To be honest I don’t know where to begin when it comes to writing about playing Goat Simulator 3. I suppose it begins with my friends Jamie and Shadey who thought it would be a good idea to play something a little different and more light hearted than the survival games we have been playing such as Valheim and The Forest. Developed and published by Coffee Stain Studios (who also published Valheim) Goat Simulator 3 is, well, I don’t really know what it is but it uses the Unreal Engine 4 and was released in 2022. Before reading on I must point out that there are a few spoilers.
I have of course heard of simulator games, the most famous being the Microsoft Flight Simulator series which dates back to the 1980’s, but also Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator and more. I have never played any of these but my understanding was that they are games developed to deliver a close approximation to whatever they were simulating. I didn’t know what to expect from Goat Simulator 3, but I knew that it surely couldn’t be literally simulating the life of a goat. I was right, but nothing could have prepared me for how random this game is. My friends and I would each play a goat in which we were able to change the appearance with cosmetics we could unlock by performing any number of random tasks within the world named San Angora. To say these tasks were varied would be an understatement, whoever thought up some of the activities in Goat Simulator 3 must be clinically insane, taking some potent drugs or both. The wild imagination it took to develop this game is I must say impressive, it’s the sort of game where a perceived bug could actually be a game feature, it being a feature before or after the bug report (if there ever was one) would have been irrelevant in Goat Simulator 3. I don’t know if there was a QA team for this game, but beyond making sure you can form a party with your friends and starting the game, I don’t know what else they could have tested.
Many of the activities reference a wide variety of pop culture. I think my favourite is a reference to the 1992 Wolfenstein 3D game developed for DOS. During the activity the game UI changed to a Wolfenstein 3D style where we would navigate around some rooms which contained grandmothers in rocking chairs that would shoot balls from a bazooka while shouting at you. As a reward for completing the challenge my friends and I unlocked a cosmetic of one of the grandmothers in a rocking chair with a bazooka which would sit on your goats back and shoot balls for you. I feel crazy just trying to explain it. Some things I can’t explain, such as what was going on in the screenshot below.
As we progressed and completed stuff we obtained illuminati ranks which unlocked rooms and features in our goat castle, which also acted as a sort of waypoint to different zones in San Angora. Eventually, after a few gaming sessions, we unlocked all of the rooms in the castle which introduced us to an end game boss fight. I did not think that Goat Simulator 3 would end up on my list of completed games, but after consideration I believe it just about deserves a spot there on account of doing enough to unlock the castle and defeat the boss after about 12 hours of play time. But there is still so much to this game, I think we could probably sink another 20-30 hours into it and still not complete everything it has to offer. Another favourite moment of mine was when we found a secret container rave and we chose some cosmetics to join other goats there. I made a short recording of what it was like.
I think Goat Simulator 3 is misunderstood by some. Yes it is a complete train wreck of a game, but that’s the point. It is precisely because of how random it is that it’s always funny and successful. I was highly sceptical at first and just happy to be spending some time with my friends, but now I can honestly say that I really enjoyed the game. My final thought for this blog post is that Goat Simulator 3 reminds me of someone I used to play World of Warcraft with, Kyra. I think there is a good chance that he is responsible for this game. I believe this because if you could pour all of his thoughts into a game this would be the likely outcome.
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