I went back and watched Markipliers and Jacksepticeyes playthrough of Getting Over It and also wanted to give it a shot, but since I didn't have the game, I resorted to this instead.

For a game as old as me, this is actually not that bad, it's not very long and the difficulty is alright if you understand the controls. I don't regret playing this lol

also the Donkey Kong music was nice

Feels kinda weird to say, but I definitely get what Bennett Foddy saw in this! Kind of insane to me how despite fitting into that mold of a "rage game" it's one of the most stress-free, pleasant experiences I've had in a game in a while: One part the pleasant sounds of MIDI DKC music, one part a sort of freedom to be found in the fucked-up physics.

See, in a game like Getting Over It, almost all fuckups will be due to player error. You fuck up a swing, you fall down the entire mountain. Wah wah. In Sexy Hiking, there's a sort of relief in the hopelessness of the engine, how sometimes you'll clip into a branch weirdly and be flung in the opposite direction, how you'll randomly get pushed in a direction you don't want (The game being four smaller levels certainly helps too since you lose less progress on each fail). It feels very zen, especially in combination with the afformentioned MIDIs and the simplicity of the art. Just you, a fucked up looking face, and a wall of pixels between em.

If you thought getting over it speedruns were absurd, sexy hiking speedruns are on another level man

I've never felt so in control of an onscreen avatar and yet so utterly out of control. The physics which the game's mechanics fundamentally depend on feel so incredibly random, and yet weirdly consistent? To master the game is to develop an intuition for how and when the physics will screw up and fling your character in a strangely predictable way. It's almost like you're using the game's glitchiness to overcome its own shoddy construction.

And yet it all feels so intentional, like it was meant to feel stupid, such that only the truly deranged could appreciate its exceptional game design. The obstacles seem impossible to overcome at first and yet, after throwing yourself at them over and over, you find that they are actually rigorously playtested tests of dexterity that provide specific challenges so that the player would be forced to intuitively master impossibly subtle mechanics to overcome them. Every tree branch that blocks your path begs you to hook your hammer in and climb it. Every jutting piece of rock that seems just out of reach taunts you, almost as if saying "Bet you wish you could jump, huh? Well...have you tried?" The simple placement of the terrain provides such a natural tutorialization of the game's unique and inspired mechanics that is nothing short of masterful.

An important question to ask, though, is now that I've completed the game, would I play it again? Hell no. This game is a nightmare to play. It's incredibly glitchy and chaotic and an incredible test of patience. I can't tell you how many tens of times my hammer fell through a length of rope for seemingly no reason. Or how many hundreds of times I tried to hook my hammer into a piece of rock after "jumping" into it, only for the tip of the hammer to read my movements as a "thrust" and fling me directly in the other direction. It also doesn't help that the game doesn't even lock your mouse to the window, so if you accidentally move your mouse away into a second monitor, you lose all control of your hammer until you realize what happened and move it back in, making it a rare case where a dual monitor set-up is actually a disadvantage. Nevertheless, while playing the game does let you recognize the genius of the design, I really would rather do literally anything else than play this game ever again. I'm certainly glad I played it all the way through once, but from now on, keep this thing the hell away from me.