Coffee Stain Publishing have fully revealed Goat Simulator Remastered, a spruced-up take on 2014’s open world, ragdolling livestock sandbox with all of the original’s DLC included. I played a bit of this at Gamescom in August, and while the trailer below is proof positive that the remaster does indeed look newer and shinier, in the moment I couldn’t shake the idea from my memory banks that this was just how Goat Sim always looked.
I wonder if there’s a word for this, where years of beaming ever-more lavish visuals into your eyes tricks you into perceiving long-unplayed games as looking more modern than they did. Alice0 (RPS in peace) enjoyed how the Half-Life: Ray Traced mod made the game still look old but in a newer way; kind of like that, except the changes only exist in your head, and can’t be downloaded from GitHub.
In any case, Goat Simulator Remastered is a modest do-over in terms of tech, and it’s uncharacteristically restrained in concept as well. From what I saw, it plays the whole remake thing straight, with no wink-wink-nudge-nudging about itself or the industry’s current love of reheated games in the same way that Goat Simulator 3 poked fun at sequels. Which could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you get on with Goat Sim’s sense of humour.
Of course, there are parodies aplenty in the bundled DLCs, which among others include the DayZ-inspired GoatZ, the Mass Effect sendup Waste of Space, and that Goat Sim x Payday 2 crossover, which actually does pull on the nostalgia strings quite well by harkening back to when Payday was good. And the remaster does make one big change, providing access to the Mutators menu – the comedy variables list that lets you play as a Giraffe or strap into a jetpack – at any time, rather than just at the level select screen. This turns missions, if you can call them that, into even more of a free-for-all, with your goat able to swap forms and abilities at will.
Goat Simulator Remastered is out on November 7th, via Steam and the Epic Games Store. It’ll be on Game Pass, too.