The Gunk review – Good clean fun

Everyone has their favourite way to relax. Binge-watching series on the couch. Playing games. Pottering around the garden. Reading in bed with a cat on your lap. Just staring at the horizon. A good thirty minutes of vacuuming every evening – like my neighbour. Every evening.

There’s clearly something satisfying about physical effort that leaves your surroundings spick and span. That same sense of accomplishment from cleaning sits at the gameplay core of The Gunk, a new action-adventure platformer from Thunderful, the creators of the SteamWorld franchise. So, even if you didn’t use the festive season break for DIY renovations and housework, you can still get your clean-up gratification virtually, courtesy of this new indie release.

In The Gunk, you play as Rani, one half of a struggling space scavenger-prospector duo. With your best friend and business partner Becks, you land your spacecraft on an untouched planet to investigate a powerful energy signature. Discovering the source could erase your financial woes for good, but the search reveals a darker mystery: the ruins of an ancient alien civilisation, and a toxic black ooze spreading over everything.  

Fortunately, Rani’s Power Glove – which she’s nicknamed Pumpkin – equips her to suction up the gunk. Clear all of it from an area, and that patch of the planet is instantly revived, sprouting strange but stunning foliage, and revealing new paths to explore deeper into the unique, vibrant world.

Now, it could be argued that The Gunk leans too heavily on its clean-up mechanic. Player actions are actually quite limited during a thorough six-hour playthrough. Mostly you’ll be clearing gunk, and using that same suction action to collect resources, detach natural items to advance your platforming, and defeat enemies. You can also scan your environment, which deepens your understanding of the planet, and unlocks upgrades for Pumpkin. Combined with the requisite genre running and jumping, and that’s about it.

The Gunk doesn’t push the boundaries of gameplay innovation. That said, it still offers a sleek (for the most part) and visually striking new-gen platforming adventure. It’s charming, cute and family friendly – the game has a Teen rating – without ever feeling childish.

To be fair, The Gunk does enter rarely explored territory in other areas. While Rani has a blaster, and combat is required in certain instances, The Gunk isn’t about shooting your way out of trouble. Instead, it offers an exploration-driven, environmentally conscious tale about the devastating impact of endlessly pursuing resources, and forcing order on the natural world. Ultimately, Rani is out to repair and restore, not destroy.

Speaking of characters, The Gunk features a lesser-seen woman of colour lead, and a WOC with a physical impairment at that. Voiced by Fiona Nova, Rani is an instantly likeable hero, bouncing along with energy, enthusiasm, empathy and a not-insignificant dose of humour. She is one of gaming’s newest standout characters.

The Gunk also spends a lot of time delving, with surprising credibility, into the relationship between Rani and the far more pragmatic Becks (Abigail Turner), who even wears Crocs. As a genre, science fiction is traditionally associated with male experience; certainly not the spotlighting of female friendship. Yet, The Gunk passes The Bechdel test effortlessly.

The only major downside of The Gunk is that it starts to feel increasingly bitty and less polished in its final third. Gorgeous biomes give way to gloomy spaces, where bugs are more prevalent (sometimes even forcing a game restart). At the same time, the game fragments into short scenes. Run across a bridge. Loading screen. Face a closed door before moving on. Loading screen. Pause to have a conversation with Becks. Loading screen. Giving the Assassin’s Creed games a run for their money, the many transitions are disjointed and damage a sense of immersion.

Also, you should expect to spend a lot of time running back and forth across the vast spaces, which can be disorientating with no in-game map to help you.

Still, The Gunk has enough winning charm to help carry players over the more wobbly portions. The game released on December 16 last year, just in time for the festive season –which was a clever move. The Gunk is the perfect holiday game: visually dazzling and memorable, challenging but not too taxing, possible to complete in a couple of play sessions, and unquestionably feel good. It’s hard not to end the game with a smile on your face.

An Xbox exclusive, The Gunk is playable right now on PC (through the Windows Store) and Xbox consoles. It’s also included in the Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass libraries.