Boss Rush: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy’s Snake Obstacle Is Unforgiving and Unforgettable
Frequently, at the end of a videogame level, there’s a big dude who really wants to kill you. Boss Rush is a column about the most memorable examples of these, whether they challenged us with tough-as-nails attack patterns, introduced visually unforgettable sequences, or because they delivered monologues that left a mark. Sometimes, we’ll even discuss more abstract examples, like a rhetorical throwdown or a tricky final puzzle or all those damn guitar solos in “Green Grass and High Tides.”
Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a game of inches. You play as Diogenes (not to be mistaken with the Greek philosopher), a dude whose lower half is crammed into a large metal pot, as you slowly scale a mountain with a hammer. Unlike most videogames built around climbing and platforming, you don’t hit buttons to jump or bury ice picks in permafrost. Instead, you control the movements of your hammer with a mouse cursor, using it to hook around various detritus—houses, furniture, and many other seemingly random objects stacked into the sky—as you slowly make your way to the top of this mountain.
As can be expected from Bennett Foddy, the creator of the limb-flailing sensation, QWOP, basic traversal in Getting Over It takes quite a bit of getting used to. You’ll likely struggle to work your way over the first tree, slowly internalizing how to finagle the hammer around branches to get leverage as you swing it up and around. Perhaps the most important thing you’ll learn is that you can pogo into the air by quickly pushing the hammer into the ground, setting you up to then use a spinning whirlwind motion to reach the next ledge. Getting around is frustrating and finicky at first, but as time goes on, these strange motions become more familiar.
But while basic movement is tricky, that isn’t even the most punishing element of the experience. On top of these intentionally clunky controls, when you mess up and fall, you lose progress. It can be, like, a lot of progress. The game’s description on Steam pretty much says it all: “A game I made, For a certain kind of person, To hurt them.” While your status is saved between each session, there are no checkpoints you can manually reload, meaning you have to live with each screw-up, which are commonplace thanks to the hilariously spiteful level design. Many areas are somewhat contained, meaning a mistake only costs a few minutes, but sometimes you’ll come across a steep cliff face that will send you back to where you were hours ago. There are a lot of junctures like this, like the big drop next to the construction site or the infamous nightstand with an orange on top that has a clear drop to the starting area. But there’s one fall that’s more painful and feared than all the rest, one that essentially acts as the game’s final boss: the snake.
About 95% of the way to the top of the mountain, a bucket dangles from a string. To the left of the bucket is a sign that reads “DO NOT RIDE SNAKE,” and underneath is what looks like a petrified boa constrictor, its unmoving body extending off-screen to the left. The only way up is to delicately place your hammer on the bucket and catapult yourself upwards, with the goal of reaching the last cliffside to climb. I vividly remember the first time I got to the bucket; I experimented with different methods of launching myself up to the ledge, following the sign’s instructions as best as I could.
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