Wibbly-wobbly physics puzzler World of Goo is free on the Epic Games Store now, and in a couple of weeks it will be followed by spooky narrative experiment Stories Untold. 

World of Goo has been around for so long now and has been part of so many sales and bundles that I can't imagine anyone not owning it for multiple devices, but maybe there are still a few of you. You can get it for free between now and May 16. It's good! I mean I don't think I have the energy to play it yet again, but if you've missed it, it's a cracking physics puzzler with loads of character.

Stories Untold is a bit more exciting, though. No Code's eerie compilation is a clever, unique romp that you're absolutely better off experiencing blind. You'll get to fiddle around with archaic machines and in text adventures across four stories, always interacting with chunky bits of tech, from CRT monitors to old radios. Check out Andy's Stories Untold review for more. You'll be able to grab it in a fortnight.

No Code's also working on the intriguing Observation, where you'll play a space station AI that spends it days watching the station's inhabitants. It's due out in May on the Epic Games Store.  

The next free game on the Epic Games Store, as of May 2, will be World of Goo, the bizarre, sticky, and exceptionally good structure-building puzzle game from 2008. Even better, after years of languishing in a not-quite-right state, it's been given a significant update to ensure that it runs properly on modern PCs. 

"The last time we built the PC version of World of Goo was ten years ago, way back in 2009. The game ran at a 4:3 aspect ratio and at a resolution of 800x600. Most computers now can't even enter that old 800x600 mode without the screen flashing or glitching. The game would also crash your computer if you had more than one monitor hooked up," World of Goo designer, artist, and composer Kyle Gabler explained. 

"So over the last few months, we've rebuilt the game for Win / Mac / Linux and it should now work nicely again on everyone's modern computers. It'll run by default at a modern widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, and at whatever size you want. We also made a lot of improvements over the years for other platforms, like Nintendo Switch, so we brought over those improvements as well." 

Those improvements include doubling the resolution of all graphics—800x600 does not look super-great on big, modern displays—with "high quality upscaling tools to start," and then tweaking by hand. For die-hard old-school types, an option to use the original graphics will also be available.   

One thing that won't be available, unfortunately, are leaderboards. Gabler said they never worked very well anyway—"Our poor server constantly got stressed out and shut itself down"—and so they were taken offline for good a few years back. "In all recent versions of the game, including the version launching on the Epic store, we've redesigned bits of the game to accommodate this change," he said. He also pointed out that leaderboard support is offered by GooFans.com, saying that it's "a much nicer leaderboard system than we ever had." 

The updated version of World of Goo will eventually be released everywhere, but the Epic Games Store will be first. If you want to know why you should play it, read this. 

Having long since forgotten the plot of world of goo but not its glorious, weird jelly Meccano physics, I think I was expecting this reinstall to be a mainly sensory experience. Something like Peggle—great music, appealing cartoonish aesthetic—but with a slippery puzzle element instead of pinball, and a streak of black humour involving some goo balls going through a mincer. 

I had forgotten the observations about how companies use data and cookies (World of Goo operates in a GDPR-less world), about idiotic, wasteful product launches, about the value of physical beauty and so on. These observations are relatively broad-brush—corporations that put financial gain over consumer welfare, the ugly being trampled by the beautiful—but it’s a tang of playful cynicism I haven’t seen much in games recently. 

That’s not to say we’re less cynical now, but there’s a specific flavour of breezy side-eye which feels very much rooted in the late-’00s and is interesting to encounter now. These were the heady days when we were only questioning some, not all, of our metastructures. The result is that its shots still hit their targets (we’ve only really doubled down on what the game calls out) but the mood it adopts is peppy and perky rather than exhausted. Certainly a curio to me right now, at any rate. 

The jiggly, chirruping construction side is as excellent as I remember. Have you played World of Goo? If you haven’t, the idea is that you have these sentient blobs which like to attach to one another by sending out tendrils to other blobs. You’ll use this to create structures—2D lattices of varying levels of messiness. Loose goo blobs swarm over the structure, their weight and movement contributing to the instability of the whole thing, sometimes sending it tumbling to one side. 

The point of these structures is that you use them to bring the loose goo swarm to an exit pipe which will suck them up. But the pipe only activates when the goo structure is close enough, hence you can’t just fire goo balls into the air and hope they get slurped up.

Build up

At a bare minimum, the challenge is to build a structure and reach the pipe with enough loose goo balls to meet the level’s target. Later on in the game it’s about factoring in the different properties of the different types of goo, about navigating obstacles, and even moving larger non-goo objects around. 

The levels start off relatively simply. You have one type of goo and plenty of it, meaning it’s easy to meet the level targets. The starter goo is wonderfully uncomplicated. It puts out two tendrils and you can’t detach it once it’s in place. It naturally lends itself, then, to building robust triangular shapes and thus is relatively stable. 

These early levels remind me of the weird team-building exercises we had to do as part of a few corporate away days I’ve been on, or as part of school physics projects—build a bridge out of newspaper that’s capable of bearing some kind of heavy weight, or a teammate or whatever. You’d always have someone who spent a whole day explaining the value of the triangle in construction. 

