YMMV / Untitled Goose Game

• Accidental Innuendo: "Get the groundskeeper wet."
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the shopkeeper really oblivious and thinks the toy airplane is part of her shop inventory, or is she aware it isn't and is deliberately swindling money out of an innocent child trying to get his own toy back?
• Awesome Music: The playful piano that serves as the game's Background Music does a great job of setting the light-hearted, mischievous mood.
• Anti-Climax Boss: For the Final Boss, the Groundskeeper you harassed at the beginning of the game stands guard at the gate to his garden to block your progress with the bell. Except he moves away to snatch your bell the instant you approach and from there he functions like any other NPC chasing after you, including getting stunned by the water of the lake. You don't even have to approach him if you exit the garden through the hole in the hedge.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The very concept of the game, being a dick to everyone just because you can!
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • The fans for this and the 2019 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening tend to overlap, possibly because both games were released on the same date.
  • There's also some friendliness with the Muppets fandom, mostly because of the Goose's cameo in their segment of the Video Game Awards 2019.
• Good Bad Bugs: Though it's finicky to master, you can clip certain objects or the goose itself through certain walls, closed gates, or insurmountable slopes by fidgeting toward the barrier while repeatedly dropping and picking the item back up. It works the best with the radio from the garden, the bottle from uptown, and of course the beautiful golden bell. Using this allows you to skip straight to the pub, and to bypass the entire final mission by clipping through the Door to Before that connects the miniature village to the outside of the garden, letting you get the bell home in about 30 seconds without ever encountering a villager.
• Guide Dang It!: The task "Make the Groundskeeper wear his sun hat" has puzzled many gamers. Most people who stream the game often end up having to ask viewers how to perform the task, or look it up online. ^note You have to either uproot the tulip and snatch the hat when he's replanting the tulip, then run off with the hat until he loses track of you, or repeat the "make the Groundskeeper hammer his thumb" task, and snatch away his gardening hat after he falls down.
• Heartwarming Moment: Rather than terrorize the two pub patrons, the goose puts on a little show for them. Unlike the rest of the humans, they're both delighted by the goose's antics and one of them tosses a flower to the goose as a reward.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the few complaints about the game is that it's just too short, with the main game being only four levels long plus a finale, and it's all over in just under three hours or so, with even the bonus challenges only adding a few more hours to it.
• Magnificent Bastard: The goose itself is a mischievous prankster out to screw with the neighboring villagers as much as it can. Using cleverness and stealth, the goose progresses through the village, outwitting the denizens and accomplishing whatever antics it desires. At the game's climax, the goose steals the village's prized golden bell, causing the entire area to go into lockdown in a last-ditch effort to stop it. Even so, the goose evades its opposition, takes the bell home, and dumps it in a pile of identical bells, showing that it's done this time and time again.
• Memetic Badass: The goose itself. Discussions about the game are usually littered with comments like "Game of the Year/Goose of the Year", "Goose for Smash Bros", or "R.I.P. Link's Awakening"^note The Link's Awakening remake came out on the same day. There's been fanart of turning the goose into Geese Howard from Fatal Fury not only due to the names, but also to their psychopathic tendencies. The Goose and the gameplay of its title have been compared to Hitman of all games due to the ability to complete your objectives as stealthily as you want, at the expense of however many people you deem necessary.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Photoshopping the horrible goose into other games, and naturally completely ruining the lives of the people the screenshot is taken with.
  • Fanart of the goose stealing various cursed artifacts from other canons, with the owner (or victim) chasing after them with the speech bubble.
  • Rake in the lake.
    • Gauntlet in the lake.
  • Untitled Moose Game.
  • Or this crossover with Pokémon Sun and Moon, Untitled Yungoos Game.
  • Peace was never an option ^Explanation A line that was originally said by Magneto in X-Men: First Class, but has since become associated with the goose as well. The first instance of the meme in an untitled goose context had the line being used to caption an image of the goose standing on an axe, but it entered popular use with a screencap of the goose holding a knife.
  • HJÖNK HJÖNK AM GOOSE^Explanation Jacksepticeye's catchphrase for the goose in his playthrough of the game.
  • I made a goose that destroys your computer ^Explanation Exactly What It Says on the Tin; your very own Horrible Goose for your desktop, who brings you memes and notes, and steals your mouse cursor, among other things.
