There might be something in the timing of The Gunk's release where 2020 and 2021 is concerned. At least, if one felt so inclined they could very easily contextualise much of its repeated exercise and attribute going through those repetitive motions from start to finish, to the period highlighted. If one were so inclined. However, we'll largely leave that up to you, focusing today's review instead on the game's inner workings...

In fact, here's a glob of gunk from it:

The Gunk is best described as an action-platformer. Its world is one brimming with stunning alien-to-humans flora and fauna, rich in resources for the grubbing. Our hero, Rani, has a prosthetic arm she affectionately refers to as “Pumpkin” which has an incidental vacuum function (among others) that comes in handy in both sucking up said rich resource realness while also making short work of the gunk consuming the planet. She’s a walking, jumping, sucking context machine, and all gameplay within The Gunk stems from her general being, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I say “short work” because as the titular threat, and the game’s key visual selling point, the gunk is fairly trivial in its challenge. In that it never really presents one. In fact, it stands largely as purely aesthetic in the grand scheme of things; a narrative hook to draw you into a world that never truly explores, or becomes, all it can be. It’s also lite-on as far as difficulty is concerned, with enemies scarce, and even scarcer in archetypal variety. And their impediment tends to formulate in volume rather than in anything mind-bending or requiring planning or tact. There are just the two main types of grunts, and just the one type of ‘boss’, and that’s kind of it. Everything else is effectively traversal as far as any form of videogame goes, which isn’t an entirely bad thing, it’s just that in equal measure to the smallish concepts at play, the game’s world is bite-sized and delivered in load-in chunks, too, rather than as a streaming, expansive whole.

Click here for our full The Gunk review.