![]() Screenshots of the game taken by the author.Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy By swanaramscop1977 Follow | Public Platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux Title: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy ![]() Yet, back at the start, as the narrator once again recites one of his many quotes about overcoming hardships and failure, and soothing jazz starts to play, I notice I’m smiling. As I reach a new peak, only to swing my hammer just a little too carelessly, consequently watching the mountain range fly past me as I feebly try to reach out for a protruding cliff, I wouldn’t say I feel happy, exactly. Life is meaningless and all our attempts are futile, but by embracing this truth we may find momentary happiness in the tasks we choose or are assigned to. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus writes that we should imagine Sisyphus happy. Yet I keep coming back to the foot of the mountain, and sometimes my attempts take me little further than they did before. I do not have the patience, determination, nor the aforementioned reflexes to practice the precise jumps or the lightning fast headshots from impossible angles. The game is a celebration of failure and repetition. Physics are accurate and the controls are precise enough, and while the obstacles are brutal, when you fall, it’s on you. They don’t let you off easy, but they reward practice and flawless execution. Hard games are, if not a genre, certainly a class of their own. Mind you, you can still fall all the way back to the start from here. Past the mountain range the milieu becomes increasingly eclectic. And if this game were to be described in one word, it would certainly be “Sisyphean”. After all, Sisyphus is doomed to roll his boulder up the hill, only to always see it fall again, for all eternity. Even the possibility of finishing it seems wrong. Yet I am startled, not due to his accomplishment, but because I had not thought the game could be beaten. I’ve long since resigned to the fact that my children are superior to me at all games that require even the least bit of reaction speed or hand to eye coordination. You’ve played this too, I ask? Yeah, I’ve beaten it, he replies offhandedly, with no smugness in his voice. Sometimes you get to hear music.Īt one of the occasions when the game has distracted me for far too long, my son comes over to observe my stumbling advance. ![]() As the name promises, you are accompanied on this journey by the voice of Bennett Foddy, the designer of the game, who lets you in on his reasons and motivations for making the game, as well as occasional words of encouragement. You, as the player, control his hammer with your mouse, attempting to climb a seemingly impossible mountain range built from a collection of increasingly random graphical assets. The protagonist of the game is a muscular guy wielding an oversized yosemite hammer, trapped from his waist down in a black cauldron. For a few weeks now, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy has served this purpose. I usually have a (and it’s always singular) distraction game that I launch when I’m too absent minded or tired for some grand narrative, an epic adventure or – way too often – actual work. To hurt them.” I wonder what this says about me. Nor is it intended to: As the designer of the game says in the trailer: “I made this game for a certain kind of person.
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