The Gunk – Spotlight
There are many planets I’ve never seen before in video games. The majority of the time, I’m exploring on my own, quietly picking my way through ruins or jungles, trying to figure out my next move. This is how it feels in the Gunk, except you’re never alone. It’s as if your mother is watching over your shoulder, warning you to be cautious or reminding you that dinner is ready.
There are times when Rani and Becks’ relationship is almost like that of a parent and a child. In the hopes of finding an energy source valuable enough to pay off their enormous debt, they’ve landed their rickety “Bunny” spaceship on this uncharted planet. The main character, Rani, is a rambunctious explorer. She is a thrill-seeker who enjoys exploring the local caves and shrubbery. Becks takes on the role of mother despite her reluctance. She stays on board the ship and uses her earpiece to remind Rani not to be careless while out in the field.
While it may sound like something out of a Metroid game, this is actually a different kind of exploration. In The Gunk, the focus is as much on the bond formed between the two characters as it is on the peril they face. This is a simple twist on an old formula that is easy to appreciate – the act of exploration is pushed and pulled between their two perspectives. Unfortunately, the planet they’re on isn’t quite as exciting as they had hoped.
Rani’s ‘Pumpkin’ metal arm attachment is essential to your progress through the jungles and caves, and she refers to it affectionately as ‘Pumpkin’. An energy shot can be used to dislodge objects that are a long distance away, and Pumpkin has a scanning device that can tell you the composition or origin of plants and machines. Rather than a vacuum cleaner, it serves as a black hole in the universe. At the press of a button, it ingests an infinite number of small objects that are pulverised into their atomic essence and deposited in its stomach.
As you might expect, this is a great way to gather plant and mineral resources, which can be used to improve Rani’s shipboard gear in the long run. Larger objects, such as small assailants and the explosive seeds of a specific plant, can be pulled in, grabbed, and thrown away with ease thanks to the nozzle’s glove-like attachment. A good vacuum cleaner is only useful for cleaning up the titular gunk, which is black goo that clings to everything in its path, erasing colour and life. Sometimes it’s just there, in globular masses, obstructing your path. In other cases, it floats around menacingly, or gives birth to hostile creatures that must be wiped out.
Sucking up your surroundings in The Gunk is definitely pleasurable. In the same way that pulling an enemy projectile out of its flight path and pumping it back to its source is satisfying, so do the weeds and chunks of ore. When it comes to getting rid of the dirt, it’s like vacuuming a filthy floor with a nozzle and seeing a clean surface emerge from underneath. The feeling a surgeon has after cleaning out an infection and removing the decay that is weakening their patient, perhaps. As a reward for completing the task, The Gunk uses the old Okami trick of reviving nature with a burst of vibrant colour.
The problem is that after a while, it does begin to feel like a job, and the platform routines around it are rather workmanlike. What at first appears to be an exciting opportunity quickly turns out to be a flawed one. For example, early in the game, you learn about a seed species that, when thrown into an energy pool, grows into enormous mushrooms, allowing you to explore new areas. I’ve lost track of how many times this trick is used in the game, and while there may be minor obstacles in the way, most of the time it’s just a matter of grabbing the seed and hurling it at the target.
Like a Zelda dungeon stuck in second gear, the stakes and demands of your expedition don’t change much until the game’s final stretch. Colorful plants and mushrooms spring up as a result of scavenging nearby trash. Steps, ladders, and bridges (including one that looks ominously like a great unfurled tongue) are all available, but none of them have any other useful characteristics. In the meantime, there are only three types of creatures in the gunk, making it difficult to deal with them as the game progresses.
After a few hours of exploration, I began to lose my desire to discover new things. Incredibly, there are only a few different kinds of plants to scan beyond the opening sections, and so many strange and potentially fascinating items can’t be scanned at all. This is odd. The fact that only a few pieces of furniture could tell me anything about an alien facility seemed like an omission to me. It’s doubly aggravating because Rani can’t stop talking about how amazed she is at every new discovery, but the game’s systems won’t let me explore further.
Like Journey to the Savage Planet, this game offers a vibrant and diverse world to explore in a similar context. Even though the comparison to Savage Planet isn’t exactly fair, it’s hard not to get the impression that The Gunk lacks some of the excitement and fun that Typhoon Studios brought to the world-building in Savage Planet.
When it comes to farming and upgrading, it would help if Image & Form’s own Steamworld Dig 2 had a compelling loop like that. When compared to The Gunk, Dig 2 feels more like a purposeful journey. Most upgrade unlocks are based on how many objects you’ve been able to scan; therefore, venturing into unfamiliar territory will only yield more generic resources. In addition, clearing gunk isn’t as exciting as mining. As the adventure progresses, it reestablishes normalcy and becomes more like a mundane household task.
Rani and Becks’ back-and-forth was still fascinating to me, and I couldn’t help but care about the decisions they had to make because of their precarious situation. There are some poignant big ideas about the ethics of their work entwined with the warmth of their relationship and its soap-opera fluctuations. Even though they came here with the intention of finding natural resources for extraction, the line between exploration and exploitation was often in the back of my mind as I sucked up resources I’d just rescued from the black goo.
Becks and Rani, like Savage Planet, are exploited, forced to search for farmable energy, disregarding ecosystems, because they have no economic power to refuse. This is the point, of course. There are a number of factors at play here that make Rani’s excitement over the discovery all the more concerning for Becks, who believes she is putting her own safety at risk for the benefit of others. While their personality differences are a strain on their future together, it is this reality that causes them to question their wider responsibilities that is the real problem.
I wanted The Gunk to either be a succinct examination of its characters and themes or a substantial action-adventure. In the end, it’s somewhere in the middle, taking around six hours. Or, at the very least, I needed the game loop to give me a better sense of the characters’ journey — the excitement and the fear — than it was able to provide. Neither practicality nor wonder are adequately addressed. Despite my admiration for Rani and Becks and my enthusiasm for the plot twists, the challenges in this strange new world were all too routine and familiar. For the gunk itself, too. It’s not sticky enough to be the main attraction and keep everything together.
