The Gunk is an entertaining adventure with a message about pollution and industrialisation. with a likeable protagonist. The pacing is a little drawn out toward the end of the six to seven hour journey, but there's a great visual style and an enjoyable game to experience.
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The Gunk is a fun little platforming adventure full of malicious messes that are plenty satisfying to clean up. The small twists each new area puts on its fairly simple mechanics never drastically shake up its formula of vacuuming the landscape and then hopping to the next location, but an enticing story and a beautiful sense of style keep the clean-up process consistently entertaining throughout its relatively brief campaign.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with The Gunk. It works from a technical standpoint and it isn’t the worst way you can spend about five hours of your time. But I just can’t muster up any sort of authentic excitement about it. If it were funnier or cleverer or more challenging, I could maybe start to see it as a title I could recommend. But as it is, the best I can do is pay it that slightly backhanded compliment of saying it’s perfect for Game Pass.
The Gunk is an entertaining adventure with a message about pollution and industrialisation. with a likeable protagonist. The pacing is a little drawn out toward the end of the six to seven hour journey, but there's a great visual style and an enjoyable game to experience.
As the journey shifts and becomes a bit darker, there's a real flash of steel at the core of it all. If you've played the SteamWorld games, you'd probably expect this, but it's still a delight to see a game like this built with such craft and obvious humanity. I started The Gunk worrying about how one of the great 2D design teams would cope with three dimensions. The truth is they cope so effortlessly that I just spent the next four or five hours gloriously lost in what they had built.
There’s a lot to love about The Gunk even if the core gameplay rarely rises above being pretty OK. It’s a good adventure through a unique and pretty alien world, filled with character and life. Rani and Beck are a good team and their dialogue is great fun, even as the pressures mount on their relationship.