It may look like a cheap move to compare Only Up to Getting Over It, in which I commit the error of asking for a game to be something that it isn't. I think it’s interesting to compare where it comes from (as the influence is clear, and even explicit) just as it would be fair to compare Getting Over It to Sexy Hiking.
What Bennet Foddy saw in its inspiration was that the seed towards new ways of conception could be found in places that embraced the unconventional, that didn't care, or even preferred, to be "janky", as it allowed for the freedom to create its own discourse without having to answer to any expectations. His mountain of "digital junk" in the form of collected free assets wasn't (just) an ironic commentary on how everything online is just waste nowadays (I know there are some connotations about it, but they are more bridges towards other more interesting ideas). What was valuable in its collage of a map was to see through all that worthless collection and carefully select and position everything in a way that found a new meaning. To appreciate the shape of a lamp through the brutality of the hammer by moving it as carefully as an artist's brush.
Only Up seems to accentuate the collage of jank. Now it's a longer, fully 3D map, the companion voice is automated and even the movement itself is, or looks like, a preset moveset from any modern 3D engine. In this movement that clings into collisions the same no matter the shape, the objects matter no more, a lamp is just another box of a different size. The length of the game is less defined by the particular focus on the detail and more on repeating mechanical and repetitive motions, continuing to believe in a tendency where quantity beats quality, or at least carefulness. Where Getting Over It found meaning in its assets by making them an integral part of its revolutionary new take on platformers, Only Up only gets it in an even weaker comment of modern waste and a shield of irony.
If you think that the movement is uninspired, the response is that it's a purposeful ironic comment. If the lack of ideas to make an interesting platformer keeps appearing again and again, it isn’t a signal that there was no purpose to make a good game, but another ironic comment.
Getting Over It found value in everything through the delicate strokes of the hammer that moved through its mountain. Only Up believes that nothing of value can be done, we are at a point of no return and movement cannot be conceived as something interesting, it's just a standard to be mocked about. The worst part is that the wave of infinite clones is already feeding its empty argument.
What Bennet Foddy saw in its inspiration was that the seed towards new ways of conception could be found in places that embraced the unconventional, that didn't care, or even preferred, to be "janky", as it allowed for the freedom to create its own discourse without having to answer to any expectations. His mountain of "digital junk" in the form of collected free assets wasn't (just) an ironic commentary on how everything online is just waste nowadays (I know there are some connotations about it, but they are more bridges towards other more interesting ideas). What was valuable in its collage of a map was to see through all that worthless collection and carefully select and position everything in a way that found a new meaning. To appreciate the shape of a lamp through the brutality of the hammer by moving it as carefully as an artist's brush.
Only Up seems to accentuate the collage of jank. Now it's a longer, fully 3D map, the companion voice is automated and even the movement itself is, or looks like, a preset moveset from any modern 3D engine. In this movement that clings into collisions the same no matter the shape, the objects matter no more, a lamp is just another box of a different size. The length of the game is less defined by the particular focus on the detail and more on repeating mechanical and repetitive motions, continuing to believe in a tendency where quantity beats quality, or at least carefulness. Where Getting Over It found meaning in its assets by making them an integral part of its revolutionary new take on platformers, Only Up only gets it in an even weaker comment of modern waste and a shield of irony.
If you think that the movement is uninspired, the response is that it's a purposeful ironic comment. If the lack of ideas to make an interesting platformer keeps appearing again and again, it isn’t a signal that there was no purpose to make a good game, but another ironic comment.
Getting Over It found value in everything through the delicate strokes of the hammer that moved through its mountain. Only Up believes that nothing of value can be done, we are at a point of no return and movement cannot be conceived as something interesting, it's just a standard to be mocked about. The worst part is that the wave of infinite clones is already feeding its empty argument.