I had a good time with The Gunk. It's a pretty short game (not a bad thing), and felt a little rushed near the end, but is well-designed and lovely to look at - and not too bad sound-wise

The genre is a bit tricky to nail down, even though it'll feel familiar as a blanket to most players. 3D puzzle-platformer, with a splash of combat ? I want to say action-adventure, but that feels like it could mean anything.. In any case, you'll be jumping around exploring, solving light environmental puzzles and occasionally beating back some aggressive individuals

Most of the "puzzling" involves vacuuming up the eponymous gunk with your robot arm. You need to do this to progress, but it also has the convenient effect of restoring the environment's lush greenery. Since it's an alien planet, i kept waiting for the reveal that the evil-looking black-and-red slimy-textured stuff was "good-and-natural" actually, but i guess they wanted to keep it simple (or maybe that twist is the simple one? hmm…)

For narrative; you and your buddies have stumbled upon this previously-unknown planet, and are scouting it for something to make you rich - space age prospectors basically - and through exploring you find that the gross gunk stuff came from a previous society's overuse of the planet's natural energy. So there's a basic environmental message in there, which is nice, at least. It does feel like it undercuts the gravity of the planet's (near) ecological collapse, if a single person with a robot arm can vacuum up all the consequences without any cost at all, but hey, gameplay concessions

Still a good time though, and ran quite well for how good it looks. Also, interesting to see that this comes from the SteamWorld studio