GETTING OVER IT WITH BENNETT FODDY: a perfect review in which I fail
In Which I Begin By Reviewing All Video Games
Once you click “start new game,” it’s already over. For the next few hours, maybe days — even months, for the gainfully unemployed — you will be subordinate to the screen. There are other things you could be doing. You could learn Polish. You could volunteer at the food bank. AGI might arrive in the next few years, leaving no millimetre of your world unchanged, and here you are with a box of pizza and a 13 inch monitor. It’s pathetic, the way you curdle in your enormous, infantilizing Snuggie. All that’s missing is a soother. What’s that? You want me to pass your vape?
Well, if we’re going to feel bad about ourselves, we might as well be intentional about it. Why not play the game known for hating you more than you hate yourself. Yes, and maybe, by the end of it, we’ll have learned something about futility, video games, and the art of suffering.
Into the carnival we go.
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In Which I Try To Get Over It
And so, for the uninitiated, let’s establish the facts. The game I’m going to review, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, is all about overcoming—or at least tolerating—your hatred for failure. And because no one likes to fail, it’s become (un)popular for being (un)popular. Just google the name and you’ll know what I mean. Getting Over It is famous for the intense emotions it invoked in streamers, then it became infamous for the emotions it triggered in the rest of us.
In Getting Over It, you play a man, Diogenes, who must ascend a hill. You are given an axe and frustratingly wonky controls to do so. Curiously, you don’t know why you must climb the hill. Nothing about the game in particular encourages you to do so. There are no points to be gained, no collectible items, and no time limits. There is no story line. There are a few voiceovers by the creator, Bennett Foddy, which variously tell you about the origin of the game and what Tarkovsky, Nietzsche, and Mary Pickford had to say about failure, but many players find them annoying and end up muting them. Most of the usual pleasures of the average AAA video game—the chance of ‘winning’ a round, of achieving narrative depth, of solving a stimulating puzzle—are absent, exchanged for… well, it’s not clear. Mostly, you make some progress up the hill, and then you fall. You do this for hours. You do this for days. The falls you take grow in size, become more devastating. Nonetheless, people continue to play this game. It has sold over 2.7 million copies.
But—why? Why did a game about failure, a game with less than a 10% completion rate, a game with no save files and where you must start over and over again and just when you begin to gain some momentum you—
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Anyone who had Steam on their dashboard in 2018 has heard of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. It’s the game about climbing a mountain in a pot, and this is what my review will be about. But first, how much do you know about Bennett Foddy himself?
Do you know he trained as a moral philosopher at Princeton? Does it surprise you that he studied drug addiction? That he played as a bassist in an electronica band before he lectured at Oxford?
Jonathon Blow, the darling of indie gamers, said he wanted to make video games for people who read Gravity’s Rainbow. Bennett Foddy, meanwhile, says he made Getting Over It “for a specific type of person… To hurt them.” Why? And why this intensity? The game, it’s true, is downright cruel. It’s a game that scoops the willpower from your body like a shovel driven into dirt, a game that leaves you feeling imperfectly lobotomized, your mushy brain leaking chunkily out of your eyes. Why would he do this to us? What business does a moral philosopher have pushing us over then holding us down?
In short, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? Why is he no—
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Any good review of Getting Over Itwith Bennett Foddy must discuss the sunk cost fallacy, because Jesus—
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Ah, did you know there’s a video of Bennett Foddy playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and that this video is called Bennett Foddy Plays Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, and that Bennett Foddy FUCKING FUCK OFF—
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And so we begin the game in a pot.
We’re a man, a Danish man by the looks of it, with sun-soaked brawny arms and a propensity to sweat. In front of us is a tree. In our hands, a Yosemite axe. No billboard, tutorial, or in-game text is needed to tell us what we must do. We know it instinctively. We must get over the tree.
This isn’t easy. The only way to move is with this axe, and the physics of it are all wrong. When you push straight downwards, pogoing, you go further than you intended. When you try again, auguring against an uneven plateau, you go less far. Then in the wrong direction. When you get the tip of your axe jammed strategically around a branch and make a big swing of it, ready to fly, you go down, not up. You take a deep breath, steeling yourself. You were told this would be difficult. You knew you would be made to feel like a child. You feel worse than that. You feel like Bambi on a slackline.
