== The Gunk: 5/10

THE FIRST GAME TO MAKE ONE GUNKILLION DOLLARS IN REVENUE 🗣️ 🗣️ 🗣️

I played this game because a friend gifted it for me and because it's currently at a 93% sale on steam, down to 1.5$. At that price tag, I'd say its... just about worth it if you have nothing better to do. And you will almost certainly have something better to do, because The Gunk just isn't very fun.

On the surface, it looks promising. A 3D Action-Adventure game set in a soft sci-fi setting where the main characters are a pair of space haulers that land on an abandoned, mysterious planet? Ratchet and Clank but with Lesbians two female protagonists that don't express any real fondness towards each other at any point, and with MC's design being kickass? What could possibly go--everything. Everything that could go wrong, goes wrong, but the most criminal sin of all is the gameplay.

Starting from the beginning -- you land on the planet, and start exploring it. The controls feel off, scanning objects in the environments feels unintuitive (there are so many different kinds of background prop plants, but only a few of them are scannable). Eventually you make it to the titular Gunk, an amorphous black-red substance draining the area around it of life, and start sucking it up in your Suck Cannon thingie, and along the way you do some very simple environmental puzzles, and suck up a few upgrade materials scattered around. And then you do more of that. And more of that. And more of that.

This game took me 5.5 hours and I swear to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ jesus, I could count all the new mechanics added to the gameplay over the entire playthrough on a single hand. The platforming never gets even close to involved, the puzzles are so simple you can go through them all on autopilot. This game is the first hour of a PS3 launch title stretched to 6 hours.

It was developed by the people behind the SteamWorld franchise, and is their first 3D game, which helps explain why it's so ridiculously simple. And while I've been ragging about the gameplay, "simple" also covers this game's story (you have seen every single idea this story brings up done better in at least 10 other pieces of media, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guarantee it), characters (Including the legally mandated Falling Out section™), pacing, world design (the individual assets are really good, but too much of the game looks too samey and gamey to leave any impact), and cutscene cinematography (fine at best, really bad at the worst). This is such a nothing game and I mostly just wish these character designs were used for literally anything else.

Just play Slime Rancher if you want to suck and gunk your heart out.

I'm just so tired.
I'm tired of being oneshot.
I'm tired of trash mobs being so tanky that fighting them turns into tedium.
I'm tired of no loot, no excitement, *negative* feeling of getting stronger, the obscenely large maps with the player character moving so, so slowly.
I'm tired of being expected to do a dark souls boss fight every twenty minutes with arpg controls and absolutely no rewards except advancing another fetch quest.