Geoguessr: Christmas Island

Overview #

Today we review an expansion pack for the browser point & click game Geoguessr. The base game was quite a shock to critics back in 2013, breaking the formula of the genre by not really having any inventory management to speak of, and not even having dialogue despite definitely having the technical capability (indeed, the only characters present in the game are the Blurred People who are never elaborated on in the game’s manual or in-game text). The game’s only stated premise or objective is that you are an unnamed person who has woken up in the middle of nowhere, and you have to figure out where you are (more accurately, where you started), using nothing except your own powers of observation and logical deduction.

Despite the unusual concept, it managed to be quite the cult classic with its excellent high quality graphics (aside from some screens in the Australia levels, possibly rushed for the publisher’s deadline (given the lack of scenery there too?)) and diverse world design, enjoying a resurgence in popularity seven years later. But we aren’t here to review that. Oh no. We’re here to review a small level pack for the December holiday season (a la Jazz Jackrabbit’s Holiday Hare 95, I suppose?), released as free DLC available right from within the game! Of course I have to try this out, right? It’ll be fun!

Whoa hang on #

Okay, so level 1 served as an okay introduction to this place, so I thought. I don’t see any decorations around? No blurry Santa? Trees, but not the Christmas variety. Hmm, so they’ve broken the mold once again, by defying Christmas-themed game stereotypes! Brilliant! I mean like, okay, what do they have then? Of course, as you know, each playthrough of Geoguessr is randomized for infinite playability so your mileage may vary, but the level progression tends to follow some kind of underlying plot. So I can give you a hint - you might think this is impossible due to the lack of buildings around, but you can look at the quest marker at the top of the screen and compare with the minimap to figure out where you must be by what roads you could be on, what turns are where, and where the ocean is.

Okay, so far, so good! While I couldn’t find any motorways or airports that I think it’s implied my character uses to travel between levels, I still manage to progress by figuring out where I started (I think she figures out what to do from there, and maybe calls for someone to get her). That’s fine! Nice looking place. And then uhhh. Level 2. Uhhh. Uhhhhh???? Uhhhhhhhhh?????????

A water level? In Geoguessr? The protagonist can’t even swim! That was an infamous limitation throughout the game, used as an in-universe way of stopping you leaving the boundaries of each world. Now they’ve just decided oh, they can control vehicles like jetskis (or some kind of small boat)? But this being Geoguessr, my objective is not to go wander off into the Indian Ocean and escape (I’d run out of fuel anyway, surely). I have to figure out just where I am off the coast, as accurately as possible… and that means making my way back to the mainland! Oddly, despite being in the water now, the game still limits you to two directions here, although sometimes 3 directions which gets a bit weird (you still end up going where you’re going if you click hard enough)? But like… whoa! Cool! They added vehicles to the game in this level pack which I assumed was just a small thing at first! And then…

Look, part of me thinks maybe I shouldn’t show this, but I don’t think you should be lied to about what this level pack is really about. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a spoiler or not, to be honest, but… I dunno, it’s probably like telling people Higurashi isn’t actually just a friendly love story about a guy who moves to a rural village, right?

Jeez, this game just took a dark turn, didn’t it? I did not think Geoguessr of all games would have subversive plot twists like that! My character seems to have broken into somewhere she’s not supposed to be, or… was she invited there? How mysterious! And what’s the Australian border force doing here? Aren’t maps supposed to be for whole independent countries?

What’s really going on here… #

Sorry for these non-standard section titles. That’s not what I’m aiming to do in future reviews. Anyway, it turns out that this is a reference to a Christmas Island in real life! Whoaa!! It turns out that there’s a Christmas Island similar to what we see here, invaded and stolen by Britain in 1888, and pawned off to Australia in 1958. And then at some point there was a “detention centre” built to detain refugees, which has had numerous accusations of human rights violations over the years. So that’s kind of messed up. It seems the devs wanted to do a bit of social commentary, by referencing a real life location in their game? Hmm, I hope that’s okay… there are people who live on the real life Christmas Island, but they live under Australian rule, and it turns out we still haven’t given them sovereignty that we don’t rightfully own (oi, what is it with Australia and ruling over land that never had sovereignty ceded?).

There are important topics to be brought up here. The so-called “detention centre” is still operating, even under the new Labor government, and there have now been outbreaks of SARS-nCOV-2 there, allegedly caused by lack of sanitation. It’s run by a private company, which is alarming enough already, but one that is primarily known (at least in this country, they do all sorts of weird stuff across the world) for uh, running Centrelink call centres. There have still not been any real consequences faced for these human rights issues, not to mention the violation of the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951 that this country allegedly agreed to…

But hey, that’s not very fun to write about… I’m just a game reviewer. But I do still believe you should be informed, and if I know about this stuff, I have a responsibility to inform you about it, even if it conflicts with my mission of having silly fun times. So, let’s get back to the game, shall we?