But you are not the type to give up so easily. You were the child who waited on the marshmallow. You would walk 500 miles. A trillion atoms came together just right to form you. You keep jiggering your Yosemite axe around, looking upward. You poke and prod and push. And then—it doesn’t take long—you consider giving up.
This, right here, is the first cut off. Most well-adjusted adults will persist for a few more moments, haphazardly, then they will shrink the tab and watch a speed runner finish the game in 60 seconds. They will stare out the window until they see the faint blear of stars, then go see what their partner is up to in the other room. “Funny game,” they might say.
The more curious players might mess around for another ten minutes. They will climb over enjambed cabins, Stonehenge boulders, and candy-coloured slides. They might come to understand that it provides a low-stakes environment for players to productively encounter the sharper edges of their emotions. The less informed might say “wait, who’s Diogenes again?” And then, usually after a good forward streak, the thinkable will happen: their reflexes will get the best of them, a bad push will send them tumbling, and down the mountain they will fall.
This is the next cut off. These players will be able to say, with a genuine though perhaps unearned world-weariness, that they played ‘that’ game. They will nod along with those who were less curious than them: “don’t worry, you’re not missing much.”
But you won’t do this.
It’s a stupid game, maybe, but you have already decided to view this in eschatological terms. You would now rather swallow a large boulder than give up. This, anyway, seems like the attitude you need to keep going, and you’re tired of giving up.
But this is taking hours. You could be learning to code in Java. You could be out at the bar. It’s ridiculous, really. Why are you here. Why are you playing this game. Could you imagine trying to explain it to someone from the past? It doesn’t even make sense in the present. Years from now, if climate change crisps our planet over completely or robots use us like circuit boards, they’ll wonder what we were doing with our free time. They’ll look back through a high-tech scrying mirror, see you as you are right now. It’s 10pm, you’re eating a third slice of lacklustre faux-cheese pizza, and you’re moving a pixelated man in a soup pot up a mountain of trash.
But you don’t listen to the voice screaming back at you from the future—you don’t try to read his lips. You’re smarter than that. You know it’s only an image conjured up in your mind to keep you from finishing the game. Tuck that id in your quiver, fire it over the horizon, we’re all superego now.
After three hours of upward movement, it happens. Every inch of progress took a thimbleful of effort. Your nose is inches from the screen, your eyes burned red and veiny by the cool blue light. You are balancing the fine tip of your axe on a fallen, international-orange crane. It’s not even a hard part of the mountain. There’s only one gap into which you could fall, and it would require calculated effort to do so. This doesn’t seem to matter. Some karmic logic must assert itself from time to time in this game. The gap looks bigger than ever, stretches itself into horrible proportions. You can practically feel the breezy, cruel wind pushing you towards the edge, beckoning you inwards. You should really slow down—take a minute to relax, walk around your kitchen, return to your body—but the game induces the gambler’s itch to keep going, no matter the cost. There’s no doubt about it. The game wants you to fall.
When you start tumbling down, past the orange diagonal that took you thirty minutes to beat, clean overtop of the cramped chimney, whole fathoms below the painful blocky double jump and deep into the soft sandpit with its manifestly tall walls, you realize, after a skull-chattering frustration followed by a kind of vacant resignation, that you value your time. You’re not willing to spend another three hours only to return to where you’ve already been. You don’t much care if the game is an ingenious critique of instant gratification or a unique commentary on the road to mastery. You don’t think twice about it. Here, at the beginning, you shut your laptop. Empty—
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Again, we begin at the beginning. I’ve already made so many mistakes. The temptation to quit, to command-A del this text into oblivion is tickling my thumbs. No, I’d rather print it all onto expensive letterhead and crumple it dead in my palms, move onto… something else.
But I’m sick of quitting things. I’ve already given up on a novel that took me three years to write. I started an engineering degree late in life, which required giving up on even more things, and now here I am giving up on the last dregs of this Montellier, fully flat. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a writer. That’s not entirely true. But it is almost literally virtually true. It’s less true now, in part because I gave up, but it could become more true again in the future.
