Goat Simulator's disturbing lore finally explained
In heaven, everything is fine. In limbo, there are rambunctious goats.
If you thought Goat Simulator's suburban setting was just a ramshackle playground for an adorable animal get into all sorts of glitchy, physics-based mayhem, you'd be wrong. It turns out that this chaotic realm of mischievous mammals and jetpacks has a far more sinister purpose: it's purgatory.
That's the explanation given by developer Armin Ibrisagic on the game's Steam community page in response to a fan theory that the whole game is really a hallucination. "You'll see that one of the tunnels has a sign saying 'Himlen' and the other has a sign saying 'Helvete'. If you pull that through google translate you'll see that 'Himlen' means Heaven, and 'Helvete' means hell," Ibrisagic explained. "That is why there is both a Devil Goat and an Angel Goat in the game."
Ibrisagic's explanation gets even more detailed as he goes. There's a pentagram in the game, which is closer to the Helvete entrance, as is the Stonehenge-esque Goethenge and a protest modeled after the current turmoil in the Ukraine. The developer said that these locations are "symbolising the backwards and old ways of humankind that need to be destroyed for progress to be made."
Conversely, the side of town with the Himlen sign contains a Low Gravity Testing Facility and a beacon, which Ibrisagic said is "symbolising research, progress, and hope." He added that "The trap once you go to space shows that we must not rush things before we are ready."
"You might also notice that, no matter what you do, you can never interact with humans," Ibrisagic pointed out. "If you lick them or even touch them a little bit, they will instantly go limp. If there are any humans nearby, they will run away from you. When it comes to other humans, you are always the onlooker, always staring from a distance, never part of the group. Always alone."
A new map is coming later this month in patch 1.1 that will flesh out this unsettling lore even further.
It looks like that amazing Dead Island parody trailer was more than just a lark, eh?
