Attracted by a signal from an unknown planet, two space transporters decide to improvise themselves as explorers. While Becks stays with the ship, Rani goes on an adventure. It is therefore obviously this last character that we embody. The game uses a third-person view and offers us a gameplay more focused on exploration than combat. Rani is thus able to scan the local flora, in order to learn more about this mysterious planet. Some plants are purely decorative, others give access to resources (metal, fibres, etc.) used to improve our equipment, and still others can be used to progress in the decorations. Plant ladders to unfold, explosive bulbs intended to free certain passages, and other seeds to be thrown into energy cracks to grow mushroom platforms are thus on the menu. These different options serve the exploration of a relatively linear world, certainly, but built with care. You never get lost, there are a few slightly secret areas to unearth, and the developers haven't forgotten to play on verticality from time to time. So yes, an open world would have given us much more the impression of exploring a new world. But we can't decently ask a small independent studio to compete on this point with the biggest productions. And then this relatively compact aspect certainly helped the developers to better control the final result, including graphically. Technically and artistically, The Gunk equals, if not surpasses, titles with ten times the development budget. The Unreal Engine is used brilliantly, the slightly cartoonish characters are never ridiculous, the animations hold up perfectly, the colors are carefully chosen and, above all, the extra-terrestrial fauna and flora amaze us. The icing on the cake: the English voices always sound perfectly in tune.
IS DIRT CLASSY?
Beyond the previously mentioned exploration, the main gameplay mechanic is the one that gives the game its name: Gunk (or Dirt in good French). This black and reddish moving substance literally smothers the environment, but Rani's power glove is fortunately able to suck it up and therefore reduce it to nothing. Each cleaned area instantly regains color, both literally and figuratively. Nature then takes back its rights and plants come to brighten up the atmosphere and/or open up a new passage for us. Small creatures sometimes come out of the Gunk that we must also "aspi-eliminate", but these mock-combats turn out to be quite anecdotal. Be careful, these clashes are far from unpleasant! But they do not offer a challenge high enough to be truly remarkable. This is also where the game begins to betray its lack of scale, because the general feeling of progress remains quite weak. Even unlocking an Energy Pulse Cannon after a while isn't much of a game-changer. This just allows you to activate mechanisms dedicated to solving puzzles that are never very complicated. These mechanisms come from ancient structures and betray the presence of a lost civilization, which Rani will seek to awaken. The second half of the game therefore tends to abandon natural spaces in favor of interior places, a bit less attractive and original. These levels are still pleasant to walk through, but we would have liked to have taken an extra dose of alien vegetation. The Gunk actually leaves a little taste of too little in general, since it takes less than five hours to go around.
