"So I'm squatting here half-naked in a cauldron with a rubber mallet for control and it doesn't even work right?"
A German YouTube stripped down and squeezed himself into a giant cauldron and then used a foam hammer to control his way through a let’s play of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. It went about as well as you’d expect.
Before we even begin to describe HandOfBlood, the German YouTuber with a habit of getting into costumes for his let’s plays, we should probably take a moment to describe Getting Over It, the award-winning indie game about perseverance in the face of monumental adversity. Or perhaps it was just a game designed to infuriate its players into giving up.
Getting Over It was released in 2017 on mobile and PC as a deceptively simple platformer. You play as Diogenes, a man stuck in a cauldron who must use a sledgehammer to climb a mountain. There’s a whole book to be written about the symbolism here, but we’re just going to skip it and get to the real point of Getting Over It, which is that the game is hard as nails.
At any point, the player can lose some or all of their progress, requiring them to start over again and again and again. Developer Bennett Foddy will offer encouraging philosophical quotes at various points or when the player has lost significant progress, but other than that, it’s just you, a hammer, and the challenge of climbing a mountain.
It’s a challenge that’s hard enough using the intended controls or either a mouse or a touchscreen device. HandOfBlood had to use a foam hammer with a home-made control scheme consisting of a laser point and a receiver that didn’t work particularly well together. The motion controls didn’t at all resemble the on-screen movements of the character, requiring HandOfBlood to first discover how the controls truly worked before he could even attempt to surpass the game’s first challenge of a single tree. That took him 36 minutes.
The rest of the video goes about as well as you’d expect. HandOfBlood offers some interesting philosophy of his own because he never gets far enough for Foddy to start pontificating about pointlessness of existence. For the audience, at least, it’s a good waste of 10 minutes.
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