Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a platformer video game created by developer Bennett Foddy and released on October 7th, 2017. The game consists of a mountain with various levels and obstacles that the player has to overcome using controls that are very unfriendly to the player (a signature game mechanic of Bennett Foddy's). The game also features quotes from famous writers and musicians when the player falls down the mountain and a monologue voiced by Bennett Foddy when the player is going up the mountain.

Quotes

• Oof, you lost a lot of progress. That’s a deep frustration, a real punch in the gut.

• Uff… Sorry about that.

• Oh no, it happened again. Keep on trying, don’t let it get to you.

• (Music) "Goin' Down the Road Feeling Bad" - Cliff Carlisle

• This thing that we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down. - Mary Pickford

• The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears. — John Vance Cheney

• The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal. — C.S. Lewis

• I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet consciences. — William Shakespeare

• You cannot believe now that you'll ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it, will make you less miserable now. — Abraham Lincoln

• (Music) 'Poor me Blues' — Edna Hicks

• Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die. — Mary Frye

• To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in the suffering. — Friedrich Nietzsche

• Life is a mosaic of pleasure and pain - grief is an interlude between two moments of joy. Peace is an interlude between two wars. You have no rose without a thorn; a diligent picker will avoid the pricks and gather the flower. — Sathya Sai Baba

• Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year. — William Carlos Williams

• Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been'. — John Greenleaf Whittier

• If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them. — Andrei Tarkovsky

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

• To the sessions of sweet silent thought
  I summon up remembrance of things past,
  I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
  And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste. — William Shakespeare

• Patience is the foundation of eternal peace. Make anger your enemy. Harm comes to those who know only victory and do not know defeat. Find fault with yourself and not with others. It is in falling short of your own goals that you will surpass those who exceed theirs. — Tokugawa Ieyasu

• She smiled in defeat,
  With unconquerable eyes. — Atticus

• Your failure here is a metaphor. To learn for what, please resume climbing. — Rob Dubbin

• Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone for the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, but has trouble enough on its own. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

• Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. — Christina Rossetti

• Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin' … Someone told me not to cry.
  Now that I'm older, … My heart's colder,
  And I can see that it's a lie. — The Arcade Fire

• I stand amid the roar … Of a surf-tormented shore,
  And I hold within my hand … Grains of the golden sand
  How few! yet how they creep … Through my fingers to the deep,
  While I weep - while I weep!
  O God! Can I not grasp … Them with a tighter clasp?
  O God! Can I not save … One from the pitiless wave?
  Is all that we see or seem … But a dream within a dream? — Edgar Allan Poe

• Can I see another's woe,
  And not be in sorrow too?
  Can I see another's grief,
  And not seek for kind relief? — William Blake

• In the end… We only regret the chances we didn’t take. — Lewis Carroll

• Our doubts are traitors,
  and make us lose the good we oft might win,
  by fearing to attempt. — William Shakespeare

• There are no regrets in life, just lessons. — Jennifer Aniston

• Pain has an element of blank … It cannot recollect
  When it began, or if there were … A day when it was not.
  It has no future but itself, … Its infinite realms contain
  Its past, enlightened to perceive … New periods of pain. — Emily Dickinson

• Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
  Where most it promises and oft it hits
  Where hope is coldest and despair most fits. — William Shakespeare

• Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy. — Kahlil Gibran

• This is the Hour of Lead … Remembered, if outlived,
  As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow
  First Chill, then Stupor, then the letting go — Emily Dickinson

• Feel your pain the pain in knowing this has Happened to you. The pain in knowing what more tears we have gained. But through all this I feel your pain — Octavia B. Hawkins-Richardson

• The mountain seems no more a soulless thing, … But rather as a shape of ancient fear,
  In darkness and the winds of Chaos born
  Amid the lordless heavens' thundering … A Presence crouched, enormous and austere,
  Before whose feet the mighty waters mourn. — George Sterling

• Whenever I climb, I am followed by a dog called Ego. — Friedrich Nietzsche

• I'm uhhh... I'm gonna let you be for a little bit.

Monologue

• 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, but 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.

• Alright, thanks for coming with me on this trip. I'll understand if you have to take a break at any point... Just find a safe place to stop, and quit the game. And don't worry, I'll save your progress, always. Even your mistakes.

• This game is an homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled 'Sexy Hiking'. The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they're often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They're built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.

• In a certain way, Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It's built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it's one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it's flavour. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer, or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly, in danger of falling and losing everything.

• Anyway, when you start Sexy Hiking, you're standing next to a dead tree, which blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up. And there's a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogames are fake; you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method or the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixelated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.

• The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I'm not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game -- the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing, and it's authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I'd have an idea for a new obstacle, and I'd build it, test it, and it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn't bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault, as a player, rather than as the builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.

• When you're building a video game world, you're building with ideas, and that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them, they begin to harden and set until they are immutable, like rock. At that point, you can't change the world. Not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.

• 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 store are trash. I don't mean that they look bad or that they're badly made, although a lot of them are -- I mean that they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a 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.

• Over time, we've poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh, untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the digital age. You could build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.

• Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash heap of creativity's fountain. A landfill of everything we've ever thought of in it, grand, infinite, and unsorted.

• There's 3D models of breakfast, Gen-Xers' Fanfic novels, scanned magazines, green screen Shiah LeBeouf, banned snuff scenes on Liveleak, Facebook's got life-like bots with unbranded adverts, and candid shots of Kanye and Taylor Swift Mashups, car crash epic fail gifs, Russian dashcam vids, discussions of McRibs; discarded, forgotten, unrecycled; muddled, rotten, and untitled.

• Everything's fresh for about six seconds, until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there's years of persevering disappearing into the pile, out of style, out of sight.

• 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's just gonna get piled up in the landfill, filed in with the bland things?

• When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone's turned off by that. They want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that's not you, you're an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.

• Now I know, most likely you are watching this on YouTube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you. Like a baby bird being fed chewed up food. And that's culture too.

• But on the off chance that you are playing this, what I'm saying is trash is disposable, but it doesn't have to be approachable. What's the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don't hate it if you got this far. Feeling frustrated, it's underrated.

• An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That's not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice.

• It feels like we're closer now. Composer and climber, designer and user, You could have refused but you didn't. There was something hidden in you that chose to continue.

• It means a lot to me that you've come this far, endured this much, every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback you've forgiven me is a kingly gift that you've given me.

• We have the same taste, you and I. It's not ambition, it's ambition's opposite. An obdurate mission to taste defeat. You'll feel bad if you win, so I put this snake in for you.

• Have you ever thought about who you are in this? Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you his hand? Are you the top of his hammer? I think not -- where your hand moves, the hammer may not follow, nor the man, nor the man's hand. In this, you are his WILL. His intent. His embodied resolve in his uphill ascent.

• Now, you've conquered the ice cliff, the platforms, the church, the rectory, the living room, the factory, the playground, and the construction site, the granite rocks, and the lakeside. You've learned to hike. There's no way left to go but up, and in a moment, I'll shut up, but let me say, I'm glad you came.

• I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far, I give it to you with all my love.