Over It

The thing about a lot of games is that you’ve gotta be able to progress. The goal of Civilization is to dominate the world. In Metal Gear Solid you’ve gotta stop the terrorists from being able to nuke the world. In Shopping Cart Hero you’re doing sick stunts and the sicker the stunts the more upgrades you can give your cart. Along the way you get better, you improve, you win.

The goal of Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy is, ostensibly, to get over it (‘it’ herein being a massive mountain of stuff). The actual process of getting over it, though, is far less straightforward. You play as a man in a potwhose only way of moving is by swinging a hammer. It is, by design, unwieldy and frustrating. It’s hard to get anywhere up the mountain and one slip can (and will) send you careening back down to the very bottom and the only way back up is to climb all the way back up once more. Sometimes you’ll be met with a pithy quote from sources as disparate as Ice-T, Tokugawa Ieyasu, William Shakespeare, Arcade Fire, and William Carlos Williams. The lack of saves or checkpoints means that, nope, you can’t just go back to where you were before. The only way up is, well, up.

I will confess I come to this game eight years after its release a little biased. I had the titular Bennet Foddy as a lecturer in University, back when he was known as the guy behind QWOP (imagine my wry amusement when I realized that the man giving this week’s lecture in Games 101 was the architect of my gaming frustrations).The smattering of classes I took at the NYU Game Center, with lectures by Bennet Foddy, Jesper Juul, Charles Pratt, and many others introduced me to new ways of thinking about games. Many of these ideas seem old hat nowadays, but hearing about concepts like ludonarrative dissonance and narrative architecture was quite novel in 2013. Maybe games didn’t exist only to be beaten.

Getting Over It feels born of a lot of those ideas. Here is a game that is hard by design, a game that you have to try really hard to get good at and is unforgiving in its punishment. Like Dark Souls you have to get good, but that process is the game itself. You’re not getting better at Getting Over It just to beat the game, you’re also getting used to that loop of trying again no matter how far you may fall down. Probably.

This is the part where I admit that I’m pretty lousy at Getting Over It. Try as I might, I’ve not been able to get terribly far up the mountain. I can see how I could be good at the game, but try as I might, I’ve just not been able to grok the controls and I’ve heard more than my share of pithy quotes from my many failures. Yet through it all it’s been fun to try and get back up, as frustrating as it is. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to successfully get over it, but hey, the process is the fun.