
From there, everything begins to look like an M.C. As you pass rocks and trees, a construction zone begins to take shape, materials laid out haphazardly in ways that aid your ascent. The mountain you climb in Getting Over It is built from these replicable B game assets in short, it’s something out of Diogenes’ nightmares, its recycled nature becoming increasingly apparent the farther you climb. And when a game is created from what the public perceives as trash, the game itself is then seen as, well, trash.

Just like food and water, media is consumable, so rapid-fire creation of it only results in an equally rapid-fire mounting of cultural trash as we burn through our endless feeds. But this argument doesn’t account for context. Many have speculated, Foddy continues, that all video games will eventually be constructed through this assembly line process, with prefabricated objects reused over and over to populate our virtual playgrounds.

“They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products,” Foddy explains. Sexy Hiking typified B games, he argues, which are “rough assemblages of found objects” assembled quickly and at little expense at the cost of playability. Alexander offered to grant him a favor, to which Diogenes shooed him away the conqueror was blocking his sun.īut how does this relate back to a game about a bald man with superhuman upper-body strength propelling himself up a mountain? Well, if you unpack the narrator’s words a bit, he spells it out for you.įoddy explains that his inspiration for Getting Over It came from a 2002 game called Sexy Hiking, an indie game also about climbing up a mountain with a hammer (who knew it was a genre?). Diogenes then lamented, “A child his beaten me in plainness of living!” Alexander the Great was purportedly very fond of the philosopher, and visited him once in Athens during his travels. To give you an idea of the man who’d become known as “Diogenes the Cynic,” he reportedly once threw away his only possession – a cup for food and drink – after seeing a child drink from a fountain with his hands.

Around the fourth century BC, Diogenes’ frequent and fierce public displays of his belief inspired several tales of varying authenticity until he became known more as a character of the period than a philosopher. And so he cast off all worldly goods, took to begging, and made his home inside an abandoned cask – thus why Getting Over It’s protagonist resides in a pot. Diogenes believed true happiness could only be achieved by living simply, through meeting one’s natural needs instead of those imposed by society. In this naming of his protagonist, Foddy calls back to one of the founding minds of Cynic philosophy: ancient Greece’s Diogenes of Sinope. The biggest tell being the name of our hero, the man behind the hammer: Diogenes. Foddy left several clues highlighting this philosophical symbolism peppered throughout his sarcastic narration. Wonky physics and an increasingly difficult landscape make every inch gained a battle, and if (when) you fall, you lose that progress permanently.īut as players overcome the pitfalls of their climb, what they may not notice is the metaphysical struggle happening before their eyes. But with Foddy, the game’s developer and narrator, as well as the devilish mind behind QWOP, things are never quite that easy.
#Getting over it with bennett foddy mode Pc#
The premise of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, an indie PC platformer released in October, is simple: get to the top of the mountain using a hammer controlled by your mouse to grip onto obstacles.
