GUG review for PC

GUG is quite possibly the worst game I’ve ever played.

I realize that’s a pretty strong statement. After all, I’ve played a lot of terrible games over the years: the one where Nazis were the heroes. The broken Bomberman clone that was so bad Bloober Team wrote a public apology. Any of the terrible attempts at reviving the RBI Baseball franchise. And so many more besides.

But there’s a strong argument to be made that GUG is worse than any of them.

Literally every single aspect of the game is awful. It promises one thing – a roguelike creature-collector where the game generates new monsters based on words and phrases that you input – and then delivers a broken, incomprehensible experience that barely works at the best of times. Even in a world where games routinely come out full of bugs and glitches and other problems, GUG stands out for being far worse than any of them.

It’s hard to know where to begin in unraveling this mess, so let’s start at the beginning: there’s no real intro screen. You boot GUG up, and you’re instantly asked to input a word. From there, the game creates a monster (one of the titular “gugs”) and you’re launched right into the action with no other explanation. I mean, it’s an auto-battler, so as long as you can press the giant “Attack” button that pops up you’ll be able to do the bare minimum that the game asks of you, but it’s never really clear what’s happening beyond that.

As for the attacks themselves, there’s not really anything there, either. You drag your gugs onto open slots, enemies appear out of nowhere, some kind of action happens for a moment or two, and then the encounters are over. Since the game never explains anything to you, it’s hard to know what the strategy is, how you can improve, or figure out anything else to do with the game.

Normal games, of course, might include a pause screen with instructions, or even a full-blown tutorial. Not GUG, though. It doesn’t have anything like that. In fact, if you search the game’s discussions on its Steam page, the most you’ll get from the developers is a link to a YouTube video made by someone else about what to do, so evidently they thought it wasn’t their problem if players don’t know what to do with their game.

Even the parts of the game that you’d think would be self-evident make no sense. Every so often GUG sends you to a shop, except it doesn’t tell you how much money you have, so you just have to guess whether you can buy things. Likewise, there’s an “Amniotic Spring” where you generate more gugs, but since the game is seemingly based on randomness, it doesn’t feel like it matters what word or phrase you input – you’ll get monster with some vague connection to what you wrote, but it never explains what.

One thing GUG has plenty of time for, however, is loading screens. Any time a battle ends or you finish up in an area, you get an endless loading screen that doesn’t give you any indication of how long you need to wait. I read a theory that the load times are due to GUG’s reliance on AI to generate pretty much everything in the game, which sounds vaguely plausible to me as someone who only barely understands AI, but at the same time, you’d at least hope that the game’s performance would be boosted as a result.

This, needless to say, is not the case. Even with those long loading screens, GUG performs absolutely abysmally. Occasionally it freezes up and nothing seems to happen for minutes at a time – and then it will suddenly speed up, like during battles, and everything happens all at once. You’ll also run into the odd game-breaking bug, like when I dragged what was apparently the wrong gug onto an open spot, and the game just froze up and wouldn’t let me do anything more.

Not even the music or graphics could be classified as redeeming in any way. The music putters along in the background, loud enough that you know it’s there, but not loud enough that it distinguishes itself in any way other than background noise. The visuals, too, are completely forgettable; it turns out that when you rely on AI to generate images, you don’t get anything that looks very distinctive.

There are plenty of ways to look at GUG, and none of them are good. Is it a scam? A prank? A thinly disguised attempt at creating a botnet? Normally I’d say that it’s just a developer biting off more than they can chew, but GUG is so bad in so many ways, you almost hope that it’s because it’s a cover for something worse. Regardless, avoid this game at all costs.

Martian Lawyers Club provided us with a GUG PC code for review purposes.