I played what subjectively felt like 30 to 40 minutes of Getting Over It. It had me laughing out loud for about the first 15 to 20 minutes. Then I browsed the Steam discussions, played some more, and watched Bennett Foddy play the game on Kotaku’s channel.
I don’t know whether Bennett has said what the game’s truly about (they mention something at the beginning of the video, but I’m not too much in a hurry to take that at face value), and I haven’t seen it to completion, but you might as well call it a game against streamers/tubers, or making fun of them, and it would ring as much or even more true than a game made for them.
It’s also a game made on a commission using stock assets that happens to have sold a crapton, dominated, albeit fleetingly?, the Steam sales chart and that has spawned a horde of ‘git gudders’ that will even defend its controls.
As something that refuses to occupy that range of the seriousness band where most people agree the game is what it says on the tin, it’s inhabiting Poe’s law territory.
To me, the game was some bittersweet fun as it commented my progress (failures) through its sad, old songs (I assume all of them royalty free) and dispensed motivational bits that made me wonder how full of shit the people who wrote them felt.
Were they all lucksters who had it good? were they so full of their own emotional soup that they were fully serious about their own words? not impossible.
Those motivationals mostly sounded hollow or incredibly detached from reality as I was experiencing it.
All I can say is that this looks better to me than The Stanley Parable, although by introducing a skill element, it captures a kind of elitist audience that would otherwise call it a pretentious walking sim. The joke’s on them?
