Danger Goat is one of the Daydream VR launch titles and probably one of the most colorful ones. It’s a a solid puzzle game that comes in a charming package and should have no problems to appeal to younger target audiences.

Gameplay

In Danger Goat you have to lead a lost goat to the top of the mountain, helping it avoid deadly traps that block its way and would mean certain death if you would not be on the lookout.

You can lead the goat from flower to flower, pointing at them with your motion controller. Click on the touchpad and the goat will happily move to the flower you pointed at and munch on it, but that’s only for the sake of presentation. Each level has an exit that your goat has to reach. If you reach the goal without any deadly incidents you will earn three stars for it. Every trap you walk into will result in one star less in your final count, but it will let you keep playing from the position of the trap you walked into with the trap gone.

And there are lots of traps in Danger Goat. This goat is truly in danger. There are rockets that will launch just benath our beloved goat, there are electric fences, there are fire traps, you name it. You don’t want to have your goat walk into it. To save our fantastic beast from those traps you can destroy them by having stone pillars crash into them. Those stone pillars come in different sizes and to have them fall onto traps you first click on them to carve out the base and then tilt your controller in the direction you want it to fall down. That works in most of the cases but unfortunately this had let to quite some frustration when it simply didn’t work the way I intended the pillar to fall. In my opinion it would have been easier just to point at the direction you want it to fall to instead of having to use this gesture.

Other than that you will find wind turbines that blow goaty goat away, catapults and elastic springs to reach higher heights and colored switches that open doors or turn wind turbines on and off. It all works well and follows the expected puzzle regime of reaching point A to turn on the switch witch opens door at point B that lets you reach catapult at point C that will throw you to the exit. The game mechanics certainly work well but the puzzles at no point felt “clever”. Solutions often felt a bit too obvious, but probably that’s because I have played video games since the Atari 2600 and this game might more cater to younger crowds who are just discovering videogames.

Presentation

Developer nDreams has nailed it with the presentation of this title. This game looks beautiful, animations are top notch, menus looks great, heck, they have even composed a title song that tells our poor hero’s story. You can tell that the designers worked on Danger Goat with great love of detail. There are plenty of different death trap animations that will put a smile in your face even when you could not save our protagonist from certain death.

Immersion

Danger Goat certainly did not have to be a VR game but would work fine on a tablet as well. However, hovering over the playing field like you do does feel good, especially because this world looks so colorful and being there feels good. I am sure the younger folks will have a great time hovering over the goat to lead it to the mountain top.

Comfort

There are no issues with comfort at all since the camera is fixed and there are no camera movements whatsoever.

Final Thoughts

Danger Goat is a solid puzzle title with charming graphics. It does suffer from its less than ideal control scheme and predictable puzzles but will for sure appeal to younger generations who will enjoy the title’s colorful art style and general upbeat atmosphere.