Okay I swear these section headers are gonna be more structured usually #

I didn’t manage to quite get the starting location in the exact correct part of the ocean, I was 1.2 kilometres off, but that’s still okay for progressing through the levels. The plot is getting pretty intense now. The real life Christmas Island’s detention centre is actually inland, so that wasn’t where I was, but oh jeez, the amount of spooky looking signs around here, contrastic with what would otherwise be a peaceful environment of beaches and tropical trees…

Level 3. Yo hang on, what??? This just gets even more weird. I’ve awakened to find myself in the middle of a forest… trees everywhere? Am I supposed to presume that I’ve been kidnapped and thrown here?

This does not seem like something out of Geoguessr at all. This is like a sudden unexpected grimdark twist, deconstructing the game’s own concept about calmly and peacefully trying to figure out where you are. It’s been flipped on its own head, becoming a horror game where you REALLY do not know where you are. Other than you are on Christmas Island. And it’s dark. There is nobody around. Nobody to save you. Nobody here except the menacingly tall trees, a mysterious red ribbon tied to one tree… and anyone who might be hunting you down. You’d better figure out if that’s the case or not.

Well. They did have a good starting point here. But holy fucking crap, this level SUCKS! Because there’s no path to walk along, your controls get really messed up, and I don’t think it’s one of those deliberate control screwy things you sometimes see in video games… you can find yourself going in a completely different direction you inputted, you sometimes find yourself with 8 directions available when that doesn’t even make sense, and the fact that you literally don’t know what direction you’re even supposed to walk in does not really make things any more enjoyable.

Perhaps I could forgive these mistakes if it wasn’t for… well first of all, the movement speed is so friggin SLOW! I’m walking at 1 centimere per step here all of a sudden, when normally it’s a given that the Geoguessr protagonist can float along roads with a satisfying whoosh (the accepted in-universe explanation is that your character’s superhuman speed is the reason for why they got into this job). Maybe it’s because I’m in a forest, I don’t know, I don’t care, I still don’t like it. Whatever the intent is, it just makes the game more annoying to play. Click click click clickety fucking click, get your fucking arse over there to the other end of this trail! It’s like, you know those dreams where you try to walk somewhere, but you find yourself moving at a snail’s pace or falling over to the ground unable to pick yourself up, because your brain is recognizing that your body is asleep in real life outside the dream and so can’t actually be moving very fast? It’s like that, except it sucks even more! Grrr!!

But the graphics here aren’t even good! I’m not even talking about the art style, although that’s a bit disappointing too (what is this, a late 2000s FPS game? Where’s the colours?!), but everything’s just so low resolution, it makes me wonder why I would bother, and not just load up the DOS version of Alone in the Dark or something like that and turn on one of those silly upscaling filters that make the pixels less crunchy. And what are these graphical glitches?

It’s unfortunate that they ostensibly made this level pack to raise awareness about a real world issue, and yet that goal may be compromised by goofy looking things like this. Bit of a rushed job maybe? Publishers screwing with the dev team and putting them under unnecessary pressure? I have no idea what’s going on here. Even after you’ve beaten what I have to say is the worst part of any point & click adventure game I’ve ever played, you still haven’t really beaten this level yet, as you still need to figure out where this barbecue is (how jarring! Just being thrown into a nice peaceful public park like that?) and get to the next level. And you have to go through there, you don’t have the option to use the road, which is not something that has ever happened in any vanilla Geoguessr level I’ve ever seen. Might also be a bug.

Level 4 is fine, actually. Just a bit of a short breather level before the final stretch. That’s fine. So otherwise I’ve felt a bit let down by the Christmas Island expansion, but maybe level 5 will be an intense final showdown to make up for it? Ah… no. I mean, maybe my random placement was unlucky. But I just got a forest again. Yeah… really. Nothing here either except at least there is a dirt path carved out for me to walk up and down and realise that I should probably try going the other way instead of clicking for hours, and get annoyed again by the movement speed being suddenly slow for no apparent reason, and get annoyed by the puddles of muddy water sometimes in your way (which doesn’t affect gameplay, it just looks out of place in this game).

Gotchas/potential issues/what’s a good name for this section #

Here, we’ll talk about accessibility issues or technical issues with the game, stuff that might trip you up or be a deal-breaker for you. Now I’ve just gone through explaining why you should avoid this game no matter who you are, but out of principle…

Well, for starters, it turns out the artwork in Geoguessr was done by a search engine company called Google, which is… well. I guess outsourcing that work to some random company is understandable given the massive scope, but does explain why the quality is inconsistent. But anyway, that company gives me that vibes, like are they up to something here? What’s their deal? That’s the issue I have there. I don’t trust them. I think that’s worthy of mentioning here.

