Life's difficult, even putting your foot forward is a daunting task of the physical and mental duress. Maybe it comes with the overbearing weight of disappointment, hardships, lack of joy in life, and feeling that you'll never be good enough for a million different things.
But the Sisyphean task of all is being able to walk on your own feet. Not figuratively, not metaphorically, literally. We all take it for granted how our foot works, but this guy, the biggest underachiever of all, manages to force us as the player to learn how to put the left foot on and the right foot out, be careful not to fall, or you'll start shaking your booty out.
Bad rhyming, I know, this game makes Getting Over It look like a walk to the grocery shop. You will be vain, and you'll kind of give up. But then again, if you're really driven, it's a pretty wonderfully silly adventure in the most Terry Gilliam/Adult Swim contemporary fashion.
From his bedroom, right straight to the wilderness of the mountain tops somewhere, Nate has the unfortunate task of walking over to the top of the glowing top. Along the way, he meets the strangest of folks, one in particular is the guy who can see Nate needs for a bathroom break.
And he just rebuffs him off, there's nothing to tell whether that was a legit help or ploy of sorts, but the awkward exchange sort of made it clear what is coming up next. Nate just can't catch a break, his journey is super onerous, every step is mechanically daunting task of stepping closer to the destination. You will fall, so many times that you'll lose count.
The gameplay works like this, you have to manually control where each leg will go. Both left, and right mouse button lift his legs, WASD moves them in the direction, and mouse wheel lifts or drop them. You have to sequentially do this every, single, step of the way.
Rough terrain, steep climbing, walking through death traps, planks, and here's the thing. You don't die, even if you land on your groin, you basically deal with the consequence of falling deep below, and starting from there to get back up top. It's super tricky, and at times you'll even miss some items to pick up, leading to interesting other shenanigans.
No UI, no health pick-ups, inventory management, it's super barebones, and just leads with this simple premise where what you discover is kind of out of the blue. Characters are very odd, quirky, and often times you'll just scratch your over what's going on. I even met a shoe salesman running a stall, but his items are too big for my guy. I mean, twice the regular human size, who is he even selling for in this barren place? Not to mention, they're all Australians, except for Nate.
And the funniest thing of all, guess who co-developed this? Bennett Foddy. No wonder this game seemed so similar, the silly toilet dropping music, bird chirping in tune, quiet atmosphere with nothing going on, and the silly things you'll see pop-up out of nowhere.
I get that Devolver had a hand in its funky nature, but making fun of every component in other games like the rotating map, compass, no health bars even. It's so vacant.
There's a lot to like about Nate, he's pretty modest. He doesn't want to impose his need for assistance on others, despite them insisting they want to. The insanity goes further when you're climbing way up top and the palpable anxiety kicks in more.
You can easily screw up, even if you've maintained the symbiosis of the mouse clicks and leg movements. You forget you need to use the mouse wheel to lift your feet or drop it down. There are the stairs even, and god forbid, the chick I have that's following me clips to the stair, and gets stuck. Spoiler alert, the little guy actually does. Poor thing.
Now, I've managed to come so close, sooo close to getting up on top, but my worst challenge was climbing with my own feet. Everything was fickle, till I dropped like a bag of rice from a tall apartment building. And then hit a mudslide and gone back to the very beginning. Woo is me. The bucket is gone, the chick is missing, and I think the portable toilet I kicked had a splat inside.
Above screenshots and GIFs are from personal recordings only
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