EDIT: Spoilers are now open!

Pre-Edit:

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our 20th game of 2023 is Goat Simulator. The target completion date is September 25, 2023.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after September 25, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Goat Simulator?

An extremely serious and down to earth simulation of daily goat life from grazing to competing for mates to licking literally everything.

How long is Goat Simulator?

How long to beat lists it as 2 hours long but it's really more of a sandbox.

I actually just did a gameplay and impressions video of Goat Simulator 3 on my channel. It's a ridiculously good time that constantly rewards you for the most bizarre and random of activities. Recommend playing it for sure! https://youtu.be/gWAnsL8fE2k?si=51bwM2QJ5EnNbDYp

I have always been interested in Goat Simulator and even bought it years ago on Xbox for like $3 but never got around to playing it. This selection got me to try it and...I hated it! I don't really understand how this game got the traction it did. I thought it was going to be janky chaos with bad physics but it's actively unpleasant to play. The controls suck, the objectives are totally unclear, the chaos is incredibly unsatisfying, and even multiplayer I don't understand how it would be fun because it's just not enjoyable to control. I can enjoy a janky mess as much as the next person but there's jank and there's frustrating jank and this goes beyond "normal" jank into frustration.

I am in the same boat as @bigsocrates. I remember playing this game around launch with some friends and really enjoying passing the controller around and letting everyone mess around with the playground. Flash forward to the present day, though, and I turned it off after an hour. It may have been the lack of friends around me to help dull the annoyances this time, but I disliked most things about this game. Even taking into account when it was released, I thought it was incredibly ugly; the controls were rough; and the physics felt inconsistent when trying to complete goals.

Side note: I booted this up on Xbox first, and everything looked way oversaturated. I'm not sure what was going on there, but the colors looked a lot better when I played my Steam copy.

This all may sound curmudgeonly, but I'm not completely against the concept, so if Goat Simulator 3 ever gets added to Gamepass, I would check it out to see if it plays better.

@noboners: It does look ugly and dark on the Xbox but honestly the graphics were not the issue. It was the control.

I think this may be an example of a game where a trailblazing game may have had its core ideas iterated on better. I think Goat Simulator sort of started the idea of "streamer" games or "intentional jank" but there are a lot of games that use those concepts but are still fun to play. I'm thinking of something like Hotel R 'N R, where the controls are wacky but the chaos is much more enjoyable (with you giving tools like fire and explosives to create procedurally generated destruction) and scored, giving you more incentive to do things with it. I guess Goat Simulator has scores too, but it doesn't seem to do anything with them. Or Tentacular, where you have to struggle using motion controlled tentacles to perform delicate actions but you can figure out how to get the goals done.

And I realize I just named two VR games but the "wanton destruction" genre works really well in VR.