This Getting Over It speedrun ends in joy and anger

This speedrun of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy may not seem too impressive if you haven’t played the game, but it looks like a miracle for those of us who know the pain that Getting Over It causes its “fans.” And that pain is very much by design.

The game was created by the same man who made QWOP, and the awkward control scheme and frequent failure is meant to be frustrating. Your goal is climb up the mountain, and to keep trying even when you fail and fall back to the bottom. The higher you get, the more it hurts to lose your position and start over.

“What I’m interested in is the feeling of developing stakes just from the effort you’re putting into the game,” the game’s creator, Bennett Foddy, said in a recent interview. “Somehow, when I’ve get high up a mountain I feel like I’ve accumulated something. There’s a moment in hiking or climbing when you look out and see how far you’ve gone, a sense you’ve accumulated progress. If you feel as though that can be taken away and you might have to do it again, that adds a sense of importance and high stakes that really transforms how you play the game.”

You don’t see the player falling at all in this particular speedrun, which makes the screaming, joyous ascent even more of a beautiful thing to behold. What do you do when you master a game like this? How do you react when you turn what had to have been weeks of frustration into an act of perfection?

In the case of this speedrunner, you uninstall the game. And rightly so.