.

I had fun vacuuming up sludge and restoring the world to a vibrant state. I thought the story was fairly well told and the voice acting was excellent. I think it earned its cliches, including an elevator level fraught with emotional tension and a monochrome walking level at half speed. I loved the music and thought it looked gorgeous.

That said, it didn't really go above and beyond. I wish there was more stuff to scan or more upgrades to get. Yet it knew not to overstay its welcome, so.... Good! Fine! I'd recommend playing it as a comfort game and not expecting to have your mind blown!

A game that I could swear came from XBLA and one that cannot meet the ambitions I'm sure Image & Form had set out to accomplish.

A core mechanic doesn't expand to offer enough variety meaning the game actively regresses the longer it goes on, and while it finally starts to show some potential by the last chapter, I was hoping for the game to wind down already by that point. You also get the sense there will be a degree of depth to gathering and crafting resources, but this ends up being far too simplistic and the upgrades you make have minimal impact on your character.

Environmental puzzle elements are too simple or get explained by the character as you enter the room, but the overall environmental design is lush and detailed - albeit with some texture popping here and there.