I’ve made genuine sacrifices for writing. Financial, relational. If I thought it would make a difference I would add to the pile-up of adjectives: physical, familial, spiritual. I would give up more. Take my left hand. I’ll advertise your Depends Undergarments, your Vyvanse, your dick-pill vape oil. Sometimes the Faustian bargain seems fine if it meant I could write prettily, reliably. But these days I wonder if I just wasn’t made for it. It’s hard to know for sure, which is really too bad. When you want to be a pilot, you make sure you have 20/20 vision. If you’re trying for the NBA, double-check you’re taller than Muggsy Bogues. But with art, with writing, the breakthrough is always around the corner, and the whole community counsels you to continue failing—fail again, fail better.
It hasn’t all been failure. I’ve published work I don’t regret. I’ve been paid well at times. But all the bigger swings have been misses. I keep trying to make big commitments. In 2021, I moved to a small coal town near the border of North Dakota to write for ten hours a day and walk through the dying city. I chose the place for the sole reason that it had the cheapest AirBnB in the country, and in this, at least, it didn’t disappoint. My apartment was curiously empty, only haunted, occasionally, by some after midnight footsteps of miners and their girlfriends. These were some of the only well-paying jobs left in that town, as Trudeau had pushed an already shuttering town to the brink by vowing to end the coal industry by 2030. The food bank was well attended, the large library mostly empty. My room, close to the bellicose daily train and its shrill, histrionic squeaks, was an ugly closet of a room painted gaudy blue. It looked like an AirBnB crossed with a clown, afterwards mugged. It wasn’t designed with longevity in mind—actually, it hardly seemed designed with anything in mind, maybe wasn’t designed at all, just constructed. I was trapped in the bad intentions, anyways, of someone I didn’t know, and I guess it’s probably oversharing to say I was thinking of ending things. The place—both the town and the AirBnB—encouraged it. The mattress was also the couch. The stove was portable, and leaked gas. The fan required some encouragement, was not much more than a ball of rust. I spent a lot of time walking around giant fields of mud and staring at the sun, waiting for something to change, furiously writing. I stayed there for months. I couldn’t stop starting over. I didn’t get much done.
I shouldn’t break the fourth wall like this. Also, I shouldn’t have used the second person POV in the fragment above. I’m breaking the kind of rules that Chesterton’s Fence was made for, the good manners and literary decorum that I generally agree with. But this is an essay about failure, so maybe I’ve given myself some license to fail at this, too. Maybe I should take this a step further. There are elegant and inexpert ways to break rules, and a big part of this requires knowing your audience. I think I know this audience well enough after many years of reading the blog and its contests. These readers like an essay with a clear first person perspective. They want an essay that sets up a problem in simple prose and endeavours to answer it with unpredictable logic. Controversial topics are good, but only if they are treated thoroughly. Trendy ones—especially political (US), philosophical (utilitarian), and psychiatric (new drugs) ones—are top tier. The ideal essay would find a way to endorse IQ as a valid mode of inquiry, gently challenge the current wave of feminism, push against orthodoxy regarding charity, and come to some new synthesis regarding dictators in the Global South. This essay would eschew the original essayistic style of a Montaigne, a style that prirotizes jauntily thinking in action by communicating the texture of the writer’s thought (and environment) in a moment–for the more direct pre-Gonzo journalistic approach of distantly reporting on the facts. There are obvious merits to this style, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Readers, when they’re given a chance to write for these contests, generally adopt the style of the blogger who hosts the contest. This leaves the impression that they either know their audience or have one principal inspiration for their writing style—namely, the blogger. Let’s call it Malcolm Gladwell or Freakonomics adjacent, but for a more educated audience. Maybe I’d be better off starting over with this in mind. This would be a much better idea than alienating the audience by describing them in a somewhat bland, insulting, and reductive way.
