And their impediment tends to formulate in volume rather than in anything mind-bending or requiring planning or tact. It’s also lite-on as far as difficulty is concerned, with enemies scarce, and even scarcer in archetypal variety. In fact, it stands largely as purely aesthetic in the grand scheme of things a narrative hook to draw you into a world that never truly explores, or becomes, all it can be. I say “short work” because as the titular threat, and the game’s key visual selling point, the gunk is fairly trivial in its challenge. She’s a walking, jumping, sucking context machine, and all gameplay within The Gunk stems from her general being, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Our hero, Rani, has a prosthetic arm she affectionately refers to as “Pumpkin” which has an incidental vacuum function (among others) that comes in handy in both sucking up said rich resource realness while also making short work of the gunk consuming the planet. Its world is one brimming with stunning alien-to-humans flora and fauna, rich in resources for the grubbing. The Gunk is best described as an action-platformer. "She’s a walking, jumping, sucking context machine, and all gameplay within The Gunk stems from her general being.” Meaning his God complex is very real, and very much in play throughout your journey. He also calls himself “The Gardener”, and has anointed himself savior and protector of this place deified by the denizens he’s fleeced. So naturally (heh), we’re soon the centrepiece to emancipating the planet’s indigenous population from elective OG Matrix-level self-battery stationeering, tasked with undoing a Rhinehart-esque villain’s monorail sales pitch, he clearly succeeded at.
But as you’d expect with any form of human intervention in worlds we don’t truly understand, an alien mystery presents itself, slowly unfolding to reveal a bit of a native dweller misstep in managing the planet’s resources, and in how large a footprint has been left by those natives in the wake of their attempt at progress.
There’s a pipe, you see, and emanating from that pipe and around the gunk itself are some promising power readings that could spell big profits for the workaday pair, and their single-phrase automaton, CuRT. In The Gunk, the white savior trope is dialed up to human savior Avatar levels, where our main protagonist, Rani, an offworld junk collector, stumbles upon a ‘gunk’ that is eating away at the natural beauty of an alien planet she and her (more than just business?) partner, Becks, have stumbled upon.
#THE GUNK GAMEPLAY FULL#
(Ectoplasm is a kind of liquid - fight me!) One where the overgrown trope can be played out in full and an easy-to-swallow narrative concept can be built upon. Whether it’s sucking up ghosts from a vacuum backpack in Luigi’s Mansion, spewing water from a mounted water cannon strapped to Mario’s back in Super Mario Sunshine, or painting the town RGB in Nintendo’s beloved multiplayer romp, Splatoon - the tech gimmick that is weaponising some form of voluminous liquid in clean or spray arrangement is a fun and accessible one. With both The Gunk’s gameplay loop and clean the literal gunk gimmick, that is.
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