![]() ![]() It’s a videogame that generates television as a byproduct of being played. ![]() “Games that are designed to make the player miserable as a way of entertaining a passive audience”. I feel like we need a name of this genre. And yet, if you take the time to master the controls you can breeze up to the top in less than two minutes. People spend hours trying to climb this stupid mountain of random garbage. This setback is so catastrophically upsetting that there are compilations of streamers doing it. It deposits you at the exact start of the game, thus erasing the hours you spent climbing up to that point. If you’re foolish enough to grab onto it (there’s a sign warning you not to) or if you accidentally fall into it (it’s a bit like the gutter of a pinball machine where’s it’s easier than it looks to get things to go into it) then you will ride it all the way down. That long thread-like line running down the left side is called “The Snake”. I imagine someone had to dig around the datafiles inside the game to make this. In-game, your view is focused directly on your character, who would be just a few pixels tall in the image above. You’ll never see the game like this when you’re playing it, of course. In fact, let’s look at the map of the whole game: It’s a cruel task with a lot of pitfalls, where the environment is engineered to make falling down a deeply costly mistake. But like a lot of people, I enjoy watching the game. I’m pretty sensitive to frustrating challenges with big setbacks as punishment. 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. 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. 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. The game embraces this hodgepodge approach to design and makes it central to the game’s visual aesthetic. That’s the equivalent of making a movie using only stock footage. Getting Over It is a game seemingly made from random crap from the typical asset store. It’s getting less coverage than PUBG, is what I’m saying.) Maybe you talked about it with your friends, but I wasn’t there for that. 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. ![]()
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