The tale consists of a boy, Dimwit, who is given a few scraps of food and sent off into the woods by his father to gather some firewood. He shares his food with a poor old man who, in exchange for Dimwit's kindness, points him to a tree beneath which can be found a golden goose. The goose is inexplicably sticky and attracts many greedy townsfolk while Dimwit makes his way to a king. The king's daughter falls for Dimwit, but the king, not overly impressed by the poor boy in shoddy clothing who appeared before him with a glob of greedy citizens stuck to his golden goose, sets three tasks that the boy must accomplish if he is to have his daughter's hand.

Because this is a fairy tale, the tasks are ludicrously difficult. It is Dimwit's retrieval of the golden goose, as well as how he goes about accomplishing the seemingly impossible tasks, that is the focus of this Grimm episode. Rather than run around darkening everything, as is the series' de facto gameplay standard, most of the six available stages revolve around Dimwit's attempts to complete the king's difficult assignments.


One task is to find a person who can drink an entire cell full of wine. The cellar is a deep room filled with wine casks stacked to the ceiling. Wooden beams and pipes spiderweb between casks which stretch up, up, up to a door at the top of the room. Grimm's job at the beginning of the level is to darken just enough of the environment so that many of the wine casks shatter and begin flooding the entire basement.

As the casks spill their contents, the wine level in the room slowly rises. You must guide Grimm from cask to cask, occasionally hopping onto and scampering along the narrow wooden beams and pipes in order to reach preset spots in the level. Grimm remains vulnerable to deep liquids, so falling or accidentally jumping into the wine results in a death.

While the rising wine level does provide some tension -- and more importantly, a break from tediously darkening NPCs and architecture -- Grimm's twitchy movement and spotty jumping can make navigating the narrow beams and pipes overly difficult. One wrong tap of a strafe key will send you plummeting into the wine. It's a fun stage, and the added tension of climbing to the top of the stage before the wine catches up with you is a pleasant deviation from typical Grimm gameplay, but the sensitive controls can sometimes detract from the fun factor instead of add to it.


Like the wine cellar stage, accomplishing the remaining tasks makes for a few interesting and refreshing moments in a formula that has grown rather stale. Still, there were some obvious opportunities for slightly different gameplay that the designers at Spice Horse missed. Grimm's modus operandi of darkening everything to change the environment has often been compared to the addictive Katamari Damacy. Such a comparison caused me to wonder why players weren't given the chance to control the sticky golden goose in an effort to catch all of the townspeople, who become stuck to the rotund animal just as all objects stick to the magical ball in Katamari. Simply have Grimm become stuck on the goose, and allow the player to control the goose as he hunts down terrified townsfolk.

Other than completing the three tasks, The Golden Goose largely plays like any other Grimm episode. It's different enough from the rest to deserve your attention, but if you've been easily frustrated by Grimm's hit-or-miss platforming elements before, expect more than a few rage-induced headaches.