A platformer that invents itself from its foundation in a stale genre, reaching back to the essence. An essence that understands that everything at its root is about platforms and moving around them, not about enemies, nor levels, nor obstacles, nor lives, nor deaths, not even jumping or running. A game that doesn’t care how you reach the top, it will treat you the same either if you were lucky or you worked hard, that if you fall it will just suggest you go back up. A mountain made to piss you off, but a static platform above all, the same mountain for all, the journey only yours.

Bennett Foddy kept reinventing movement, searching for the opposite of convenience, to understand and explore that rare bodies are capable bodies too, much more interesting than any standard one. In 2017, Getting Over It was released demonstrating that you could learn to climb with a hammer the same as you learnt to walk, then run, then jump, as we already did more than 40 years ago, and all the merits and failures were yours. If you want to capture the frustration of getting used to a new body, you must avoid any standard. In 2018, just 3 months later, Celeste released and insisted, over a search of the most comfortable body to ever be put under control, that you had it hard, but that if you made it to the top, the merit was yours, you overcame yourself. About every year, hundreds of precision platformers demonstrate that there is no friction going that way, that a small touch on what is already over-explored is the opposite of self-discovery. About every year, it becomes more clear that the Getting Over It journey was truly unique and personal, that trying to replicate it already misses the point. It conquered its own top.

Reviewed on Sep 09, 2022


2 Comments


1 year ago

"If you want to capture the frustration of getting used to a new body, you must avoid any standard."
Heck yeah, I'm in with that.
We've talked previously about this, specially about what is left once you learn the abilities and specificities of a new learned body, but nevertheless, it's always something interesting to overcome.

1 year ago

love this "searching for the opposite of convenience, to understand and explore that rare bodies are capable bodies too"