It takes a lot for a game to completely blindside me. Even with games such as Skate Story and Blippo+, the striking visuals and unique gameplay are a stunning departure from the mainstream, but their themes and gameplay remain cohesive. Tingus Goose is not a cohesive game, but for all the right reasons.
Before I talk about the gameplay, I need to address the elephant in the room – the visuals. Anybody who is familiar with Master Tingus will likely already know what to expect, but the game primarily revolves around unique animations that could safely be called cartoon body horror, in which various different cutesy geese embed, impregnate or otherwise ingratiate themselves with humans to birth the eponymous Tingus, a long-necked goose that frequently belches out babies called Tingis.
Originating as a freemium mobile game on Apple and Android, Tingus Goose started life as an idle clicker in which you made formations with your Tingus Blossoms, a form of growth on your Tingus that increases how profitable each of your Tingis are as they fall down from the mouth of your strange goose protrusion; once the Tingis hit the bottom, they climb into a piggy bank and are converted to cash – I’m sure there’s a more succinct and sensible way to describe how the game works, but when you are launching babies from a goose into unusual fleshy contraptions for profit, it confuses things enormously.
Despite being a freemium game at first, the PC release of Tingus Goose is instead just a singular purchase, with many of the purchasable elements from the original being converted into items purchased with in-game currency or simply removed, allowing players to enjoy the experience fully without hitting paywalls and roadblocks. It doesn’t show in gameplay either, as the game comfortably stands as its own experience, sloughing off (an appropriate phrase given the game’s fleshy nature) any of the essence of its freemium roots.
As players progress through the game, new scenarios and mechanics are introduced to offer you new ways to generate income, as well as providing new routes to bounce your Tingis around the various branches and blossoms – by creating a well-oiled goose machine, you can increase the value of each of your Tingis as they descend, but it’s not just landing that increases their worth – as Charles Darwin once speculated, evolution is the natural progression, giving your Tingis increased resilience and monetary worth.
Conceptually the game is fairly simple, requiring you to build complex Rube Goldberg-style machines out of your various fleshy appendages to ensure your Tingis evolve, bounce and fall successfully to the ground, giving you even more profit – but what does this profit entail? First and foremost, it allows you to water your Tingus, helping it grow tall enough to reach the sensual goose friend waiting above – aside from normal cash, there are also diamonds and bones, the former offering level-by-level upgrades for your Tingus while the latter provides permanent increases and abilities for your benefit.
Both the design and gameplay are impressive, but it falls short in a number of ways – the biggest of these being in understanding how to make your blossoms work best. When setting out the various blossoms, they each have a method of entry and exit; the Tingis entering the blossom usually just involves landing on top, whether caught by a bucket or landing in the approximate area of it, whereas leaving the blossom can take the form of a single point (of which an alarming number are either rectal or cloacal) or just require bouncing off them. In theory this all works fine, but there are points where Tingis seemingly don’t land, or you need to guess where they will exit from – this extends beyond trial and error, because even some environmental factors like ladders or ketchup bottles will sporadically work.
Outside of the faults with how your cascade of goose-vomit-babies functions, there also seem to be some unusual visual issues between levels, particularly with the original Master Tingus animations that introduce you to the conception of your next goose – there is often a sudden, unexplained drop in visual quality as though they had been pulled directly from a low-resolution YouTube reupload. It wouldn’t be the first time visual issues like this have arisen in games, as even Bye Sweet Carole had problems with zoomed-in shots, but where that could be explained away as a rendering problem, it feels as though original animations like these shouldn’t suffer from such a sudden disparity in their visual quality.
It bears repeating that even with its issues, Tingus Goose is an enjoyable experience that scratches the itch for an obscenely surreal journey, and I mean surreal in the literal sense: I’ve definitely had dreams about this kind of stuff before! Regardless of how you approach it, there is something charming about the details – the cursor being a goose-shaped pointy friend, the snippets of information you learn in journal entries, the disconcerting happiness on everyone’s face when goose-shaped abominations (goosebominations if you will) emerge from various places and the doctor with far too many legs all contribute to this strange experience.
One of my biggest concerns when loading the game was the previous relationship Master Tingus has had with the world of Bitcoin (or more accurately “memecoin”) and NFTs – even if you disregard the financial and environmental worries these practices bring, it also led me to wonder whether the game implemented these facets in any way – thankfully the game appears to be clean of any form of blockchain implementation, so anybody concerned about their machine being used in coin mining of any kind can rest easy.
Before leaving you with my final thoughts, allow me to remind you that the game also features obscene amounts of vore, various unusual methods of impregnation and, on at least one occasion, the insertion of an egg into an uncomfortable location. The fact these cartoon figures all do this with a smile on their face haunts me to no end.