But that aside, a better essay would find a way to make my failure mean something, and maybe it will, yet. Maybe I should assemble all the punily embarrassing things I’ve done to write well, here, in order to drum up the narrative stakes. Desperation literature—poking at your own wounds with a kind of gnarled, cancerous finger of prose—does have a dedicated following, and inflicting discomfort on the reader is essential to communicate the meaning of this game.
But one of the problems is that failure tends to be boring. Unlike some other more exciting stories of failure, I have not taken up heroin, adopted an extreme ideology, or gambled my savings away. I have a friend who was among the top 3 most viewed streamers on a major porn site before a break-up—he also had the highest math scores in his state, grew up near Robbin Williams, and is talented in other ways I don’t have time to get into—who now has a neck injury, lives on the edge of homelessness, and spends most of his time talking about how he wants to kill himself. But most stories of failure are more banal. For most of us, failure is a daily grind. You lose an inch every day, despite pulling on your end of the tug-o-war rope like someone with their life on the line. Taxes, hidden fees, false progress, migraines, misunderstandings, petty embarrassments—they layer over you like a thousand pieces of papier-mâché, giving you shape. But your failure isn’t all that interesting. Everyone has a friend who thinks their life is unfair—who thinks their average suffering is staggeringly unique—and often you’re trying to get off the phone with them. Still, they have a point. No matter who you are, failure can shake scales from your eyes you didn’t know you had, and the virgin world can begin to look awfully dismal.
Maybe there’s dignity—maybe it’s preferable—to give up. You don’t have to look far to find a good metaphor. Every year, the seasons start over. Millions of dandelions pop up in summer to be terrorized by millions of new two year olds who’ve learned the pleasures of pulling grass. Maybe crocuses have the right idea: press out into the refrigerator cold of an early spring, touch the warm glow of a high sun, then burrow back down for a long sleep, escaping relevance.
Even that paragraph was a failure—too off-key, amateurish, uncertain in its sincerity—I’m failing even in my section about failure. I’m falling too far afield. I need to stop narrativizing my failure. At this rate I’ll resort to more cheap essayistic tricks. An exultant and unearned conclusion is evidence of failure. Culture war rage-bait is too. I shouldn’t have inserted myself into this essay. I’m not Charlie Kaufman. This will only make a Salieri out of me. I’m living a failure mode. This is my failure mode. It’s indulgent to talk about failure. If you haven’t survived a war or outlived your child and you’re talking about suffering—don’t. This isn’t Tumblr, this is worse than amateur, this is overly intimate in the wrong ways. Shit, stop swearing—maybe you need to start over for real this time. Write about a different game. Failure is overrated anyways, probably misunderstood. Failure just precedes more failure, statistically it does not converge towards success. Maybe we should just do the things that come easily for us, nurture our talents, stop trying to be the small guy who lifts three plates, the ruffian trying to be Raphael, the that comparison doesn’t even—
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At the beginning, here, I want to tell you about the only game I played in 2025 that I managed to finish. You’ve probably heard of this game. It’s called Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and it was the first game that could reasonably be labelled a retelling of the Myth of Sisyphus. Nonetheless, it became, in 2017, the bestselling game on Steam.
This requires explanation. Why would a game that was made to “hurt a specific type of person” become popular? I you fucking derivative copy-cat it’s—
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Alright, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. It’s a game about learning to overcome your churning, Archean rage. It’s a game that requires Confucian levels of control—a kind of strategic, dispassionate detachment. The game trains, or at least rewards, emotional self-regulation—emotional IQ.
Or at least that’s what most people think the game is about. In fact, they’ve been badly misled. To really understand what’s going on here—to give a ‘Straussian’ reading—requires starting from first principles.
In other words, we need to talk about the cauldron. If you’ve played the game, you know what I’m talking about. The main character, Diogenes, never leaves his cauldron. In fact, we never see his legs. Nipples down, he is protected, shrimp-like, in a coal-black shell.