  • Hideo Kojima's Goose Game
  • "It's a lovely morning in [X], and you are a horrible [Y]."
  • I think I will cause problems on purpose ^Explanation A phrase for mischievous characters everywhere that originated on Tumblr, but seems to have been associated with the goose in particular due to being a very apt description of it.
  • "Oh dear. Two horrible geese!"^Explanation Exactly What It Says on the Tin; the August 2020 Nintendo Indie World presentation ended with a trailer for the game revealing two-player co-op. Cue commentators making numerous gags about this, and even repurposing old jokes/memes such as "Prepare for trouble, and make it double!" and "This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them!"
  • Goose Howard/Untitled Geese Game^Explanation With Geese Howard being a Fountain of Memes, there are many fanworks that attributed whatever memes Geese had to the goose. Chiefly including his many Leitmotifs, his voice clips, and especially his many many Engrish phrases. Take your pick from "PREDICTABO!" or just anything else that came out from Geese's mouth, apply that to the goose.
  • "Honk if Thatcher's dead"^Explanation Scottish comedian Limmy, who's not a fan of the former Prime Minister, using the honk function during his livestream of the game.
• Memetic Troll: The goose, which was inevitable given that the whole point of the game is to have the goose cause trouble in the village For the Evulz. As a result, the goose is frequently featured in crossover fanart with other properties to frustrate the other characters, usually by stealing their belongings.
• So Okay, It's Average: While the game gained memetic status because of what you can make the goose do, it only really served to hide how short the game really is, and how straight-forward the puzzles are, tainting the experience from a mechanical standpoint. That said, the game isn't badly designed, it's just not really doing anything different or all that memorable, as the objectives are fairly simple logic puzzles, even with the addition of the goose adding a challenge. Most of the praise the game received was to its minimalistic aesthetic, and especially the music that is scoring your time in-game.
• Spiritual Successor: Of a genre rather than a specific media. As stated by The Completionist, the Practical Jokes and other Amusing Injuries the titular goose subjects the townspeople to, as well as the absence of dialogue and the Mickey Mousing piano music, all transposes the comedy style of classic Slapstick Silent Movies of the 1920s.
• That One Boss:
  • The Burly Man/Publican's Husband, due to his sheer determination to make sure the pub is goose-free. He completely blocks you out of the pub at the beginning of the area, and once he sees you, he won't stop chasing you until you're out or hidden, or unless you manage to untie his shoelaces and make him trip over. The Publican herself behaves similarly to her husband, and will frequently team up with him to scare you out of the pub.
  • The Tidy Neighbor will take everything you bring to his garden and throw it into the artist's garden, including the bell, greatly hindering your progress. He'll even rip off your pretty red bow!
• That One Sidequest:
  • Scoring a goal. It requires you to steal the wimp's soccer ball and get it to the goal in the yard beside the artist's property. The ball is finicky enough to get from place to place since you have to roll it, but the artist's property is on a slope causing the ball to continually want to roll away from where you need it to go. Whether or not you get it there is largely dependent on luck.
  • Completing the backyard and pub to-do lists before the church bells ring. They're largely difficult because both of these tasks are heavily reliant on waiting for villagers to decide to do something such as happening to move away from the toy boat or happening to sip his tea. The backyards are particularly brutal owing to constantly having to loosen the fence to get into the artist's yard, which of course attracts her attention to come and fix it, and the tidy neighbor's tendency to throw objects he finds out of his yard rather than sitting down to make himself vulnerable to steal his slippers or make him spit out his tea.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: The Deliveryperson who delivers the boxes to the pub can easily be confused of being male, with her helmet covering her hair.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Notable fanon has been to condone all the goose's cruelties by assuming that all the humans in the small English town voted for Brexit. Word of God has stated that the game actually takes place in an alternate timeline where the Tory party ceases to exist after a goose chases Margaret Thatcher out of office, spurring a Bennite revolution so that all the townsfolk are Marxists. Note also that Tony Benn was a hard Euroskeptic.
• The Woobie: That poor boy, since many of the second level's objectives focus around being especially cruel to him. The goose can steal his toy plane, force him to buy it back, trip him, swap out his glasses for the wrong pair, and trap him inside a telephone booth. He's so scared of the bird, you can honk him away during the final level even though he's supposed to stand guard and take back the bell.

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