Goroons Reviews

Very clever, funny and addictive puzzle platformer. Co-op play is great. Love playing with my daughter.

The TDLR here is I can recommend this game on the price point. I enjoyed my time playing. Your times may differ. I did not get to test this game in multiplayer. This game is charming and minimalistic in art style, doesn't hold your hand when it comes to introducing you to puzzle mechanics, and encourages experimentation. You will need to think logically and make sure you're planning ahead and executing controls precisely, lest finding yourself in a frantic panic or unable to proceed and requiring to restart the whole level.

Most "cheap" puzzle games are easily solved or the only challenge rests in overcoming the bugginess of the gameplay. This is a nice exception for the genre. The designers clearly spent time thinking through how the various Goroon mechanics could be used to create challenging puzzles. There is some roughness to the game that could use some polishing on the edges, but at the price point this is a solid idea that was pretty well executed. The game includes leaderboards that are sparsely populated - I have to say it made me sad to see that so few had played the game. As long as you aren't expecting polish - this is a fun game for a couple hours of puzzles.

Goroons is an older game from 2018. It's a venerable 6 years old at the time of this review. Goroons is a handheld (Nintendo Switch)/console game that's also been put on Steam as a bit of an afterthought, as it's very much designed for the handheld/console gaming audience. There's a co-op focus to the game, so you need to co-ordinate with your friends to play this... I guess that's easier for the developer than making a compelling single player experience. Creating content is hard! Why bother? Like I always say, if the only thing that makes a game fun is your friends, that just proves it's fun to spend time with your friends, and doesn't say much for the game at all. You can play this single player, but it's the opposite of fun... and if you ask your friends to play this kind of garbage Nintendo Switch game on PC, you soon won't have any friends... that's a no-win scenario for this one. The idea of the game is to move the 4 player blobs to the exit... each blob can morph, and you need to use the abilities of each morph to solve the puzzles/obstacles between you and the exit. It's been done a hundred times or more, almost always better than this. So much for gameplay. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Goroons is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Fun and challenging puzzle game. I played alone and beat it anyway. Played on Linux. Divertido y desafiante juego puzzle. Lo jugué sola y lo di vuelta de todas maneras. Jugado en Linux.

Good game in principle, but seems to have a bug that when two people are playing, the switching doesn't work properly and disables the other player - who can no longer switch to another character.

The TDLR here is I can recommend this game on the price point. I enjoyed my time playing, it is short but worth the roughly £1 per hour puzzle experience I had. Your times may differ. I did not get to test this game in multiplayer. This game is charming and minimalistic in art style, doesn't hold your hand when it comes to introducing you to puzzle mechanics, and encourages experimentation. You will need to think logically and make sure you're planning ahead and executing controls precisely, lest finding yourself in a frantic panic or unable to proceed and requiring to restart the whole level. Positive qualities include: -Great art style with minimalistic controls, polished appearance. -Relatively difficult puzzles and high quality level design. -A sense of learning through puzzles without being force-fed information. -Includes multiplayer (did not test). -Worked very smoothly with very few bugs (already fixed by developers). Negative qualities include: -I slightly bumpy learning curve (although this could be a personal problem I had with particular levels). -Sometimes confusing and slightly frustrating keyboard inputs with fairly punishing consequences (game was developed for controllers). -Nice music but lacked variety. -Relatively short gameplay time if you're a good puzzle gamer. -Simplistic sound and graphics options.