Playing Tingus Goose makes me feel dirty, and I kinda like it.
I’m genuinely surprised that there haven’t been more geese-themed games since Untitled Goose Game, or at least more games about dickhead animals violating social norms. House House’s avian bullying simulator was a riotous success when it released in 2020, the kind of phenomenon that normally spawns a legion of imitators.
Yet with the possible exception of Little Kitty, Big City, beast-based shenanigans have been surprisingly scarce. No Untitled Moose Game, no games about foxes or other geographically appropriate creatures wreaking havoc in English villages. And certainly, no more games about geese.
That is, until now. At the end of last year, a new goose game hatched on Steam, and it’s so unsettling that it’s made me regret ever wishing for more waterfowl-based entertainment.
Tingus Goose is very different from Untitled Goose Game. It’s an idle clicker rather than a 3D physics puzzler, and the relationship it depicts between humans and geese is far less antagonistic than in House House’s game. But it does share one crucial thematic link, namely geese doing upsetting things. It’s the creation of internet artist and animator MasterTingus, who specialises in bizarre cartoons which, while not explicitly violent or sexual in any way, nonetheless make you feel like you need a shower after watching them.
Tingus Goose is a near-lethal dose of the animator’s hallmark strangeness. It takes place in a world where geese have a semi-parasitic, semi-symbiotic reproduction cycle with humans, infecting them and then growing out of them in spectacularly odd ways.
The cycle reminds me of the zombie-ant fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, only the afflicted humans are not killed by the process, and indeed are entirely happy to see a giant tree made from geese burst out of a man’s head or a pregnant woman’s bump. This goose-tree, in turn, gestates hundreds of human babies known in-game as tingis, which play a crucial role in the tree’s lifecycle.
