Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
Developer(s)	Bennett Foddy
Engine	Unity
Platform(s)	Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android
Release	Windows, macOS, iOS WW: December 6, 2017 Android WW: April 25, 2018 Linux WW: Late 2018
Genre(s)	Platform[1]
Mode(s)	Single-player

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a platform video game developed by Bennett Foddy. The game was released as part of the October 2017 Humble Monthly, on October 6, 2017 where it went on to be played by over 2.7 million players.^[2] A Steam version of the game was later released by Foddy on December 6, 2017.^[3][4] The game was also released on iOS that same day.^[5] The Android version was released on April 25, 2018.^[6] The Linux version was available for beta testing in August 2018^[7] and received a stable release in the same year. The game won the innovation Nuovo award at the Independent Games Festival in 2018.

Gameplay

The player's avatar ascends a mountain using only a hammer

Getting Over It revolves around a man by the name of Diogenes – who, somewhat true to his namesake, resides in a large metal cauldron – and wields a Yosemite hammer, which he can use to grip objects and move himself. Using the mouse or trackpad (controllers are supported but make the game harder because of the lack of precision in the joysticks), the player tries to move the man's upper body and sledge hammer in order to climb a steep mountain.^[4]

The game is accompanied by voice-over commentary by Bennett Foddy discussing various philosophical topics. The commentary also provides quotations relating to disappointment and perseverance when significant progress is lost by the player.^[8]

As the player progress up the mountain, they are at a constant risk of losing some or all of their progress; there are no checkpoints.^[9] The game concludes when a player reaches the highest point of the map and then enters space. Upon reaching the conclusion, a message asks players if they are recording the gameplay. When a player indicates they are not, the game provides access to a chatroom populated by other players who have completed the game.

Development

Foddy had been drawn to difficult games while growing up; living in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, he was limited to what was brought into the country through imports, with many of these being games that lacked any type of save mechanism and required players to be sent back to the start of the game if their character died, such as Jet Set Willy. Into the 1990s, video game developers in the United States and Japan began adding means to save or have checkpoints, so players would not have to return to the start on death. Foddy said, "The flavor of being sent back gradually disappeared up to the point now where it's this boutique thing. People of a certain age still have that taste, or maybe everyone has it, but it's been written out of the design orthodoxy."^[10] In 2018, Foddy stated that the main reason he put his name in the title of Getting Over It was due to a culture that doesn't generally "recognize the individuals who make games".^[11]

Getting Over It was aimed towards "a certain kind of person, to hurt them" and took inspiration from Sexy Hiking, a similar game released by Czech video game designer 'Jazzuo' in 2002.^[12] Foddy learned of Sexy Hiking around 2007 from a post by Derek Yu on TIGSource, and according to Foddy, the game was 'somewhat of a meme among indie game developers', with Adam Saltsman having described Sexy Hiking as "the single worst game I have ever played".^[11] While dismissing Sexy Hiking at the time, Foddy found the game memorable, and later showed the game to students of his class on game design at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, whereupon he "realized how timeless the design" of Sexy Hiking was.^[11] Foddy stated that he is a fan of "messy, realtime physics puzzle games", and further expressed that they are "huge area of inspiration in my own work".^[11] In a now-deleted Tweet from 2014, Foddy asked his followers "would it be wrong if I made a sequel to Sexy Hiking? Given that I am not actually Jazzuo (as far as you know)".^[11][13]

More recently, Foddy had seen a return of difficult games such as through the Dark Souls series. In August 2017, Foddy observed that while there was outcry by players over the saved game mechanism in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which reportedly would erase the player's save file if they died, other players readily took to the challenge, showing renewed interest in games that were difficult by design. He said, "whenever you see something that disproves a strongly held design orthodoxy it's extremely exciting because it opens up new avenues for exploration", and considered Getting Over It as his exploration of this new development space.^[10]

Reception

Foddy receiving the Nuovo Award for Getting Over It at the 2018 Independent Games Festival

Getting Over It's difficult gameplay was praised by reviewers, including PC Gamer writer Austin Wood.^[12] Rock, Paper, Shotgun listed it as one of the best PC games of 2017^[14] and GameSpot said it might have been the "weirdest game" to come out of 2017.^[15] Polygon ranked it 36th on their list of the 50 best games of 2017.^[16]

An Easter egg to Getting Over It appears in the game Just Cause 4. At a point on the game map, the player can guide the protagonist to where a cauldron and hammer are located. Activating them puts the game into a side-view mode, challenging the player to move about scattered obstacles as in Getting Over It, with Bennett Foddy narrating atop about the folly of the exercise and meta-humor of the Easter egg.^[17] Diogenes was added as a playable character to the crossover fighting game Indie Pogo in May 2019.^[18] Diogenes also appears as an assist character in the upcoming crossover fighting game Fraymakers.^[19]

References

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