Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
[[File: |300px|center]] "If you thought Super Nintendo's The Rocketeer was horrendously tedious, overly challenging and boring at the same time, then this game is the modern-day 2d platformer embodiment of this." -Crappy Games Wiki
Protagonist(s): Diogenes Genre(s): Platform Platform(s): Android iOS Microsoft Windows macOS Linux Classic Mac OS Release Date: October 6, 2017 Engine: Unity Developer(s): Bennett Foddy Publisher(s): Bennett Foddy Noodlecake Studios Humble Bundle, Inc. Country: United States

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. It was very infamous for making millions of players (ex. Markiplier) extremely enraged in pure frustration by the controls and physics of the game itself.

Why It’s Intentionally Not Getting Over It

1. To write down the first problem about this game, it lacks all of the charm, likeability, and decent humor that Bennett Foddy did in his previous games like Qwop and Girp since it actually had some level of comedic value to the ridiculously hard controls that made it more funny than irritating and the extremely colorful graphics that went into it shows how those games managed to keep things interesting for the player.
2. Making a game extremely challenging and difficult because of the control schemes isn't automatically a bad thing if it's well-executed, especially since Bennett Foddy was well-remembered for doing that in his previous games mentioned above, but everything about this game, even from how the game was designed in itself, was solely made to make players humiliated, degraded and frustrated overall. Making this game painfully cynical and demeaning to the player, as it would humiliate the player with little to nothing satisfying or redeemable to take from the game itself other than beating it.
   • It's taken to the point that it reaches Desert Bus levels of annoyingly sadistic and unbearable to tolerate your losses, especially when this game comes off as a game that is literally made for masochists, people with long-lasting patience/motivation, or people with low self-worth to enjoy.
3. Because of the first pointer mentioned above, this game tries so hard to be like those charming games that are extremely hard to beat like I Wanna Be The Guy or Flappy Bird, but it fails miserably since it's frustrating just for the sake of being what it is, as such nothing really interesting happens throughout the game despite the constant narration, making this game pretty boring outside of being excruciatingly hard.
   • Especially since the joke of the game is that one's misfortune is funny, which is naturally a concept that can be done well given the right execution and the positive aspects about it, but the joke this game uses stops being funny when there's nothing interesting or different that happens in the game to make it that enjoyable or hilarious.
4. The controls, by default, are beyond oversensitive, clunky, floaty, and slippery. Flying off the edges of an area or ground that the tool clips onto will happen to the player more often than passing over something, this is what makes the charm of having a 'challenging control scheme' done so badly here. If you were to play this game with a controller, your hands will start to hurt after trying to get used to the controls for the very first time more often than not.
   • Speaking of the controls, even when you try changing the controls in the options menu (as seen in one of Markiplier's videos shown below), the mouse sensitivity will not properly respond to your mouse despite the settings you can customize on your very own. This all proves that the game's controls were wonky and over-realistic on purpose and it has every right to warrant criticism.
5. A bit like Superman on the N64, there are some glitches in the game that hinders your progress and throws you back, which is more obnoxious and painful than funny.
6. Bennett Foddy's constant narration that shamelessly plagiarizes quotes from actual people in the past (ex. Abraham Lincoln), which you will always hear over your misfortune (or success) alongside actual songs that'd also be played to further enforce the humiliation inflicted onto the player, is merely obnoxious, degrading and ruthless regardless of intention.
   • Even when he refers to quotes that bring 'supportive reassurance', they're often used in an annoying context. Especially when he starts off as nice, wise, and positive to becoming downright condescending, insincere, and snobbish! Which will make you want to make the narrator shut up at that point.
7. Despite the game having not too much of a plot other than overcoming the game's difficulties it sets out for the player to do to stimulate the mere concept of overcoming the challenges and hassles of real life, the narrator never mentions the very name of the character, Diogenes, who you play as. If you have to find the name of the character by researching it since the game itself does not even tell you who your character even is, that's poor writing.
8. The graphics, while average, are very unappealing, bleak, and look like it was still a tech demo in the early 2010s, where everything looks somewhat rough, plastic-looking, and superficial.
9. The vertical level design of the game, while somewhat creative on a conceptual level, gets somewhat boring to look at for a while since the graphics as mentioned above, aren't the best looking.
10. Referring back to WIINGOI#1, every time you slip and fall, there are no checkpoints to regain any of the progress you've made, which is more unforgiving and painstakingly cruel if anything. This means that the game requires you to always use careful precision to do everything (even when you adapt to the game's control scheme), making it completely hard to sit through.
    • Examples of these include Diogenes being so light you fall back when positioned at a certain edge or angle, and the tool getting stuck in several gaps that cause you to flee yourself back to where you just were by mistake and by accident.
11. It has an extremely hard-boiled message to keep trying again after you fail at something as a way to move on that, while complex and somewhat meaningful, is incredibly pretentious since the game never amounts to anything beyond that. Especially since there are plagiarized quotes that hammers down the game's message.
12. Before the ending credits appear, when you go up to the end of the metallic tower, it defies gravity and you can only push yourself upwards to beat the game. Given how much trial and error you as the player were subjected to, it is very much a weak joke that feels unrewarding and unsatisfying than anything.
13. Insulting Easter Egg: The most insulting and disappointing thing to the player is that you have to complete the entire game a total of 15 to 50 times to make your cauldron gold; which allows the controls to become a lot more responsive and feel less broken, who in the right mind would want to deal with horrendously difficult and tedious gameplay for more than 5 to 10 times? If Bennett Foddy was able to make the controls for the golden cauldron so easy that it's no big deal, then why didn't he realize how broken and slippery the physics were in default mode?! It's like he doesn't get the difference between challenging gameplay and fake difficulty when he made this game. As a result, this comes off as an essential middle finger to gamers who had to suffer through the game's bad controls for the first time.
    • To make matters worse, as seen in a gameplay video with Bennett Foddy himself, he didn't want nor think to change anything he made in the game, which is not the best mentality to have for making an intentionally frustrating game and not seeing how he should change the mouse sensitivity to be less unreliable.

Redeeming Qualities

1. Despite the ending being a total joke, it can be viewed as satisfying to a fair amount of players for how much they overcome everything in the game.
   • This type of mentality with persistence and looking more deeper into the complexity of Bennett's "anti-design" concept that was viewed in a humanizing and realistic manner may be the very reason why there are people who oddly enough, respect this game on a philosophical level. Examples of these include Good Game Design's video and this video by What's So Great About That?.
     • The extreme complexity aside, there are some people who simply find the game fun in a way by personal preference despite the game's massive flaws.
2. The music choice is very calming to listen to.
3. This game could have been done better if there was some amount of fun in it or making the controls less floaty. Especially if the overly frustrating control scheme was less extreme and clumsy.
4. Bennett Foddy does tell the player to not play this game if you're having a bad day.

Trivia

• The character you play, Diogenes, is based on Diogenes the Cynic; a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynic philosophy.
• 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. Many of these games 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.
• This game was aimed towards the vibe of "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. 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". 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. Foddy stated that he is a fan of "messy, real-time physics puzzle games", and further expressed that they are a "huge area of inspiration in my own work".
• Despite the backlash this game got, the game was positively received by gamers for it being considered to be more than just a "masterpiece of frustration".

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