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.
But then, I accidentally shot myself to the left. My hammer, which was outstretched above my head, hooked around the top of the snake, and I could only watch in stunned silence at what came next. I was stuck as if on a zip line, going further and further down as the color of the background went from the dark blue that signified I was almost in the atmosphere, to purple, to yellow, to light blue, and then finally to green. There was a metallic plop as Diogenes landed next to the tree at the very start of the game, the long descent comedically punctuated by the metallic twang of my pot hitting rock bottom. I was just at the end, but a single mistake took me all the way back to the beginning.
In just about any other context, it would be enough for me to uninstall the game and never play it again, a completely sadistic turn that would have sucked out my desire to continue. But the thing is, the snake was so perfectly in line with the rest of the experience and the specific emotions it’s trying to instill, that after the first few minutes (or maybe hours) of shock, I found myself coming back for more. One of the things that helped with this and many other calamitous falls is that Bennett Foddy’s voiceover kicks in throughout, letting you know about the design aspirations of the game and offering musings on the nature of failure. He talks about how deeply it hits when you lose progress in this way, whether it’s misplacing your homework or, in this case, falling off a mountain. While I’m sure some will chafe against Foddy’s monologues, especially after they’ve just taken a big spill, his words have a lot of merit. He conveys that this experience isn’t some bootstrap-y metaphor about “bucking up” or something; it’s more a meditation on the nature of failure and how we should be less hard on ourselves when we do.
However, while his words helped me accept being sent to the beginning of the game by the snake, it was the ensuing climb that gave me the greatest realizations. Compared to the several hours it took me to reach the bucket for the first time, the second journey was dramatically easier, not because I had leveled up Diogenes, but because my play had noticeably improved—I’d internalized almost every ridge of this ascent from repeated failures along the way. The other thing I realized was that, at least as far as this specific game was concerned, I’d been given the tools to “get over it,” as the title alludes to. I could deal with minor setbacks because I knew I could keep going and that these circumstances were impermanent.
After being knocked down by the final boss and starting again, the background quickly changed as I went higher: green, blue, yellow, purple, and finally dark blue again. Then I was back, the snake still terrifying, but a little less menacing this time around. While my first few jumps were tentative and overly cautious, eventually, I worked up the courage to start making serious attempts, and after many launches, I worked out a somewhat consistent method of slingshotting myself to the next area.
Then, I was on the unyielding icy cliff face of the last stretch, which felt almost impossible due to its smooth, slippery terrain. I kept losing my footing and getting sent back down next to the snake, narrowly avoiding the ride back down several times. I eventually figured out a way to slowly creep up the glassy mountaintop. Then, there was the last thing in my way, a radio tower, which I scaled and scaled until I shot off into space, bouncing between asteroids until I finally did it, I got to the end. I felt a surge of pride and satisfaction as my triumph over the snake was finally complete. I watched the credits, marinating in victory, and after going to the special secret area at the end (there’s a little prompt that makes you promise you won’t record, stream, or describe what’s there), I was back at the main menu. But then I did something strange, something I may not have done if the snake hadn’t made clear this success wasn’t a fluke. I hit “New Game,” and I started climbing again.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.