A few days ago we got a new installment of Errant Signal where Campster talked about Getting Over It, which seems to be the game everyone was watching and nobody was talking about last month. (I mean nobody in the gaming press. Maybe you talked about it with your friends, but I wasn’t there for that. It’s getting less coverage than PUBG, is what I’m saying.)
If you missed it:
Getting Over It is a game seemingly made from random crap from the typical asset store. That’s the equivalent of making a movie using only stock footage. The game embraces this hodgepodge approach to design and makes it central to the game’s visual aesthetic. You play as a nameless naked man in a black cooking pot who uses a sledgehammer to pull and shove his way up a gargantuan mountain of trash. That’s no story, no characters, no context, no score, no unlocks, no save points, no enemies to fight, and no achievements to earn along the way. There’s just you, your hammer, some really fiddly climbing controls, and Bennett Foddy’s calm narration ruminating on difficulty and punishment in games as you ascend to new heights and tumble back down in bitter defeat.
I haven’t played it. I’m pretty sensitive to frustrating challenges with big setbacks as punishment. I’d get too angry to have fun. But like a lot of people, I enjoy watching the game. It’s a cruel task with a lot of pitfalls, where the environment is engineered to make falling down a deeply costly mistake. In fact, let’s look at the map of the whole game:
(Spoilers?)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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