“It’s really hard to deform a triangle, you know?” Yes Dave. We know. “Consider the pyramids.” I’ve considered the bloody pyramids, Dave. “It’s because of trigonometry.” Shut up and roll newspaper, Dave. “It’s why you see so many triangles in bridges too.” DAVE THAT IS WHY WE ARE USING TRIANGLES TO BUILD THIS BRIDGE. “Did I show you this picture of a bridge I took while I was away last month?” Yes, Dave. Please just roll some newspaper so we can bear the weight of that encyclopedia and get out of here. “Look! There’s a picture of a bridge in this newspaper! I’m going to cut it out so we can stick it on the bridge as a mascot. It even has triangles.” I swear to god, Dave. “You know what? My favourite triangle is the equilateral triangle.” 

Unlike Dave, I have a soft spot for a scalene triangle. They’re awkward and difficult and spiky, like me in a team-building session. Anyway, where was I?

Gooreat

Ah yes. Goo. So there are different types of goo. There’s that first kind I mentioned, but you’ll soon encounter others—green goo, beauty goo, matchstick goo, balloon goo… My favourite is the green goo. It can put out up to three tendrils which is nice, but the best bit is that it can be detached and reused or just left loose. The reason I love it is because I spend a lot of time trying to rescue as much goo as possible from each level. If a level uses plain black goo, every blob you use to build is one you can’t collect. If you’re on the green stuff there’s a chance you can detach it and collect it once you’ve activated the pipe. 

Having blasted through the story chapters in a few hours I went back to the beginning to try OCD mode. I winced at the name—another reminder that the world has changed a little, I guess—although it technically stands for Obsessive Completion Distinction. This is the hard mode where you need to meet far more challenging targets. Every ball and every placement becomes incredibly important. 

This is where I started to feel real annoyance with the interface. It boils down to the fact the game doesn’t have a quick restart button or a replay option if you reach the end and find out you didn’t meet the target. Having to sit through the end section of a level and start again from the level select screen is just a bunch of extra clicking which gets between me and the challenge. The alternative is to try and work out whether you’ve succeeded or failed before you activate the pipe, so you can use the in-level retry button, which isn’t always possible.

Heavyweight

My other gripe is that goo becomes heavier when you attach it to a structure. I’m assuming this is because it is now considered to have the weight of the blob and the weight of the legs attaching it to other goo balls, but where did that extra weight come from? In a physics puzzler, this manifestation of substance from nothing, rather than the blob being spread thinner, feels like a tiny betrayal. “But what of the laws of physics?” Exactly, Dave. I’m with you on this one.

Trying to see if there was a way to quick restart using a mod or some other tinkering is how I ended up on www.goofans.com. This is where you can download GooTool; a utility for installing new levels and goo ball mods. It’s a bit old at this point and requires a touch of Java tinkering, but I’ve found a number of level packs which offer some curious new challenges. You can’t create new chapters for the game, so these levels just hover in the sky in the chapter 1 level select screen—a bit messy-looking, but useful for extending the life of the game that bit further. 

I was also considering some of the goo ball colour mods, but the game does a good job of clearly communicating function via its colour coding, so adding a random colour variable felt like it wasn’t likely to help me play (much as I would love to build a riotously bright tower that rivals my Christmas tree for coloured balls). 

But all of this is just me distracting myself. I’m clearly going to end up tearing my hair out over how you get one last infernal ball into that infernal pipe on vanilla mode. It’s 2008 all over again. 

7 Billion Humans is a people-powered programming puzzle game set in a world ruled by machines. It was announced by developer Tomorrow Corporation today as a direct follow-up to 2015's Human Resource Machine. 

The announcement trailer is bleak, but the premise is interesting. Essentially, you order office workers to complete tasks by treating them as variables in a unique programming language. Tomorrow Corporation says 7 Billion Humans improves on the language used in Human Resource Machine with the addition of multi-worker execution—again, bleak. 

"You'll be taught everything you need to know," the game's Steam page says, presumably trying to comfort the people who look at programming like a gazelle looks at a lioness (hello). It seems there are also more puzzles this time—over 60 in all. 

Tomorrow Corporation is a small studio consisting of World of Goo designer Kyle Gabler, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure designer Kyle Gray, and former EA developer Allan Blomquist. They released their first game, Little Inferno, in 2012. 

7 Billion Humans does not yet have a release date, though Tomorrow Corporation says it's "initiating soon." 

The Humble Indie Bundle is back, but this time with a greatest hits collection featuring some of the best games from past bundles. It's an amazing selection for anybody that's new to indie games, or gaming in general. For everyone else, there's a pretty good chance you already own most of what's here.

As usual, the action is split into multiple categories depending on how much you're willing to pay. Whatever you pay, you'll get Super Meat Boy, World of Goo and Dustforce DX. Beat the average (currently $4.78) and you'll also get Dungeon Defenders Collection, Limbo and Braid. Finally, if you pay $1 over the average price (currently $5.78,) you'll get Risk of Rain and Antichamber. Whatever price you settle on, you'll need to pay $1 or more to get Steam keys for the bundled games.

After settling on a price, you can then decide exactly where that money will go. The sliders allow you to set how much of your cash will go to the developers, to Humble and to this bundle's two charities, Child's Play and Watsi.

The bundle will run until next Tuesday, June 16.