The Gunk – Review

You are a space-scrapper duo who touch down on a wasteland planet covered in weird goo chasing an energy signal, and the player character has a giant hoover for a hand. The outcome seems obvious – time to start sucking up gunk. As you absorb it the land seems to be recovering, and you uncover the mysteries of this barren planet. There’s a lot to like about The Gunk, and the visuals and music are lovely. However, I’m not sure it quite finds enough to do with the central goo-clearing mechanic. Despite this, it’s an appropriate length and doesn’t overstay its mechanical welcome.

Cleaning up

Structurally, The Gunk is a standard 3D platformer, with a few puzzle-ish bits thrown in here and there. In many ways it reminds me of older games, with its discrete zones, clear objectives and visual structure. Hoovering the goop is satisfying in that cleaning-up sort of way, though maybe a mechanical incentive for doing so might have made it a little nicer. General upgrades for your character, as well as a couple that help with progression, are purchased using materials, which serve as the incentive for exploration. When defeated, the enemy ‘animals’ drop upgrade materials, so perhaps rebalancing this upgrade unit and rewarding the player with one for clearing a gunk ‘node’ would have helped keep the dopamine flowing. 

The game’s limited ‘combat’ basically revolves around hoovering up enemies and throwing them at other enemies, or yanking them out of the ground. The Gunk probably could have done with a few extra enemy types over the long run. There are some boss fights, but they’re both uncomplicated affairs and don’t really make use of many of the game’s mechanics, which is a shame. I think The Gunk could have leaned into the gunk a bit more. Some of the game’s best bits come in the form of puzzling out which smaller, discrete gunk patches need to be cleared first to unlock different pathways or progression plants. Overall, the gameplay design of The Gunk is a bit back-to-basics, reminding me in a lot of ways of classic 3D platformers of the 5th console generation. 

More to do than hoovering goo

While there are some promising parts about the level design, it could have done with some more variation. You spend most of the game following the same pipe back to its source. While it does a competent job of introducing minor new mechanics and then remixing old ones through the length of the game, it’s just a bit basic. There is maybe one little side-path per area with an extra resource node you can poke into and then shortcut back to the main path and continue on. On a few occasions you have to venture into differing nearby areas to find stuff to progress, which changes it up nicely. Near the end of the game The Gunk gets a bit more daring with it, with one single area having multiple sub-zones you need to clear to move on. The level designs are generally simple and satisfying, but you’ll have been introduced to all the ‘tools’ to progress after the first few chapters, and the rest is variation on the same themes. An extra mechanic or two at around the 75% mark wouldn’t have gone amiss. Another mild gripe is the game’s reliance on only letting you grab marked ledges – without the magic yellow paint, ledges just out of jump clearance are completely inaccessible. It’s not the end of the world, but it does make some of the platforming challenges that little bit more artificial. 

The Gunk’s visuals and sound are far from messy

The aesthetic and music are really nice, though. Your spaceship and the two lead characters, Rani and Becks, have a well-stylised, cartoonish look, with the tech satisfyingly blocky and vaguely retro. Rani looks like she’s got a huge Gameboy stuck to her, presumably to play with her enormous robot hand. While the gunk itself is deliberately visually monotonous and renders environments the same way, once you clear it the world springs to life with a vibrant colour palette. While nothing stood out to me about the sound design, the music is consistently thematic and evocative, really dominating the aural experience of the game. Graphically it’s quite nice, with good lighting and interesting zones. At least on the Series S there’s a bit of texture muddiness when you get too close to some stuff. There’s no real getting around the fact that the bright, fun, restored zones are the highlight of the game and as the plot progresses it follows that classic structure of becoming darker and more serious visually, which means less forest and more gunk. It’s a bit of a shame, but not exactly a huge issue. 

The main plot revolves around uncovering the mystery of the gunk, unsurprisingly, and the main character ‘drama’ is about the idealistic adventurer Rani’s contrast with the practical and pragmatic Becks. They’re both well-established from the start and develop quite nicely through the course of the game, chatting away through their radios with well-delivered voice work. I don’t think there’ll be any huge surprises in terms of where the plot goes, but it’s charming and good-hearted, and really that’s enough for a game like this. There are some nice little points of colourful background-filling, too, through the radio. It stops short of full-on World-Building™ but it’s enough to provide gentle support to the game’s themes. With the weird pollution goo all over the place, The Gunk has some planet-saving environmentalist notes that carry through the game. 

The Gunk took me a little under 5 hours to beat, a well-pitched completion time for what it is. If you’ve got Game Pass and are into 3D platformer games, it’s a no-brainer, go check it out. Most of the attention seems to have been placed on the aesthetics and audio in favour of complex or significantly evolving gameplay challenges. While it’s not to the complete expense of these other factors, it is noticeable. It carries its straightforward story off with relative style and quality – though in my opinion the ending is a little weak – and its character arcs are satisfying. If you’re a 3D platformer veteran the formula might be a bit simple once you scrape off the outer layer of gunk, but it scrubs up alright.

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I’ve been posting more lately – most recently, I wrote a retrospective of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. George recently wrote about fun roguelite PVP game Rounds, which is definitely worth a look.

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