If you’re a fan of Goat Simulator 3, other than having a winning taste for the wild and absurd (kudos on that), all you’ll likely want from the game is just: more. That’s exactly what Multiverse of Nonsense brings to the table. It’s not breaking new ground or reinventing the wheel, it’s giving us a little extra of what we already love with new areas, new gear, new goats, and new quests. And most importantly, new nonsense.
I previewed the DLC last week, playing alongside Coffee Stain senior sound designer and composer for Goat Simulator 3, Stuart Docherty, who sums up the DLC as “more of the same” but emphasised, “the theme is completely different from vanilla Goat [Simulator 3]”.
Multiverse of Nonsense blames you for everything going wrong and you must help the Guardian of the Multiverse—a giant capybara, by the way—to fix it all. There are rifts and rift stones that make travelling easier and funnier, but there are also rifts that you can just headbutt to get new gear, or maybe just a bunch of hotdogs. Sometimes even a stack of dynamite.
There are three new areas to explore, with Docherty telling me, “The first thing that we had the idea for was a Planet of the Goats kind of thing. Imagine goats had evolved to be people and they stood up and walked around like people. How would they live? What would a goat city be like?” That’s how the idea for Goatroit came to be, where the goats walk upright and have humans as pets, but there’s also Mount Olympus, an ancient Greek area, and Goofville, a toon world waiting to haunt your dreams with its classic Disney—think Steamboat Willie era—styled characters and scenery.
I can’t convey enough how haunting Goofville is. There’s even a toon goat you can become and the bleats are more of a Goofy-style ‘gu-haw!’ that makes me shudder. As cursed as this world is, I utterly love it, especially the toon cars. That’s Goat Sim in a nutshell surely? Cursed enough to haunt you, funny enough to make you laugh, weird enough that you won’t forget it in a hurry.
“It’s similar to vanilla in that you can rush through it if that’s all you wanted to do,” Docherty tells me about the DLC. “Or you could spend three times as much time just messing around. I think roughly in terms of content, it’s probably coming towards a third of the size of vanilla. Which is way bigger than we were thinking it was going to be.
“It spiralled out of control, like having three different areas. I don’t know why we went to three different areas. That was a crazy idea. It just gave us too many ideas to try and come in. We did end up cutting some stuff. It was never going to be released if we didn’t. It’s bigger than I think people would have expected it to be.”
We tackled one of the new quest events in Goofville, where a tree that looks suspiciously like the Deku tree but without the branches is annoyed because there’s a woodpecker in his head, so naturally we have to get a bomb to blow him up and out of the poor tree. Docherty also points out an easter egg, with the tune the woodpecker is tapping being the pattern for Meshuggah’s Bleed. He also tells me the team added more “complicated events” for the DLC, “just to add a bit more payoff to them”.
If the name of the DLC or premise didn’t clue you in, Multiverse of Nonsense parodies Marvel’s multiverse and has you rift-jumping across universes to collect infinity stones. Well, not infinity stones because of copyright reasons. They’re instability stones here. In addition to the new areas, there are Mega Rifts; smaller areas you can go to with a different theme and minigame, which is where you will find those coveted instability stones. The one we checked out in the preview was a Deep Rock Galactic world where you have to mine ore, though it’s far less grindy.
Much like the main game, the DLC is crammed full of Easter Eggs and pop culture references. Olympus features a Squid Game-style challenge, with Docherty explaining some of the extra work that went into the parody, “I had to go and research what the song in Squid Game was because there’s a super creepy song that the statue sings in Korean. So I had to research what it was and it’s something about this flower that grows in the mountains in Korea. It’s like saying this flower has bloomed or something. So that is what the statue is saying in Swedish [for Multiverse of Nonsense]. I don’t know if anyone will spot that.”
You can find an Animal Crossing-inspired quest where you have to pay off your mortgage in Goofville, complete with bags of money on the tree, and in Goatroit you can participate in a Dr Pilgor set. There are also Half-Life and Assassin’s Creed style outfits, to name just a couple of my favourite references, with too little space to mention them all. Heck, they’re too many to notice. I’m certain I haven’t found them all. But that’s always part of what I’ve adored about Goat Simulator 3. You can play for days, hours, or weeks, and yet still discover some gem, reference, or quest hidden away that you hadn’t spotted before.
You know what? I lied earlier. There is some new ground that is broken, but it’s more of a foot scuff in the mud that we appreciate: dialogue. You can speak to NPCs now. See, I told you it wasn’t groundbreaking. But it’s a nice little detail. Now you can at least make some polite conversation before you headbutt someone into oblivion. The DLC map areas also have a lot more verticality to them compared to the base game, so couple that with the rift jumping and such and you’ll be flinging your goat all over the place.
“One of the nice things about Goat Sim 3 is we built it as a platform where we can do a lot of different things with it,” Docherty says. “It’s very easy to add different types of gameplay, different additions, different events and gears in a way that Goat Simulator 1 was never that flexible. It was a lot harder to add new stuff to.”
“The downside of that is we kind of don’t have any limit to what can be added. It’s not a downside, I mean it is, but it’s like we’re spoiled for choice. We have to sometimes cut stuff and tamper with ideas because we’re going way beyond the boundaries of how long it should take to make a DLC.”
Though the DLC has not been announced or confirmed for Goat Simulator 3 mobile, Docherty tells me “I think the plan with mobile is that everything that comes to Goat Sim 3 should in theory eventually end up on mobile.” He goes on to jokingly add, “Most of what [the mobile team does] is seeing the number of sounds and music that I made on the game and then crying because it’s way too much. I think in this one it’s 70 minutes of new music in this DLC. I think the original game was maybe 120 minutes. There’s a lot.”
For those of you who lap up the new DLC as quickly as I did, you’ll be pleased to hear there is more planned for the future, with Docherty saying, “I think we’ll shift focus into doing smaller updates and see what value we can add. We don’t want to take another one and a half years to do another DLC.”
For now, though, go out and be the GOAT of goats in the Multiverse of Nonsense, and let me know which little Easter Eggs and references you stumble across.…Read more by Meg Pelliccio
