The people on the platform attached to the 30 foot long and continually growing goose’s neck applaud. They’re easily impressed by bouncing tingi, those being the strange mutant babies the goose keeps vomiting out. Far below, the base of the goose’s neck juts out of its human host’s body, next to a piggy bank the tingi keep dropping into. Far above, another goose with a neck made out of hotdog says ‘Come to me baby’. Everything’s as it should be in the Steam Next Fest demo of Tingus Goose.
I’ve not even mentioned the smaller geese and other gizmos sticking out of the main goose’s neck, which the game poetically dubs blossoms. It is into, onto and off of these that the tingi bounce as they fall from their mother’s maw down to Earth, with each bounce generating cash to pay for further neck lengthening. It’s an obscenely beautiful process to observe. As an idle clicker, Tingus Goose gives you plenty of chance to do so.
In truth, I was rather surprised to learn that its forthcoming Steam release comes on the heels of an alternate life spent being a weird mobile game. The desktop feels like a natural home for the geese and their tingi, lest you have to explain to someone on a bus why you’ve just watched a cartoon showing a man with indigestion ingesting a liquidy goose, only for it to take over his body and lead him to mate with an actual goose, then birth a mutant bird baby out of a human-shaped egg. The Steam version also promises “no microtransactions, just glorious goose growth”, which is good.
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It’s surreal absurdism, you say to old Mrs Miggs who’s on her way home from the shops, perfectly natural. The Tingus Goose doesn’t care for the judgement of others. It calmly and enthusiastically explains the ins and outs of its cow-rooted universe via a handy manual, acquired page by page as you progress through chapters each based around growing until your goose mates with their sky-dwelling lover.
There’s life, there’s laughter, and there’s love. Nothing ever ends. It’s your job to make cash from the falling tingi by having them bounce off of your ever-evolving arrangement of blossoms on the way down, with factors like purple cloud men forcing you to regularly switch up the setup. As the neck grows, more blossoms emerge, and you can also buy some from a bloke called Doctor Food. He seems nice and is fond of gems.
If the tingi bash together in certain ways, they can evolve into bigger tingi of higher level, who naturally have higher earning power. Each tingi has a name. Rebecca. Taylor. Xena. Conquest. Do they know attached of their human parentage? Do their brains rattle with the same inner squawk monologue as the geese? We may never know. I’m not sure I want to.
I’ll keep playing Tingus Goose’s demo, though. It’s getting slightly grindier as it goes, so I might not last much beyond the third of four demo chapters, but the goose has just about nested in my grey matter. If you fancy letting it roost in yours, you can find this Next Fest demo on the game’s Steam page. The full version’s set to launch before 2025 ends.
