I’ve maligned the lack of science fiction games out there several times. There just isn’t enough sci-fi content in gaming. Every once in a while though, something sneaks out that you don’t expect. Today, that’s The Gunk, from veteran indie developer Image and Form Games, makers of the fantastic Steamworld Dig franchise and publisher Thunderful Games, the parent company of Image and Form.
Now, Steamworld Dig was an utterly fantastic game and the entire series is a cut above, but The Gunk is a significant divergence from anything Image and Form has made before. You play Rani, member of a small two-person spaceship crew barely scraping by vintage sci-fi fashion. They’re desperate for a scrap score to pay their mounting bills and land on a planet detecting energy that they might be able to sell to ease their financial woes.
As Rani, it’s time for you to find the cash and save your ship, but this isn’t the adventure you might expect, because the planet is covered with, well, gunk. Weird bubbly gunk that covers all the energy vents you desperately want to harvest. Fortunately, your robotic arm can vacuum it all up, but when you do, things change. Turns out the gunk everywhere is restricting the natural environment and purging it results in an explosion of life in the surrounding area, much like completing a level in Flower. The Gunk is a story-driven game and the entire game follows a highly linear narrative. As you wander through the alien planet, things are a little more complex than you might have initially expected and Rani and her shipmate Beck have a deep and complex relationship that is slowly shown through the game. It’s a simple, charming story that isn’t overdone or underdone but just leads the player comfortably through the experience.
That’s kind of the entirety of The Gunk too. This is a focused gameplay experience as much or more than it’s a game, and at around 5 hours, it’s not going to take you a long time. You can easily beat the Gunk in a couple days of light casual play and that’s perfectly fine. You’re not going to struggle too hard to do it either, since the difficulty here is quite low. Sure, you need to be able to handle a 3D camera and aim and stuff, but dying doesn’t really do anything in The Gunk. You just respawn to zero fanfare where you died with no penalties. There’s combat and you can absolutely die in it, but mostly because you weren’t expecting combat. Once you get a feel for the controls, it’s quite easy and the plethora of upgrades available through the course of the game leave you nearly invincible.
You’re not here for the challenge though. You’re here for the story and the visuals. Rather than pixel art, I & F has chosen to go with fully rendered 3D for The Gunk and the results are nothing short of spectacular. The Gunk is an absolutely gorgeous game and the alien world is lush and vibrant, teeming with weird and wonderful plants and creatures, almost none of which want to kill you. This is a relaxing adventure that will have you gazing around in wonder at the environments, save for some of the darker parts of the story that are suitably grey, red, and unpleasant for story purposes. For a first attempt at 3D, Image and Form has honestly knocked it out of the part in terms of visual design, creating new and unique looks for plants, creatures and more. The closest thing to The Gunk out there in terms of visual design is probably Journey to the Savage Planet (review here), but that’s a pretty intense first person platformer and this is a chill third person adventure.
Vacuuming up gunk is surprisingly satisfying and while Rani might chatter on a bit too much, it never really gets irritating. Most of the gameplay consists of figuring out how to activate various platforms and plants, and it’s just a pleasure to wander around in the environment, even though long-time gamers will feel like they’re being led by the hand a bit. It’s important to keep in mind that this is a short experience and that makes all the difference in The Gunk. The devs could easily have expanded this game to a Rare-style collect-a-thon that forced you to gather up a bunch of random plant samples and jump around for hours to get that last leaf or whatever, but they didn’t. That’s not the point here. Instead of artificially extending the game for no reason, they simply told the story they wanted to tell, an approach that’s sadly lacking in the game industry these days. Will you replay The Gunk? Probably not. But you’ll remember it, because it doesn’t drag on interminably. It gets the job done and lets you move on with a pleasant, uplifting story that fun to play through.
During the game, you’ll unlock a plethora of upgrades for your robotic arm by scanning everything around you, and some of them are definitely helpful, but you certainly don’t need them. Walking across the planet, you’ll vacuum up various items such as fiber, metal, and bits of alien and use those to synthesize new parts for your arm back at the ship. You don’t have to collect them. Nothing makes you. But it’s kind of fun to do so and making that small amount of collecting fun is impressive. And fun is the word here. Low pressure, low key fun that keeps you engaged for the length of The Gunk and keeps the narrative moving forward steadily. Wandering back to the ship to choose upgrades is fun. Making mushroom platforms grow is fun. Vacuuming the planet is fun. It’s just an all around good time.
Those spectacular visuals are accompanied by a solid soundtrack too, and the overall vibe of The Gunk is a quiet competence of design, appreciation for nature, and more than a bit of a polluting is bad narrative. In this day and age, that’s more than acceptable, it’s practically a civic duty and to couch all that in a fun and interesting story that’s accessible for not just skilled gamers but pretty much anyone is admirable. The Gunk is a game that anyone with 3D spatial perception can pick up and play relatively easily and it doesn’t keep going interminably, providing a defined experience that ends definitively. You will finish the game, enjoy the experience, and be done with The Gunk and that’s something that a lot of gamers value. There’s no need for 40 hours and honestly, the experience would get stale. As it is, just when things are starting to feel a bit of repetition, the game is done. That’s good game design. Don’t argue. Enjoy it, then move on to the next thing and ten to one, you’ll remember playing the Gunk a few years down the road more than whatever random game you spend 100 hours on out of sheer designed compulsion.
The Gunk is a fun, short game that’s designed for everyone to enjoy. It has a positive message, it’s great to look at, sounds amazing, and it’s enjoyable. Sure it’s short. But that’s good! It’s also free on Xbox Gamepass if you have that. If not, it’s a reasonably priced $25 and that might sound like a lot for a five hour game, but it’s not. What did you pay the last time you went to the theater for a 1.5 hour movie? $50 with popcorn and drinks? This definitely an experience that’s worth the money and if you have Gamepass, you’ve already paid your admission, so you might as well take in the show! It might not be a hardcore gameplay experience, but we all need to chill once in a while and The Gunk is a fantastic game to do it with!
This review is based on a digital copy of The Gunk provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a Sony 55” 1080p TV. The Gunk is currently an Xbox exclusive which is also available on PC directly through Microsoft.
