Goo? Yes, goo! Balls of goo, actually.

I recently saw a few posts on Planet KDE about something called "World of Goo" and it being available for Linux, so today, when I spotted the third post about it, I actually read it (I only skim the list and pick a few posts on that other planet) and decided to look at that website of this "goo" thingy.

I discovered that it's actually a game. It won a few awards, was produced by a small independent company and is available in versions for Wii, Windows, Mac - and Linux.

I decided to download the free demo that actually lets you play the whole first world with all its levels (which are mainly geared towards learning the game).
It works well on Linux, and so I could actually find out what this "goo" stuff is all about:


Basically, you have those things they call "balls of goo" that are somehow crawling around an existing start of a structure or lying around sleeping until a structure comes near them, and you can place them next to that structure in a way that they build up connections and extend it, enabling the other balls to travel there. The target is to extend the structure until it comes near a pipe where the balls get sucked in.

This game has much of the feeling of the legendary Lemmings series coupled with a fun form of a physics simulation and it seems to easily get addictive.

World of Goo is surely worth the $20 to buy it, I just fear that if I do that I'll spend way to much time with it and push out actual work that should be done...