No matter how often I kept hearing
World of Goo was super awesome, I avoided it. This is mostly because I had played its precursor,
Tower of Goo which is not at all engaging or entertaining. I mean, if you're going to make a physics game, it's not going to be fun if your physics are terrible. Building a bridge or tower out of overcooked macaroni is not my idea of a good time, and worse, if your gooballs start wobbling, more often than not instead of settling down, their motion will actually amplify--with no action on your part--until your structure reaches catastrophic failure. I was afraid World of Goo would be plagued by all the same problems as Tower of Goo, and just couldn't imagine a game built around that premise being at all enjoyable.
It turns out I was half right. World of Goo does, in fact, incorporate all the mechanics that made Tower of Goo a miserable experience. Yet somehow, for the vast majority of the time, the game is ridiculously fun. A lot of it has to do with the excellent art and the awesomely understated--yet at the same time often rather epic--ambient music (you can
download the soundtrack for free, and I recommend you do so). But most of the reason its fun is that while the overall building mechanic remains the same, its broken down into (generally) smaller and far more manageable challenges with a varied array of additional gameplay mechanics mixed in with the basic gooball stacking. In fact, in many levels, there's no actual "building" taking place at all.
Now, there were a few exceptionally frustrating places (almost all of them involving large free-standing structures) where I was still stymied by the gooballs' flagrant disregard for entropy, but for the most part, the game was a fun, light puzzler. Much like Braid, the gameplay concepts were constantly built upon from level to level, so you never found yourself doing exactly the same thing twice. This kept the experience very fresh, and helped keep me engaged even during the frustrating portions.
As far as I'm concerned, every game should do this, and just thinking about it makes me want to cancel my WoW account and swear off JRPGs for good. I mean, I'm not in school anymore, and I just don't have the kind of time I used to. Show me what you've got to offer and wrap it up, I've got stuff to do. World of Goo, Braid, Portal; I could get used to the idea of the $20, super-tight, 4-hour video game experience.