One’s left to wonder whether he even has legs, or whether his bottom half has gradually come apart over time, his skin peeling away like saltines subsumed by boiling water, his bones below the knee becoming broth. There’s definitely water in there, or maybe sweat, because our guy Diogenes is wet, always spilling more of his boiled-body water out onto the mountain. The smell must be toxic, the stuff of 3rd-world medical hospitals. But maybe our Diogenes isn’t human. Inside of that pot, he’s curled up his eight octopus legs into a single fleshy bulb which presses against every edge of his container. He’s been trapped in there to keep him from his horrible habit of sucking out the pineal glands of humans. By climbing the mountain, you are helping him escape his cage, beckoning him out of his Elba and back into the seat of power. Can you imagine the bloody scabby good GRIEF GOD FUCKER—
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A list of the things we must ‘get over’ in Getting Over It, ranked in ascending difficulty: solo cup, Bermuda grass, sandstone, granite blocks, canoe paddle, satellite dish, wheelbarrow, cabin, pipe, barrel, garbage can, pallet, ivy, lamp, crane, garbage bags, casks, concrete, dog house, bookshelf, brick, banana tree, highway divider, bathtub, safe, beach ball, chair, mattress, couch, bookshelf, painting of Diogenes the Cynic, toilet, lamp, IKEA furniture (lots), telephone wires, shopping cart, Pine tree, church, children’s play set, magician’s hat, cellphone tower, anvil, security camera, balls of snow, chimney, ice wall, hanging bucket, BORED—
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As I reached the second half of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, I began to see it as a disability simulator. You do not have perfect control of your character. And yet, you’re expected to traverse an environment that actively exploits your limitations. You sad—
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Answer this: Have you ever noticed that most reviews of books are written in text, while most reviews of video games are videos on YouTube. Text about text, video about video games. Where are the reviews of dance in dance? The paintings about paintings? Generally, text asserts itself as the dominant form for critically examining every other art form, and there’s good reason for this. Because you Chosser—
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At least Diogenes wasn’t afraid of failure. He lived in a barrel, masturbated in public, and…—
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After ten years of writing, I’ve learned the hard way about the cult of failure. The cult of failure’s primary teaching is that failure brings you closer to the truth. It’s a tenet spread from the optimistic minds of geniuses who overestimate our talents, to self-help books who flatter their audience, to professors encouraging their worst students. You are told that if you keep failing, you will fail upwards, as if you’ve fallen not into a sandpit but onto a smooth-running escalator.
Probably some of this is self-protective. It hurts to think about meaningless failure. No one’s selling popular nonfiction about how the O-ring, Deepwater Horizon, or appeasement are lessons in avoiding failure at all costs. And good luck finding something redeemable about someone like Andrés Escobar; if you haven’t heard, he was a Colombian soccer player originally known for his “clean style of play and calmness on the pitch,” later known for an accidental own-goal in the world cup, and finally known for being murdered for his failure. Or there’s Robert Falcon Scott, who raced Amundsen to the South Pole, faced terrible deprivation through alien conditions, wrote about his inevitable success, only to find their final destination marked with a beautiful Norwegian flag. This nonsuccess did not ultimately lead to some eventual triumph. Scott and all of his crew, the losers, did not get a second chance. Instead, they all died on their return trip to Britain.
Failures, according to this counter-narrative, are punished.
In an interview about movies, comedian and director Richard Ayoade talks about how he finds unrelenting failure funny. While Hollywood loves to juice up stories that affirm the American Dream—and, to be fair, to satirize it too—Ayoade says it’s funnier, and truer, to imagine someone quitting their day job, putting their livelihood on the line, and ultimately failing as an artist. This seems more honest, to me. I see it everywhere. It reminds me of Joseph Grand in The Plague, a character who writes and rewrites the first sentence of his manuscript while everyone around him dies. Despite years of trying, he does not, so far as we know, finish the paragraph.
All of this to say that the costs of failure seem underrepresented. Failure doesn’t teleologically lead towards success. Sometimes failures works like The Disintegration Loops, a tape that loops over and over again and in so doing gradually destroys itself, the magnetic tape flaking off the tape, the sonic etchings scraped away in parts, its fullness haunted more and more by its emptiness, growing soberly towards muteness. Seems kind of true, no? With each new failure, you become more robotic, more detached from your emotions, an imperfect image of your former self; you grind and grind and eventually there’s nothing left but the waste product, shavings or sawdust, swarf and chaff. Failure precedes, precipitates, more failure.
