The new game from the creator of QWOP is as brutal as it is brilliant
Mountain frustration.
In Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy you climb a mountain, but the lower-half of your body is submerged in a pot and you climb solely using a large hammer.
The hammer mirrors your mouse movements and hooks onto branches and launches you up the side of the mountain - but it can also pogo you away from the mountainside too. Frequently, you will fall.
The controls aren't as finger-tying as in Bennett Foddy's famous QWOP - the running game where you control individual limbs - but mastering the swing of your hammer in Getting Over It is absolutely the game.
It's frustrating but upfront about it. "A game I made. For a certain kind of person. To hurt them," reads the Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy Steam page. Similarly it gives no quarter but never promises to. "Lose all your progress, over and over. Feel new types of frustration you didn't know you were capable of."
But it's all calmed by commentary from the man himself: Bennett Foddy. His ponderous comments mirror the game's ambience and he talks philosophically as you fling yourself around.
His comments are perfectly timed. Have your first big fall, losing a lot of progress, and the game will recognise it, and Foddy will chime in with an "ooh I bet that was frustrating" or something of the like, which made me laugh, then smooth it over with something else like "but falling isn't failure: not getting back up is".
Foddy also talks about the inspiration for the game - Jazzuo's Sexy Hiking from years ago - and the design decisions he made. It all helps take the sting out of the frustration on screen, as you begin to understand and appreciate the deeper levels of thinking behind what's going on.
It's my kind of game. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is £5.79 and out now on Steam. Previously it had been available in the Humble bundle.