MELBOURNE, Australia — Sometimes, when you’ve had a rough day, the best answer is to go home, play at being a goose and drop someone’s sandwich in a pond.

Or at least, that’s the premise of Untitled Goose Game, a video game developed by four friends at a Melbourne-based studio, which involves a goose hellbent on mildly annoying residents of a nice English village. It has charted an unlikely path to the top of video game charts and spawned memes of avian terror on social media.

With absolutely nothing at stake — no world to save, no baddies to fight — the pleasure of the gameplay comes from the bothering of townsfolk: chasing frightened children, stealing from shopkeepers and honking incessantly at people trying to read.

Jacob Strasser, one of the creators of the game, said the village was a nod to the British television programs he and his friends grew up watching on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, like “Brum,” a children’s show with a sentient vintage motorcar.