Apparently I’m the kind of person he made this game for. This shit is fun. Unforgiving, incredibly punishing, brutally evil, but so much fun. It straddles this odd place between zen flow and white-hot pants-shitting rage I didn’t really expect a game to pull off so effectively. For most people, this is less a game they want to play and more a game they want to watch someone else torture themselves with.
The gameplay, in a nutshell: you are Diogenes, a man in a cauldron. Your sole implement to move you forward is a hammer and a physics engine. You position the hammer with your mouse to move. You have a big-ass mountain, made up of increasingly absurd level geometry, to climb, by flinging yourself up it bit by bit. Here’s the catch: at virtually any point in the game, it is possible to hit a ledge wrong, bounce yourself off the face of the mountain, and go spiraling down - either down to a previous section, or all the way down to the very beginning of the game.
Along the way, you’re treated to a lovely voiceover by Benny Foddy, the game’s designer, made famous by his creation, QWOP. Somewhat pretentious, but it sure does fit the tone pretty nicely.
This game is fun and I recommend it to both you and your worst enemies.
Be warned: Even when the credits start rolling, you’re still not done. Apparently there’s a bit at the end that’s rather tricky, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll end up losing all of your grinding.
I won’t be taking up on it, alas. Life is frustrating. I play games to get away from frustration. But hey, if this appeals to you, I’m glad it’s good that way.
And I wish the game developer every success, because evidently there are a lot of [del]masochistic[/del] challenge-addicted gamers out there to make happy.
Huhhhhhh…thoughts, no particular order. (Oh, uh, be sure to visit his website, foddy.net, if you haven’t already.)
I have personally completely, utterly, royally lost it at games that were about a tenth as frustrating at this. In hindsight, I’m baffled and more than a little embarrassed that I ever got so emotional over video games, and I resolved a long time ago that if a game ever reached that breaking point, stop. Walk away and never look back. I know the old conventional wisdom that once you’re hooked, you can never quit, you have to keep trying over and over and over until you best the game or get put in a straitjacket. Well, if you’ve seen my impressive collection of cases of games that I threw away (all of which I paid money for, incidentally), you’d know that it’s no trouble for me whatsoever. Hey, it’s like any skill; do it enough times and it becomes routine. Life is too short and health is too precious to squander any of it on some meaningless piece of entertainment that does nothing but make me feel awful.
Foddy, like most game designers who’ve never really been in the limelight, is a tough read. He’s used the rotational mechanic in both Little Mister Cricket (my personal favorite, BTW) and Pole Riders, neither of which even remotely resembles an exercise in sadism. QWOP (and the lesser-known CLOP) has ridiculous 4-button controls; Winner vs. Loser, his other track game, is as simple as it gets, and one of the runners always wins…hey, truth in advertising! The most unsettling thing he’s ever written has to be his Eleven Flavors of Frustration screed, but if you actually read it carefully you find that the degenerate hardcore mentality isn’t there; if anything, he comes across as a masochist. (You can almost hear the strains of “Hurts So Good”.) My point is, it’s grossly inaccurate to judge him only by CLOP and Getting Over It, when he’s pretty much doing what any small-time designer would do, trying a bunch of different things and finding out what sticks.
There’s a good rule of thumb when it comes to reviews in the Internet age: If most of the comments are positive, it’s good. If nearly all the comments are positive, it’s great. If all the comments are positive, it’s a STEAMING PILE OF CRAP. Let me make this clear: Nothing in this world is liked by 100% of the people. When you see something where every review is glowing, every recommendation is a big thumbs-up, every mood is warm and light and cheerful, that indicates a mob mentality so powerful that dissenters are afraid to speak up and get piled on (not a minor concern given how many lives have been ruined by these), or, worse, that whoever’s running the site simply deletes the offending comments or doesn’t allow them to go up at all.
A game that’s incredibly punishing or incredibly difficult is incredibly limiting. That’s what the hardcores never seem to understand, and that’s the grand primo firsties Muscle Power reason that not only has video game industry has largely abandoned the bad old days, on the rare occasions a publisher defies reality and goes the hardcore route, the game gets absolutely blasted. Mighty No. 9, anyone? The reason the industry is so soft and weak and wimpy and hand-holdy and snowflakey and creampuff is THAT’S WHERE THE MONEY IS.
My greatest cause for concern is that Foddy requested that no one who made it to the end of the game post the ending in any public form because it wouldn’t be right to see it without working hard and sweating and blah blah blah hardcore crap blah…and thus far, no one’s defied him. Granted, it’s only been about a couple months so far, but even that’s pretty long in this age of instant access. Everyone’s complying? Every single one? No one disagrees with Foddy, or thinks he’s out of line, or kinda agrees but thinks this is just too good to keep hidden, or is simply a punk? No one??? Hell, if I ever ran across a directive like that, I’d put it up on YouTube right away out of sheer spite! You’re not the boss of me, maggot! You know what…badly designed video games are not a threat to society. Mindless compliance with the party line is. Zun, one of the most beloved indie game developers in the damn world, specifically requested that no one post an ending to a Touhou game, and do you have any idea how many ending videos are on YouTube right now? And for that matter, who’s to say that Foddy is even in the right on this?
Personally, I don’t find videos where someone fails over and over and over endlessly delightful. I find them boring. I keep having to skip ahead, to the point where I sometimes have to go back because I accidentally zapped over something good.
Of course, if you like this sort of thing, go ahead and buy it. I won’t judge. Do please let us know how it works out for you, okay?
This puzzles me, because yeah, I’m most definitely in the same boat. And yet… I still haven’t thrown my mouse across the room. Weird, right? Somehow the fact that this game is incredibly frustrating on purpose makes it… better in a way. I dunno.
Mighty No. 9 got shit because it was a poorly-designed, ugly mess. Not because it was “hardcore” or “punishing”. Well-designed hardcore games still occasionally do just fine - Dark Souls, for example.
One possible hypothesis: the only people willing to stick with it that long are the kind of madmen who would accept the designer’s plea.
No problem with the idea. Hard games for people who like hard games. I presume they put the right level of time and money into it for their target audience, because not all games need to target everyone.
But that tag line makes me wince. I know what they are doing, using hyperbole to express how hard the game is to appeal to their audience, but even the idea of a game designed to hurt people just gets under my skin.
Obviously, I am not the target audience for this sort of thing.
I thought about trying this game, then I said to myself, no you will hate it with a white-hot passion. I’m not good with dealing with games that do this.
Not to mention that on top of the reviews about how hard it is, there are a couple of bugs…? A game like this needs to be perfectly flawless. If it is this unforgiving and then you get to a point where a glitch sends you back, for me that would completely end my interest if I somehow tried to stick it out. I think that’s the danger with a game like this. The developer is saying, I know this is really difficult, but keep trying and you can do it. It just takes one glitch to break that covenant between developer and player and leaves the player feeling betrayed.