Approximate amount of time to 100%: 7h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: There is a good achievement guide on xboxachievements.com but it says this game has no missable achievements and that isn't the case.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, "Space Archaeologist " has one missable item. And for "All In" you need to find almost all the resources and I'm not sure if none of those are missable.
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
This review for The Gunk is hard to write. At this moment I feel quite devastated. I did start this game with the idea that none of the achievements are missable, as the guides which I saw before starting said so. So I didn't check out much of the achievements, but I knew I needed a lot of resources and scan a lot of objects, so I paid special attention to those 2 things. And to learn at the end that one item for the achievements where you have to scan everything is missable and just that one I'm missing (the others I managed to mop up) just sucks. I'm also missing resources but couldn't find them while mopping up the other scannable items, so I gave up on that one.
But let us go back to how this journey on an unknown planet started for me: I was really hyped for The gunk from the moment I heard about it. It first was Xbox exclusive but I'm glad it now also is available on Steam. I wasn't disappointed, the game is amazing. I love cleaning up in games and combine that with a Metroidvania and you get a good game in my book. Sometimes the game felt a bit boring, mostly around the "tower" area where there is soo much Gunk, and you don't need to clean it all, but you need to clean a lot to be able to pass through it. For me, this area felt like the least fun area in the game.
I enjoyed the look of this game a lot, especially a beautiful animal you meet around the beginning of your journey. the faces of the human characters felt a bit weird though. I can't figure out what felt weird about them, but they just do. Another negative point is that if you go backtrack in this game, there is one area you can get stuck because you jump in an area where you can't leave and the elevator is at the top where you left it the last time, so no way to get out of that area except for loading an old save file. Gladly the game has multiple autosave files, but I would highly recommend also making a bunch of manual saves on different slots, just in case.
Even with those negative points, as a game that doesn't care about achievements I would highly recommend it, it is a fun experience that isn't too long, with a nice story. As an achievement hunter, I would be a bit more reserved for this game, as you need to scan 58 different objects and one of them (Gunk Dripper) is missable. Backtracking to the others is still no fun, especially since this game doesn't have a map or any way to see where you have scannable objects left, or where you have resources left. And those resources are also very tide, you need to almost find them all. what I have read from others is that there are like 2 more metal resources in the game than you need for all the upgrades.
If you want to get all the achievements, the best thing might be to play with a video guide next to it that points out all the scannable objects and resources, but that takes a lot of the fun away than just being able to play the game and figure it out yourself without risking it to miss out on achievements.
2.5