Goat Simulator 3 - A crooked mirror of the gaming industry

Have you noticed that we all live in a clownish reality? Seemingly sane people make such mistakes as if they have an IQ below 70, and foolish clowns by an unbelievable coincidence achieve success. Books on success authored by a no-name and an info gypsy sell millions of copies, while a batch of textbooks on applied sciences can hardly be sold at huge discounts. All initially promising and promising ideas lead to disastrous consequences, and deliberately idiotic ideas are picked up by society and inflated to planetary proportions.

One such deliberately idiotic idea was Goat Simulator, released as a joke on April 1, 2014. Goat Simulator is the usual open-world game at its worst, lacking only tower grabs and repetitive business improvement. However, the game was beloved for its unhealthy abundance of goofiness, references, and some people were bribed by Goat Simulator's elaborate ragdoll physics.

In 2022 Goat Simulator 3 came out and once again denounced the hypocrisy of the entire gaming industry. Looking ahead, Goat Simulator 3, despite its small budget, was objectively better than Saints Row 2022. How did it turn out that way? When did we take a wrong turn?

Better than Ubisoft's open worlds?

The essence of Goat Simulator 3 is a huge open world, overflowing with easter eggs, references and outright stupidity, where the player plays as a goat, wreaking total havoc on the map. The trick is the open world itself. If at the same Ubisoft open worlds are no less huge, but with rare exceptions are filled with a couple of three kinds of single-type activities. In Goat Simulator 3 each activity is a separate silly joke. A granny in a wheelchair shooting balls with a bazooka...

...or Xzibit's own garage with its suspension tuning fridge, dressers, and farm car.
The whole point of Goat Simulator 3 is to find references to seemingly everything in the world. It's easier to say what there are no references to than to mention them all.

A real find for the collector and for those who played GTA not for the story, but for the racket, killing prostitutes and stealing cars. By the way, it is even easier to steal a car in Goat Simulator 3 than in GTA.

An open world is not a surprise for anyone, but when the open world in Goat Simulator is better than in many AAA-projects - it is the reason to think that the industry has made a wrong turn. Goat Simulator communicates from the first frames that everything that happens is subtle trolling over the serious narrative in games, that everything in our lives can be mocked.

The world of Goat Simulator 3 is not static, each player's action leads to one or another consequence. A list of all the activities will take pages of text, and it is not worth spoiling the experience with spoilers. It is not so much the abundance of points of interest that amazes as their variety and elaboration. The trick is in the little things: if you go to the beach and destroy the sand castle of one of the campers, he will go to complain to the lifeguard, and your goat will be chased - this is the most insignificant example.

To the point of fun, many of the activities are unique. If Goat Simulator 3 draws you in at first, it won't let you go for a long time. But essentially, there are only two types of fun: looking for references and wreaking havoc on the map. But how?

Ragdoll-physics has never before been applied to such silly things...

Initially, people liked the goat simulator primarily because of its ragdoll-physics: the goat did not obey scripts, but had quite a weighty body, and all objects in the game were created with collision in mind. If a goat rammed a car, the car flipped differently every time.

In general, the controls of Goat Simulator 3 cannot be called intuitive. One gets the impression that they crammed everything they could. In addition to the standard running, jumping, running on walls, as in Prinse of Persia...

...as well as time dilation, bleating, and real-time physics-based car control. The goat has so many possibilities that there is not a single unused button on a normal gamepad. All for the sake of just pissing off; however, this activity, as expected, quickly gets boring.

To keep the player longer, customization is provided:

The various ornaments serve not only a decorative function, but also affect the characteristics, and sometimes have an active ability. All these boots, hats, etc. are bought for in-game currency, and the currency is given for completing simple tasks. You get a vicious circle, when one prank opens the way to the others, until the game rolls into a blatant circus circus Chapiteau.

...And the very definition of a goat simulator is gradually being erased. After all, the goat is the initial playable character. You can play as a pig, as a giraffe, even as Jesus. All of this, of course, clumsily funny, but the effect of a stupid joke may not have any effect if you're a fan of black humor. If movies like "American Pie", "Scary Movie" or "Don't Threaten South Central while Sipping Juice in Your Apartment" seemed flat, silly and dull to you, then Goat Simulator 3 will seem like entertainment for someone with IQ below 70. However, if you ignore the humor and the game's ideas, you will see that there is nothing to criticize Goat Simulator 3 for. The open world here is made with great attention to detail, devoid of repetition and, importantly, consumes almost no video card or CPU resources.

Conclusion

Goat Simulator 3 will suit fans of clumsy humor, unobtrusive pastime, and silliness. However, aside from the goofiness, there is essentially nothing here. Goat Simulator 3 is a game for the moment, purely for the mood.