‘Gobbo Goes’ Review – Waddling Across The Sky

Coming away from the media coverage of E3, in all its anti-aliased, bloom-filled glory, it’s refreshing to sit down and spend some quiet time with simple, exploration-encouraging gameplay. Gobbo Goes is a multi-platform HTML5 title developed by a lone wolf going under the (supposed) pseudonym Roman. True multi-platform development these days seems to be reserved for casual game types, which isn’t a surprise. When the gameplay on offer finishes or grows old after maybe a few hours, having a broader platform market makes sure that more people can enjoy it.

Here, an idyllic world has been thrown into chaos, and it’s up to our little humanoid Gobbo to find some order among the goblin-induced chaos. Diving straight in, it’s difficult at first to discover several things: what you’re supposed to do, and how to do it. While not every game has to have a tutorial, the sum of the text in this game could fill half a sticky note, and it’s difficult to say whether this is a negative or not. Lack of help in the form of tips is a decent trade off for some experimentation in gameplay, and not much help is needed once you get past the initial hurdle of figuring out how to make stuff happen.

If anything can be undoubtedly praised about Gobbo, it’s that the puzzles present are complex enough to challenge, intuitive enough to be grasped with a little foresight, and unintuitive enough to keep you guessing and experimenting with the various objects you have to drag around. In this respect, Gobbo truly lives up to its self-declared status as an adventure game. And, as such, as with most adventure games, one can always criticize the genre’s near-universal puzzle format that relies too much on trial and error. This is alleviated by the lack of a GUI giving you a variety of possible actions to perform, and by actions being performed automatically when the necessary objects contact each other. The challenge is thus in figuring out what objects can be used together.

The only remaining item worth mentioning gameplay-wise is the movement controls. Moving is controlled by pressing in one of the four quadrants of the screen, which causes Gobbo to move towards the corner. Walking against a wall causes Gobbo’s position to shift off-center, and the obvious workaround of being able to unlock Gobbo from his position on screen so you can re-center him works, although it’s a bit invasive. I don’t know enough about HTML5 to say whether or not this could have been avoided, so I’ll simply say that it can be a little frustrating to have to reposition your avatar in the center of the screen where he belongs.

Gobbo Goes is a short, refreshing diversion from typical gameplay styles, and the visual theme is as well. The art style is very cartoonish, but relies a little heavily on duplicate blocks and generic fences to represent borders in game. Other than that, the characters are simple and colorful (literally), and the color scheme remains consistently in saturated pastel tones–Very appealing to the eyes. As a bonus, the title is available across all its platforms (Mac, PC, Android, iOS) with a single purchase. For a short, colorful brain puzzler like this, it’ll probably be difficult for adventure game enthusiasts to pass up.

You can find out more about Gobbo Goes at the official website.

Review summary Pros:

Appealing art style, Simple, challenging adventure-style puzzling,

Cons:

HTML5 issues for older devices, noticeable hurdle to entry,

Rating: 71%