Indie developer House House announced today that their hit waterfowl simulator Untitled Goose Game will be receiving a free update on September 23rd that adds 2-player support for the game. While many are excited at the possibility of causing suburban mayhem with a partner, the news has got me thinking about 1 thing and 1 thing only: Untitled Goose Battle Royale.
Don’t get me wrong, stealing lawn furniture and startling old ladies as a pair of mischievous geese sounds delightful. But I was raised on the battlefield and when I hear a game has online multiplayer I expect there to be a winner and a loser. Who’s the best goose? There’s only one way to find out.
Of course, I wouldn’t expect a Goose Game battle royale to be a shooter like Fornite or Apex Legends. Fall Guys and Tetris 99 blew the doors off the BR genre and proved that the 1vs100 format can work really well in all types of games, not just shooters. As much as I’d like to see a bunch of geese in army fatigues blasting each other with AK-47s, that wouldn’t really be in the spirit of the game. So what would a Goose Game BR look like?
At its core, a battle royale is just a complicated game of musical chairs. In Fall Guys, only a certain number of players can qualify each round. The number of “chairs” available decreases each round until there’s only 1 seat left. With that in mind, there are plenty of mini-games and game modes that would work fantastically with a big group of geese.
Imagine 60 ducks at the start of the round all racing to steal a bell. There are only 40 bells, and each one is either hidden or being held by a townsperson. The geese need to be sneaky to get the bells, just like in the regular game. If they don’t manage to steal one of the bells they’ll steal have a chance to steal one from another goose. When the time runs out, every goose without a bell would be eliminated.
There’s plenty of ways to make a Goose Game competitive. Maybe every goose needs to scare as many people as possible by sneaking up behind them and honking, the geese with the least number of scares after a few minutes get eliminated. For the grand finale, a race through an obstacle course made of gardening equipment. The first goose to drop a bell into the lake wins!
I’d love to see a 6 dozen geese flapping their wings and honking at each other while they awkwardly race around stealing bells. The battle royale genre is still young and there’s plenty of opportunities to see it grow in different directions. Let’s unleash the geese and see what happens.
