Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

released on Dec 06, 2017

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a punishing climbing game, a homage to Jazzuo's 2002 B-Game classic 'Sexy Hiking'. You move the hammer with the mouse, and that's all there is. With practice, you'll be able to jump, swing, climb and fly. Great mysteries and a wonderful reward await the master hikers who reach the top of the mountain. To quote Jazzuo himself: "The hiking action is very similar to way you would do it in real life, remember that and you will do well".


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Definitely not one I can praise, the tutorial and the weird furniture land are well put together but by the time you get to orange hell it seems to lose what it was attempting to get across.

The narrator states that every obstacle he placed he couldn't bring himself to change it to make it easier, but orange hell seems to contradict that, it feels less like the first two segments where you have to think around the different kinds of obstacles and their positioning and instead it's just a bunch of steep rocks. For a "hard game" it doesn't have much of a drive to complete it out of spite that better games like Super Meat Boy have. Every failure is just an unmotivating back to square one, I was never thinking "I have to complete this because I won't let it frustrate me to quitting" it feels more like "oh wow I'm back to that fucking tree again, I'm just bored now".

I guess that's part of the metaphor, that creating art is a difficult process that can leave you starting over again, but I feel like if the game was more so a fair but difficult challenge as opposed to being really clunky and having sections which literally are designed so that you have to start over means that the theme has a level of pretention.

Honestly, the commentary is pretty pretentious too, it's not really saying a whole lot in particular, Bennett Foddy just says a bunch of disjointed things about games and difficulty and some of the quotes are pretty piss poor to be honest.

He says: "An orange is sweet juicy fruit. Locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice."

If that's the case then what even is the point of the game? Most games that have a task to complete are made for the glory of completing it, the feeling of figuring out the correct method so solve a puzzle, finding the skill to overcome a difficult series of platforms, finding the right strategy to defeat a foe. If we believe Foddy's thoughts on a challenge it makes it sound as though he made the game hard just so he could make it hard. Him splicing in some quotes doesn't make that any less the case, the game is as pretentious as they come.

I don't hate it at all, I appreciate the attempt, but I feel like it's not really offering me anything at all. The Stanley Parable is also philosophical and explores themes of creating art, but that game is much more focused and it has enough endings to explore different concepts in-depth. This isn't that, it's a guy rambling his scattered thoughts whilst he pretends that his hollow challenge has any sort of meaning.

I love it when games have themes and stories to tell, but this game feels like it's trying to hard to be that thing that explores those wacky ideas. Foddy seems to think masterpieces are made because the creator set out to make them, that only "B-Games" are made for the joy of their completion, but they're not, they're made because somebody realised a worthy vision.

TL;DR: man makes a hard game for the sake of making a game but puts some flowery words in it thus reckons his aimless and clunky void of meaning has any more significance than a banana duct taped to a wall... Oh wait.

This is the "banana duck taped to a wall" of indie games.

Interesting concept, pretty fun for a time, but I got bored of not being able to execute a specific part and the frustration became bigger than what the game had to offer in its mechanics, which are pretty clunky (it's kind of the point of the game but meh, it lost me)

I think if I can take something away from this game is that people are able to find something deep in anything. Literally anything. Which could be seen as a good thing or a bad thing; I suppose it depends on your personality.

i played it but i skill issued but its fun