Getting Over It is a game that punishes you for having the audacity to play it. The game doesn't throw obstacles at you in order to make it difficult; it's not Cat Mario, it's not a blue shell, it isn't even the Director from Left 4 Dead. Minus a few objects with physics (only one of which has any bearing on gameplay), the game is presented as-is. It's honest. There are no curveballs, no sudden surprises that will send you careening back to the beginning, there is only this mountain, your hammer, and the world's most frustrating movement mechanic. And it follows that, since nearly all the obstacles are clearly-defined, unchanging, and motionless, and since the physics, though frustrating, are consistent, there is only one source of blame for those moments of failure: yourself. It's not even that you're BAD at the game, it's that you're playing it at all. You could easily just turn around and walk away from the computer. You could play any other game. And you're tempted to, because Bennett Foddy makes himself into a caricature of his own message by being overly-pretentious about how the only way to succeed is through perseverance. And it's knowing that you could (and probably should) walk away that makes those seconds where you lose hours of progress all the more hurtful. You KNOW you're wasting your time. The game makes that obvious. But here you are, still wasting your time on a game that hates you for playing it as much as you hate the game for existing AND as much as you hate yourself for playing it. It's a toxic, codependent relationship; you could walk away at any time. The game will point you towards the door. But to walk away is to admit defeat, and that admission damages your ego, and you're always left wondering, "What if I could have made it work?" So, like the idiot you are, you keep climbing, and falling, and cursing the game and yourself, and climbing again, and falling again, ad nauseam, until your will is so broken that you've either deleted the game in rage or you've somehow, miraculously, reached the top. And the top is glorious, because it repays your perseverance in this toxic relationship by validating it. There WAS a reward. But even then, the toxic cycle recreates itself, because in that moment of lucidity, that ecstatic moment of "Maybe that wasn't so bad after all," you do the unthinkable, and click the New Game button, damning yourself to a repetition of your past mistakes, but with the cursed blessing of hindsight to tell you then promptly let you forget that you're walking into a prison of your own making. The worst part is that the game, in all of this, is indifferent. It hates you at the beginning, and respects you at the end, and this dynamic does not change upon completion. As a net value of positive and negative interactions, the game comes out neutral at best, overwhelmingly negative at worst, and in your folly of post-victory confidence, you've just willingly walked back into its hostile, uncaring arms. Even when you win, you still find yourself trapped, and all the while with only yourself to blame. No other game (besides The Game, which you just lost) is so devious about how it operates, so callously cruel in its intentions and execution, so recklessly, gleefully spiteful toward anyone who happens (let alone dares) to engage with it. Only the man who invented QWOP could have created something so insidious, and I anxiously (in every sense of that word) await the day that this work of the art form that is spitefulness is outdone. 10/10