I have a really good friend in real life (let's call him Michael), we've known each since kindergarden and have a ton of beautiful memories together, he's an awesome person and I love him :) we don't hang out often but when we do one of our favorite things to do together is play videogames, back in December we finished At Dead of Night (I know that's a single player game but trust me, we did it together) on his computer and on February we started playing Untitled Goose Game on my Switch, it was a ton of fun and I don't think I've ever laughed harder playing a game because there's so many funny interactions that are infinetly funnier when you're with a close friend and you can laugh together but it's a pretty short game so we completed the entirety of the main game in one day but we still had the secondary missions you get once completing the main story so 2 months later we finally had the chance to hang out and complete those missions and while we were playing I showed him a picture on my phone and said "we should do this! it would be really funny"

I should have never shown him that picture...

We both agreed to recreate it and went around the game stealing all the signs when we encountered our first problem, the sign in High Street was glued to the floor and couldn't be moved meaning that if we wanted to include ALL the signs we had to be careful since the shopkeeper would ruin our picture if we annoyed her, no problem! we'll just try our best not to move anything that's hers and pray she won't bother us, at first we just put all the signs on the floor next to the High Street sign but it didn't look good so we tried to find any objects that the signs could lean against (similar to how the gardener's sign is leaning against the rock in the picture above) and that is when our torment started

The first thing we tried to do was making the pub's sign lean against the toilet paper but we couldn't find a way to make it stay in place so we made a little pause where we debated what other objects from around the map we could use and we realized we could use the shopping basket! we tried to do the same thing as before but using the shop's basket and althought it took us a while to find the right angle we managed to make the pub's sign lean against the basket, it was really funny to watch our geese playing tug of war as we carefully tried to place the sign and even if it took us an eternity to get the hang of it we had a semi-consistent strategy for placing the signs so we were both very hopeful for the future of this silly challenge, now we had 1/4 signs in place (2/5 if you count the one glued to the floor)

Then we debated how we debated how we would take care of the sign made by the woman from the Backgardens since it was the biggest one so we wanted to get it out of the way quickly, then I had the idea of using the cooler from the garden, we placed it next to the shopping basket now that we knew where we were going to place it we had to take care of a completely different issue, how?! we struggled for like 20 minutes to find a way of making the sign stand up but we eventually realized that if we made the sign lay backwards (tha part with the drawing facing the floor), grab the sign by both ends of the front and then quickly walked backwards the sign would do a 180° flip and stand up while facing forwards, this was probably the most infurating sign to put up, it would fall down all the time, it took embarrasingly long to figure out the correct timing, sometimes the shopkeeper would push the cooler out of the way and everytime we failed we would accidentaly push the cooler away so we wasted a lot of time just trying to put it back in it's place but after an hour of suffering we did it! now we were half way through our journey! 2/4 or 3/5

But now we were in trouble because as annoying as it was to place the other 2 signs at least they were symetrical so the path we had to take to make them look pretty was really predictable and easy in theory (putting the plan in action was a whole different can of worms but at least we knew what we had to do, we just had to do it right) now we didn't had any items to place the signs against and the 2 signs we had left were completely assymetrical so we didn't even know how we were going place, Michael had the idea of using the box from the pub for the groundkeeper's sign but as we were trying to work our way around that big wodden stick at the bottom of the sign we made a mistake, while moving around recklessly we accidentaly moved the shopkeeper's chalk which caused her to knock down all of our signs while trying to retrieve it (by this point we had spent at least an hour doing this challenge), we were obviously both really pissed off! all our hard work trown down the drain, we didn't even knew how we made some of that stuff work in the first place and just got lucky the first time but what's done is done, we got mad and hid her chalk in the garden and went back to bussiness because at this point we had spent way too long trying to take this stupid photo that we couldn't give up now, so we were back to square 1 with 0 signs placed

We re-did what we had done with those 2 signs and it was a pain but we got it done and then we got back to trying to put the groundskeeper's sign on top of the box, fortunately for us since the box was pretty short we just had to hold the sign from the 2 top edges and very slowly and carefully walk towards the box and the sign would naturally place itself on top of the box, it didn't look exactly as we planned but it was good enough, so new we ony had 1 more sign to go but of course it wasn't going to be that easy, we both got so excited about this journey being almost over that we let our guards down and we discussed how to take care of the smallest sign, the thing that makes this sign special is that it can only be grabbed from 2 very specific angles, one at the one of the bottom edges and the other in the middle top, we both decided that only one of us really needed to move the sign since there wasn't much the other player could help with so I decided to sit this one out while my friend tried to place the sign next to the rest but as you might have predicted, one wrong movement made everything fall apart, hours of effort gone in a matter of seconds, so close yet so far but we couldn't give up now, we had done this twice, we can do it thrice! despite our annoyance we gave it one last try

For our third and final attempt we did mostly the same but changed our strategy slightly to make it less risky to move stuff, we place the pub's sign on top of the box and the garden's sign on top of the shopping basket and we spaced out the objects a little bit more so were less likely to knock them out by accident and after like an hour of hard work it was almost finished we just had to find a place to put the backgarden't small sign at first we considered just letting it lay on the floor but we realized that since it was so small we could use pretty much any item as a base so Michael decided to hold the sign and make it stand upright while I carefully placed one of the walkie-talkies behind it so that when he let go the sign would lean against it and after at least 3 hours of trial and error we finally did it!

(I was the player 2 wearing the blue ribbon since blue is my favorite color if anyone's wondering) after the many mistakes and wastes of time we both had to endure together you guys have no idea how happy we were to finally see the fruits of out hard work, we felt like soldier coming home after bonding over the shared trauma of war, we high-fived and hugged yelling about how happy we were about our masterpiece, I didn't even want to close the game, we took like a billion screenshots in different angles but this one was my favotite since it looks like the geese's necks are forming a heart ♡