There’s no gamepad support as far as I’m aware, though you can use the arrow keys to navigate. Sometimes. It’s not really well documented and given the directions available are not always just up/down/left/right or north/south/east/west, it doesn’t always make sense. You also can’t hold down the key to continue moving, you have to keep tapping it. You also have to keep clicking repeatedly, you can’t just hold down the mouse button to move forward or anything… that’d be fine except for moments where you have to click a LOT and that can really be bad for repetitive strain injuries! Youchie! Remember to take breaks when gaming, gamers! You do have some kind of warp ability where you can click ahead on a road to zoom forward to that point, but this only works on areas you can see directly in front of you, and sometimes just doesn’t work at all for no reason, so you can’t really rely on it. Sometimes doing that can look a bit visually jarring - it looks like for some scenes, just clicking forward brings you to a different day/night cycle that breaks the transition entirely as sometimes things like traffic cones are placed in one screen but not the other? Like are they done by different artists who didn’t communicate with each other or something? And if a car is going in the opposite direction you are… sometimes it somehow manages to still be in the next screen, so it’s like it’s following you backwards, and that just looks really weird.

On the positive side, there’s a volume slider, because apparently this game has inbuilt sound, I never bothered hearing it. Due to the lack of dialogue, the lack of subtitles isn’t really an issue. In-game text isn’t translated, but this is deliberate to test the player’s ability to recognize multiple languages across the world… which does mean the difficulty is dependent on the player’s real world spoken language - for the “World” game mode, you could find yourself struggling because you can’t read a sign from some part of the game world that someone else can just fine. All completely random, so nobody’s going to exploit this to their advantage, unless they just learn every human language possible in which case good luck to them. You can further adjust the difficulty by giving yourself a time limit or removing your ability to even look around or zoom in, or move at all, if you really wanted to for some masochistic reason. Tryhard.

There is save support, actually. I didn’t try leaving the game in the middle of a level because I’m too addicted for my own good, but you can leave between levels and the game and your score will be waiting for you when you come back if you go to the load save screen (which is titled “ongoing games”, just to be cutesey, I guess).

I suppose these are all applicable to the base game, but Christmas Island in particular could be an issue for people uncomfortable with distressing content, given that the marketing material would give you the impression that this is just some relaxing holiday resort and that might catch people off guard. I don’t think that’s really a fair genre bait-and-switch. The forest area has visibility issues, too, which can’t be adjusted via the in-game settings…

(Out of character note: Geoguessr is a freemium game these days, and has a monthly subscription available that they really want you to get in order to subsidize costs associated with Google’s APIs. While that might be a non-nefarious explanation, it still is a microtransaction, and with a free account each round is limited to 5 minutes that recharges after 15 minutes, and some achievements are locked behind a “Pro” account. Also, that stuff about the clicking and RSI and motion sickness is true and actually could be an issue, though it might be a limitation of the Street View API that can’t be resolved.)

Conclusion #

Am I just unlucky? Did any of you play through the Christmas Island expansion, and have a better time with your playthrough? It’s so tedious that I didn’t really want to try playing it again just to find out if all the possible starting locations are like that. I feel like surely this can’t be a thing that happens, but at the same time, it would be very unlikely that I just happen to get all the bad things happening to me in one playthrough, so maybe it’s supposed to be like this. But like, did I accidentally start level 3 in an area of the map that wasn’t actually supposed to be accessed, and that’s why it was so glitchy and empty? It’d explain a lot, but that is also kinda shit.

Illogical puzzles, annoying controls, and garbage graphics… so many ways in which it does not follow the “rules” of Geoguessr level design that we have come to expect, I had to double check that this was an official map! But yes, they indeed did make it…

As for the game’s attempt at social awareness… I feel it may be undermined by the aforementioned issues. You know how Gamer Bros are, they’re just going to treat this like Sonic 2006 and laugh at it and make unoriginal jokes about it, specifically focusing on the glitchiness and low quality background artwork and nothing else. So, they aren’t reaching that part of their audience that really needs to be reached out to… indeed, this game was released before the 2022 election, so if it worked, none of you should have voted for Scott Morrison. Yeah he didn’t win the election, but he got more than 0 votes! What’s going on there? If this game was effective at its messaging, then you’d be seriously telling me there were people who knew about all this stuff all along and decided to vote for the Liberals anyway? Yikes! Okay, so this is not actually a game developed in Australia, so maybe electoral politics weren’t the aim here, but like… I dunno, I just get the feeling that people don’t realise what’s going on here? Not everyone, some do, but not enough people.

Now normally when a game fails completely at doing everything it was supposed to do, from every possible angle, with the most charitable interpretation possible, I give it a 1/10. After all, there’s not a single reason why the game should earn a point over that. I’m reluctant to do so, because I really enjoyed the vanilla Geoguessr… that one was a solid 7/10 at least! But hey if my rating system doesn’t mean anything then I might as well not have one. But you know what? Fuck this expansion pack. Fuck it. I’m giving it a 0/10 and that just seems perfectly fair, all things considered. I’m never going back. And by that I mean I am going back at some point because I only got a silver medal, fuck fuckety fuck fuck fuck