Digital Media Concepts/Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Overview

Bennett Foddy receiving Independent Game Festival's Nuovo Award in 2018.

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, usually shortened to Getting Over It, is a single player platforming video game created by Bennett Foddy. Published in October of 2017 and being released on the platform Steam in December of the same year, the game received positive reviews and has a sizable online presence. The game won the Independent Games Festival’s Nuovo Award in 2018. On the game's Steam page, the header for the game’s description is as follows: “A game I made for a certain kind of person. To hurt them.”

Gameplay

A screenshot of the beginning section of Getting Over It.

In Getting Over It, you play as the character Diogenes (a direct reference to a Greek philosopher of the same name), with his legs stuck in a pot and your only tool being a Yosemite hammer. With a trackpad, or a mouse, you control Diogenes’s upper body and hammer, using it to ascend the game’s mountain, which is filled with various obstacles and sections. The simple mechanic can be used in a variety of ways to scale the mountain—either by climbing it in large, swinging motions, boosting off the ground by thrusting the hammer downwards, or pogoing off walls and tight spaces to rapidly ascend certain parts of the mountain. The mountain is notably steep and unforgiving, with no checkpoints, which means that making a mistake could cost you hours of progress.

A screenshot of the "chimney" section of Getting Over It.

While playing the game and ascending into new territory, Bennett Foddy discusses various philosophies through narration. Otherwise, when you are losing progress, Bennett Foddy supplies quotes of endurance or suffering , and occasionally music. Although the dialogue never affects the game itself, it adds to the unique atmosphere of frustration the game strives for.

The game ends when you fully ascend the mountain, having climbed up a cell tower and launched into space. After a period of navigating through asteroids, the credits roll, and the game allows you to access a chatroom with all the people who have completed the game (and have an ongoing session; once you close the game, you have to ascend the mountain again to get access).

Design

The difficult nature of the game, both with the gameplay loop itself and the lack of a saving system, stem from a deliberate choice by Bennett Foddy. Playing the 8-bit home computer version of arcade games, the style of being sent back to the very beginning of a game at a single mistake was something he fondly recalled. On talking about this brutal approach to player retention in an interview, Foddy stated: “That’s almost invisible to you if you grew up playing arcade games because it was so ubiquitous, but it had a particular emotional flavor to it. You either get turned off by it when you’re five years old, or you learn to enjoy that taste and persevere and come back and try again.” The game is also heavily based on Sexy Hiking, a game made by a user called Jazzuo in 2002.

Dialogue

The two forms of dialogue in the game, ascending and descending, both have different intentions and trigger in different ways. All dialogue is accompanied by the playing of a jazz piece—Soul and Mind by E’s Jammy Jams.

Ascending Dialogue

Ascending dialogue is focused on the philosophy of the game, and the overall narrative Bennett Foddy is trying to convey. Each group of lines is triggered by the player reaching a certain point on the map, which can only be triggered once per climb. The combined length of the monologue is about 9 minutes and 50 seconds, and can be listened to in full in this YouTube video.

The beginning dialogue, which flashes on the screen in sentence fragments as Foddy reads them aloud, is this:

There's no feeling more intense than starting over.

If you've deleted your homework the day before it was due, as I have,

Or if you left your wallet at home and you have to go back, after spending an hour in the commute,

If you won some money at the casino and then put all your winnings on red, and it came up black,

If you got your best shirt dry-cleaned before a wedding and then immediately dropped food on it,

If you won an argument with a friend and then later discovered that they just returned to their original view,

Starting over is harder than starting up.

If you're not ready for that, like if you've already had a bad day

then what you're about to go through might be too much.

Feel free to go away and come back. I'll be here.

Descending Dialogue

On the other hand, descending dialogue is categorized differently. There are 47 ordered pieces of dialogue for the first 47 times you fall, with some falls playing a song instead of dialogue. After your 47th fall, the cycle of messages begins again, with the 48th fall having the dialogue of the 1st fall.

Each line is either a quote from a notable figure, or words from Bennett Foddy. For example, the 19th fall prompts this from the game:

Don't hate the player; hate the game. — Ice T

The 37th fall prompts this:

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits. — William Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well

The 42nd prompts this:

I'm crushing your dreams and dashing your hopes You're climbing a mountain with a hammer and no ropes.

There are also special voice lines for falling to certain sections of the game, for example, returning the "bucket zone" many times:

This gets more frightening each time you return. Knuckles whitening, stomach tightening, once bitten, so many times burned.

Other than the dialogue, there are 11 falls where music is played. The game takes one song, Goin' Down the Road Feelin Bad, as a motif throughout the game, with the song being sung by Bennett Foddy himself in the end credits.

Instances of Music Instead of Descending Dialogue

Fall Number	Music Played
Fall #5	'Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad' — Cliff Carlisle
Fall #10	'Poor Me Blues' — Edna Hicks
Fall #15	'Whoops a Doodle' — Buddy Weed and His Trio
Fall #18	'Born To Lose' — Tedd Daffan's Texans
Fall #27	'Going Down the Road Feeling Bad' — Gussie Ward Stone
Fall #31	'Easy Street' — The Pied Pipers with Axel Stordahl and his Orchestra
Fall #34	'Six Cold Feet in the Ground' — Leroy Carr
Fall #35	'When I Grow Too Old To Dream' — Dick Haymes
Fall #39	'Poor Boy A Long Ways from Home' — Barbecue Bob
Fall #44	'Going Down the Road Feeling Bad' — Ruth Huber and Lois Judd
Fall #47	'I'm Going Down The Road Feeling Bad' — Forde Ward

Philosophy

Through the dialogue in the game, Bennett Foddy discusses the idea of the imaginary mountain, built off of the efforts to surmount rather than what they actually are. The mountain in the game reflects that—because in the end, it’s a video game, and you don’t really have to play it. The opening dialogue even reflects this. The effort the player puts into ascending the mountain makes it a valuable pursuit.

It also discusses consumerism and capitalism, as firstly seen through the art direction of the game—as you progress, the mountains become increasingly composed of trash. It starts innocuous with a coffee cup, but grows to entire structures and chasms filled with discarded objects. Although this aspect of the game happens gradually, eventually Foddy points it out directly with his dialogue:

For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world.

And for the most part, that hasn't happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don't mean they look bad or that they're badly made,

although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink.

Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds.

Through hyper-consumerism, he focuses on the idea of trash on the internet, how it has permeated online culture. In that Foddy also grapples with the idea of the purpose of making something demanding, or hard, in this new era of culture.

In this context it's tempting to make friendly content...

That's gentle, that lets you churn through it but not earn it.

Why make something demanding, if

it just gets piled up in the landfill

Filed in with the bland things?

To conclude, Flora Meringold, a writer for Epilogue Games, has this to say about the philosophy of Getting Over It:

Getting Over It is as much a test as it is a game. It tests patience. It tests remembrance. It tests the player’s very ability to do the same thing over and again, meeting failure face to face, and yet climbing up to meet it again. This game is The Myth of Sisyphus.