getting over it holds a special place in my heart. i got it on the steam winter sale of last year, and got around to playing it in april, climbing the mountain on july 13th. since then, i've only grown to enjoy this game more and more. its philosophies, game design and addicting but annoying gameplay are what gives it a special charm i can't quite recall seeing in any other games. i want to share what i see in this game, and urge you, that if you don't hate being frustrated, to give it a try. this is one of the few games that are in my "life-changing" category on steam, and i mean it when i say that it is that good.
bennett foddy has had quite a history making games. his most famous titles include the QWOP series (QWOP, CLOP, GIRP, FLOP and 2QWOP), his most recent game baby steps and, of course, getting over it. it's safe to say that foddy has been on the internet for quite a while, and that experience is what creates the charm of this fascinating rage game. bennett says that the inspiration for the game was another free game from 2002 — sexy hiking, by jazzuo. the inspiration certainly makes itself apparent, as they share both an objective and a first obstacle, that being to climb over obstacles, and a dead tree that blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. this point is used for the player to test the limits and reaches of their hammer, poking around it, and eventually growing a sense for the physics. an excellent choice on game design, this technique of pushing new things with old concepts to the player is given and time and time again, such as with the basket and the ice mountain.
this game is, fundamentally, a "b-game". to quote foddy, b-games are rough assemblages of found objects. designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they're usually too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. they're built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.
the game utilizes a plethora of reused and recycled parts from other games, asset stores, free markets and online models, all as part of the philosophical design the game has. it uses — and abuses — of its genre to tell a compelling story through the lens of not only you, as the player, but as a consumer of digital content. it plagues you with questions that you normally wouldn't have ever bothered to ask, and makes new significance to what it truly means to be an artist and a person in the modern era.
getting over it is trash. it is made of ephemeral things, much past their time, and that have long run their course of utility. these expired assets that once served very distinct purposes are piled up in the digital landfill of the internet, free to take and modify, something bennett takes advantage of in his storytelling. one of the more famous sections of the mountain is the industrial era, made of slides and rakes and often a big checkpoint for the average player, one that they may return to often. none of these things particularly fit the context of a "mountain", but they pile up to become a mountain, an obstacle, a challenge, and it's this constant reassurance that this game is trash that makes it truly become a rich experience through the ethics and the philosophy of designing a piece of art.
one of my favorite things about this game are its quotes. whenever you fall down a significant chunk of the mountain, a stolen quote will be read by foddy to you. often, these quotes are of encouragement, of sadness, guilt, anger, perseverance or simply songs that talk about sadness. these quotes are one of the most important elements to the game. not because of the storytelling, but because of the metanarrative: because of you. the philosophies presented therein are actually really nice, but the frustration will overwhelm you if you ever do fall down. these quotes come as mockery to the agitated mind, and this very intentional view of the game is what fuels it to be even more frustrating that what it'd usually be. with the anger aside, i often find myself quoting a lot of this, and living these quotes through actions. though this game is often regarded as a joke and a "lets-player game", it embarks on existentialism and the perseverance of the soul despite adversities, which often leads to a very funny experience of the player being incredibly annoyed by being fancily told to chill out.
the most infamous section of the game by far has to be the snake. the snake is a late-game "obstacle". it's sitting there. it does not get in your way. if you choose to ride it, it will take you back to the beginning of the game, before the dead tree. you don't have to take it. but if you're scared of success, if you want to "get better" by living the worst again and again, then you can take it. you have the same taste as me, and as foddy: it's not ambition, it's ambition's opposite. an obdurant mission to taste defeat.
if you take it, it's like almost finishing a song's composition, and then slamming the keys and starting again from scratch. just before running a piece of code, pressing CTRL+A and backspace. on the finishing touches of a drawing, ripping it to pieces with your bare hands. the game acknowledges that, if you are like this, you'll take the snake. but the snake is not tempting. it's only tempting because you're tempted to ride it. and that's brilliant. on the final stretch of the mountain, you can willingly choose not to complete it. it's a wonderful piece of psychology.
from a gameplay standpoint, getting over it is fairly short. and i couldn't write a post dedicated to the game without talking about the speedrunning scene, arguably one of the biggest ones of all time. in a short interview, foddy gives his opinions on the speedrunning scene, which i ended up taking a liking to. you can listen to it here. but my opinion, particularly, is that the game is fun. it's a playful balance of skill, adaptation and muscle memory. i have a personal best of 7:11, with plans of getting to a sub 5 by the end of the year. playing this game is asking to be hated, to be frustrated, degraded and humiliated. but it is an open love letter to you in particular. it asks you, almost inviting you to take this beautiful sculpture and smash it in your knee. and i think that's what truly makes the gameplay of this game very special. it can be broken freely, and the fact that it is so fun to do so creates and inspires a new community of people, uniting them in the joined frustration of broken progress, being stumped and absolutely loving it.
in conclusion, getting over it is my favorite game, no questions asked. it is one of the most unusual and unfriendly games ever, and inspired an entirely new genre of games over the authors name — 'foddian'. it ended up on the museum of modern art in new york, and it remains, to this day, an atemporal classic. i want to invite you, the reader, to play it. or at least give it a shot. much like everything else, this game is infuriating, and progress is not linear. but it creates temper, character and patience inside of you. it pushes you to become better by kicking you down when you think you won. this game is made to hurt you, the one who thinks they'll get away with it only once and never come back to it again. it wants you to fully experience, and intensively so, the act of starting anew. after all, there's no feeling more intense than starting over. thank you for reading.