If you were to try to explain games both as an artform and an industry, I'd start here. Within it, you could teach about how to adapt to a platform's strengths, what a gameplay loop is, using pixel art as reference and what it's referencing, labor, how to handle backlash, derivative design practices, archival efforts, and also the futility of the entire enterprise. It is the least offensive morsel of video game that generated the most vitriolic response possible, and deserves study. Genuinely, the game of its decade, for all stories about that decade in the industry run through Flappy Bird at some point.

In the middle of my friend's playthrough they were direly over encumbered, and trying to get up a hill. They had put a lot of their belongings in a crate, and had been pushing the crate inch by inch up this mountain road. Their eyes were drawn from the prize (a mound of loot-filled corpses at the top of the road), and as I warned them about moving too far, the box's physics slipped off the model and it slowly skidded back down the road to cries of anguish. That is the most I have ever enjoyed anything Bethesda ever made.

Make no mistake, this game is evil in the exact same way that something like Getting Over It is. See, beyond the meme parts of Getting Over It, the actual brilliance of the game (and of Foddy's other stuff like QWOP for that matter) is offering you something just barely functional enough that you can see what it might look like to master it. It can create a yearning for that mastery, and in that yearning, do irreperable damage to your hands and overdraft hours of life out of your time bank. For those who broke through and learned how to do this well, I have tremendous respect. For many, they will see it, feel it brush against their ribcage like a panic, and either they'll pull away or press on, only to discover just what it takes and oh, by the way, there's a true ending.

There was like a three day period where I was naive enough to think that this game maybe could have made some headway into the empathy problem shared by gamers across generations. Then I saw people being abusive about playing it and realized that they understood literally nothing about the plot and I've since stopped believing you can reach people without empathy through entertainment. In fact, it has this paradoxical effect where a lot of the games that make the biggest deal about empathy as a concept (this, Undertale, Disco Elysium for a few examples) bring out this intense toxicity and defensiveness that flies so far in the face of what those stories are trying to talk about that it's discouraging. I'm lucky none of the artforms I practice involve storytelling, cuz I would hate to be responsible for people misinterpreting my story and doing harm over it.

I also played this game at the end of the worst year of my life and it helped me deal with a lot of what I went through, so I'll always treasure my time with it because of that aspect. I just wish it went a different way with the general populace.

Before I start, I have to say that a 2 star in my rating scale means that I regret playing this, and does not mean anything about the quality of the game. This game is, actually, completely superb. I had a physical copy of it. I gifted it to a family member who was looking for a game to play. This family member ended up cutting ties with my family, and every time I see it all I can think about is how I handed someone who didn't care about us like I thought they did a game I loved. I'm writing this because every time this I look at this year I see this thing and have this flashback and I want to stop doing that, so, here. This game's great.