tedious???
2 Likes
I turn the sound effects down and the music off, and I listen to Disrete Music by Brian Eno
2 Likes
I love this game. It’s actually very friendly and meditative. A younger version of me would have been frustrated, and I have had my moments, but mostly it is a lovely exercise in patience and caution with a good dash of boldness.
I guess, it feels like a game that is okay with me not finishing it, which makes me more eager to finish it. The stakes are low, and Bennett encourages you to take breaks but keep trying. I dunno, I have to dwell on it more
6 Likes
Not sure whether this is a secondary inspiration, but this also reminds me of Umihara Kawase, which also had you climb around with an extremely finicky and occasionally powerful/elegant grappling hook, with a clashy art style.
I made it to (not past) the orange yesterday, after 4 hours or so. Like VirtualClint I’m not feeling very much at all the frustration the audio logs constantly claim I should be feeling, because physical progress is so obviously transient and it’s anyway possible to get back very quickly once you know what you’re doing, so it’s not like wiping in an RPG with sparse savepoints or anything. So I feel like Bennett almost caricatures his experience like Dark Souls marketing and the game is successful in a deeper way than he verbalizes – his design intuitions exceed his language.
To me what’s intruiguing about this game is that progress actually constitutes of gaining consistency at climbing each section, and I do start to acquire it after grinding long enough, but it’s not clear what it is precisely I’m learning. After all, the mechanics of the hammer are broadly clear from the very start, and all I seem to be doing is banging erratically around, never in the same way and not visibly converging towards perfection. Yet after a point some parts seem easy, then after playing too long I get into these phases where it seems I’ve lost everything and as terrible as I was when I started. So this game is about the mystery of learning, about my own brain’s ability to surprise me with what it can and can’t do given a movement challenge at once totally predictable (no RNG) and utterly chaotic.
8 Likes
My favorite tiny but remarkable addition this game has over Sexy Hiking is its approximation of fatigue. Specifically, if the character is only supported by the hammer, he will constantly lower himself as if his arms can’t hold his own weight. It means the player cannot rest until they have found a safe landing spot - they have to keep making tiny movements to stay in the same spot, which is dangerous as tiny movements can have huge consequences.
6 Likes
I got this game and I found it dismal to play alone, but great fun to play with an audience. If you can convince someone to watch you play this game or, even better, take turns playing it, then you’re gonna have a good time.
Pretty sure this is one of two games that uses the song Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, the other one of course being Streets of Sim City
2 Likes
I’d been playing on iPad for better ergonomics than the mouse – the biggest problem with that version has been mediocre framerate. I’m sure that now that it’s fixed I’ll be good at the game
2 Likes
A trackball mouse would rule for this game confirm/deny
In fact the 60fps did make me noticeably better at the game. Also this update eliminates the titlescreen and instead puts the title text floating in the air above the starting point. So today I fell from the very last jump of Orange Hell back to the title, A+ update
Up to a point, but this game actually strikes a fine balance between slapstick comedy and elegant precision. If the controls were terrible to the point of pure comedy then this would just be QWOP again
1 Like
I’ve been playing at 144fps and am the only one here who’s admitted to beating it. Sounds like a strong correlation to me (I’m not a statistician)!
1 Like
I’m finding it a lot easier to gain height at 60fps. At ~30fps occasionally I could pull off really high jumps, but at other times I had trouble even getting enough height to catch the first lamp in the shaft. My theory is that it depends on whether the fast part of the gesture happens to hit the frame boundaries in the right way – if there’s a slower movement mixed in the same frame then the engine takes the average and then you don’t get much force applied.
I’m at 120hz and I got to the orange in like 3.5 hours but have not made much of an effort since facing its wrath
I just bought this, and I use trackball mouse, so I’ll report back soonish. I’m hoping it doesn’t make it too easy?
And yeah the QWOP controls are ridiculous, but I made a lesson plan around using that game to teach the degrees of freedom problem in motor control, so it’ll always hold a special place for me.
5 Likes
I Got Over It
Nominal clear time was 5 hours, but actually it was at least double that. Because Friday while attempting the anvil jump over and over, it started to feel to me that redoing the entire rest of the game would be easier and faster than a single anvil jump, so with a strange, numb mixture of despair and hubris I opened the settings menu and tapped New Game
3 Likes
You were on an iPad still? I wonder if I got the wrong version.
Yeah. Bennett said on Twitter that touch and mouse control about equally well and that seems right to me. A few streamers I watched seemed to struggle about the same amount and on the same things as I did. The PC speed record is 2:16 and the iOS record on the leaderboard is 15 minutes, so if one of the versions controls better it’s PC (although the difference likely comes down to number/dedication of players).
1 Like
I get +100 fps on the main menu, but only 20 fps in-game
(my laptop, uh… sucks)
I’m able to get up to the chimney part rather easily, but have only managed to scale it once. Like, I fell down from there multiple hours ago, and I still haven’t managed to get back up past it. Truly, a chokepoint of chokepoints.
Falling back to the beginning has been delightful every time.
