However, something didn't feel right about this completion. On June 17, 2021, I completed Getting Over It for the first time. This, paired with the unrelenting difficulty of the gameplay (I'm sure some veterans of GOI are familiar with the dreaded Orange Hell and the precarious, nerve-wracking Bucket on a String), makes the whole package for a true test of how far a player is willing to go for the simple completion of a game. The game is filled with an extensive set of quotes, esoteric philosophical monologues on the nature of originality in games, and reflective diatribes against the laziness and over-sanitization of modern AAA titles. starting over is harder than starting up." "There’s no feeling more intense than starting over. If I had to best describe this emotion, I'd put it in the slightly-abridged words of Bennett Foddy, the game's creator and comforting, slightly snarky narrator: However, something about this game brings out a subtle emotional response - one that's easy to miss, but is most definitely there. Now, my top two most-played games are Celeste (652 hours) and Geometry Dash (3,579 hours), so one could make the claim that I'm just slightly masochistic with my gaming preferences. While playing the game, you learn things about yourself that you wouldn't have realized in the confines of a more forgiving, breeze-through environment. Some would call this insanity - I call it a tough-love process of self-reflection. Those who complete the game are the most determined of the playerbase - those who will fall, and fall, and fall again, and still have the resolve to keep going back up, most often to the same result. It's a punishing and unforgiving challenge to be sure, but it's incredibly rewarding to beat the game even once, an achievement only 8% of players can boast. The map consists of a variety of stock assets - you start on a rocky lakeside and scale an odd, surrealist playing field consisting of such items as a rowing oar, a stray coffee cup you can smack around, a giant tipped-over ladder, a series of mysteriously-suspended rocks covered in snow that never melts, and of course, the iconic and notorious snake that takes you back to the beginning of the game. The goal of the game is simply to climb a mountain - or, what would be better described as the anarchical definition of a mountain. The controls are intentionally awkward and unwieldy, as you don't even click any buttons - you just move your character, Diogenes, around in a cauldron with a hammer using the movement of your mouse or trackpad. However, on a less philosophical level, it's an incredibly hard game. It's an experience that'll take everything out of you and build it back up from the inside. Getting Over It is, at its core, a game about taking risks, trial and error, and the value of starting over. However, when I picked up Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy in early 2022, after not playing it for almost a year, I learned the true meaning of comfort through risk - the VERY hard way. This causes an intense fear of uncertainty and taking risks. I have severe OCD and a whole variety of anxiety disorders, so I live my life in a lot of fear, almost constantly. The run-time is estimated at five hours, but could end up taking considerably longer.Let me preface this wall of text by saying that I have never been a "throw caution to the wind" type of person. “I created this game for a certain kind of person.ĭespite the lack of any actual horrifying content, the psychological impact of this game is not for the faint-hearted: it’s just simply, beautifully, diabolically frustrating, with one small mistake often losing you many minutes of progress. Getting Over It is a physics-centred platformer, which Foddy chose to classify as ‘psychological horror’, and the game’s tagline gives a clue as to why: It’s inspired by Jazzuo’s Sexy Hiking, and the subject is a man sitting in a cauldron, trying to climb a mountain using a sledgehammer. The NYU-based game design teacher has now released Getting Over It, a longer form game which went live on Steam earlier this month. You may not recognise the name Bennett Foddy, but there’s a good chance you will have played one of his free online minigames, like cricket batting game Little Master or QWOP which went viral and featured in the US version of the Office.
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