10 Video Games Made INTENTIONALLY Bad To Prove A Point
7. Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy
Developer of the smash-hit 2008 Adobe Flash QWOP, Bennett Foddy has a lot to answer for. So many hours have been lost in trying to wrangle the disaster of limbs presented in his obtuse Olympics simulator. Many more hours have been dedicated to shrill early-YouTube Let's Plays of the product, which are arguably even more frustrating than the game itself.
Bennett Foddy is back with Getting Over It, wherein you control a little man in a cauldron who has to traverse a deadly world with just a hammer and a reliable fulcrum motion. You move your endangered main character by spinning this hammer, all the way over mountains, planes, and other structures.
As you might expect from a product by the developer of QWOP, this game is not exactly intuitive, or particularly smooth to operate. Despite all this, it was released on Humble Bundle where it was played by over 2.7 million different players.
The developer attributes this success to people wanting to play frustrating or inaccessible games.
Foddy has talked in length with Kotaku on what he calls the "aesthetics of frustration" with regards to this game.
“The flavor of being sent back gradually disappeared up to the point now where it’s this boutique thing,” he says. “People of a certain age still have that taste, or maybe everyone has it, but it’s been written out of the design orthodoxy.”