In a sane society, we manage the risk of life-destroying failure. Responsibility is metered out to people who’ve proven themselves, little-by-little, to have good judgement. But we are not sane, at least not entirely. For instance, we’ve learned that bestowing god-emperor power on children usually heaps risk on top of risk, but we still let people risk themselves. Gambling, apparently, is allowed. On WSB, you can watch people risk the forty-year savings of their grandparents—money made scrubbing toilets, fastidiously collected in piggy banks and hidden under mattresses, the money in some cases literally smeared with the sweat of their labour—shorting a toilet paper company. Generally, money is power, and so people who make money in one domain, maybe a domain where they are experts, can then exert power—responsibility—in another, risking failure mode. Oftentimes the failure of others becomes a failure for us all.
Failure can also be complete. This is what makes Getting Over It arguably, in some ways, dishonest—or at least incomplete—or maybe even subtly optimistic. In life, failure eventually, necessarily, leads to death. But in Getting Over It, you can always keep going. You can always keep going. You can always keep g—
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Alas, we are back at the beginning. We’ve been here so many times. We haven’t given up. Maybe we should have, but we don’t think like that anymore. We just keep trying.
We have learned some things. We have probably unlearned some things too, maybe even useful things, but again, we don’t think like that any more. We hardly think at all. We are not going to be fake about this. Failure, sometimes, teaches you nothing. Sometimes failure is just bad. It is not always redemptive. But we’re learning that failure also helps illuminate the success of others. This is true of the game, anyways, and it is true of life outside the game. When I enter a library these days I’m struck by the unimaginable weight of failure that preceded every published book. I know, intimately, that for every one hundred pages of text we see, more than five hundred were likely tossed. Some days, the process of writing felt like trying to squeeze champagne out of a dry boulder; other days, like inking the page with their own blood. Parents died in that time. Nieces were born. They kept writing.
It’s a new idea I’m trying on: failure is what makes achievement visible. I wouldn’t understand Bolt’s career if I’d never run. Alex Honnold’s free solos would only be imprecisely impressive if I wasn’t a climber. Every failure brings you closer to the pulse of someone else’s accomplishments, and so in failing we approach comprehension. Try wiring a basic breadboard for the first time, and then go stare at the circuitry of a rocket ship. It all becomes blindingly, perfervidly moving.
So in this spirit, let’s watch someone else play this game. Why not watch the best of them: the first sub-one minute speed run.
And so we do.
There is hardly a moment of silence before the game gets going. The speedrunner begins, wasting no time, with a few short slide skips before a surgically precise push over the first tree. The momentum and speed is already flummoxing. It’s like the pitter patter of a sequence of punches. Up he goes, without a single misplaced movement.
There is no time for jealousy. In some way that’s hard to pin down, we feel like the speedrunner. We have become them. Past the Stonehenge Boulders. Past the Devil’s Chimney.
Recognizable barriers that took us hours are cleared in seconds. We used to be crawling, now we are flying. Past the Orange Hell, past the Anvil Jump, past the snowballs.
It’s hard to look away. A game about failure has become one about perfection. There’s something vaguely ablutionary about it all. Like someone found a happy ending to Waiting For Godot. Like eating a Michelin star meal after burning your frozen calzone. Like sleeping in an angelic bed after years in a cave.
For a moment, failure has been chased away to the sidelines. We jet past the ice wall, past the shopping cart, up the cellphone tower. It’s all happening so quickly. Like time has been compressed. Like we’re driving across a route we spent 40 hours walking. Before we’ve had time to catch up to our feelings it’s already almost over.
Finally, and without a moment of hesitation, a final push of our Yosemite axe sends us off into space. It’s uncanny. We float. Unburdened by gravity, we’ve reached the final frontier. Nothing can stop us now, and effort is no longer required; it’s true, we can relax every muscle; the long march is over. Parts of ourselves we weren’t aware of—down some odd neurochemical tunnel of the mind, inside an unnamable part of our stomachs—are warmed and calmed, and there is absolutely nothing left to do. For a moment, we drop the axe.