A Difficult Game About Climbing couldn’t hope to be as meaningful or clever as Getting Over It, but it could have gotten very close. It did not get very close. I’m going to be comparing the two a lot here. To be clear, I’m only doing that because the comparison is made across all the marketing material for the game and also superficially within the game itself, even going so far as to include a quote that is also in Getting Over It at the end of the game. So, I don’t think this is unfair. In short, this is not a bad game, but I think you should go play the other one instead.

Full disclosure, Getting Over It is a top-5 game for me. In addition to containing a poignant little message about outsider art and B-culture, it succeeds in being a ridiculously tight piece of software. Very precise controls (despite what people often say) with reasonable odds of actual mastery of the systems by the time you’re up the mountain. And, to put it simply, everything in Getting Over It works because everything else in Getting Over It works. The message aligns with the shape of the game which aligns with the mechanics which align with the design of the environments you climb through. There is no such alignment of mechanics and ideas present in A Difficult Game About Climbing.

Nothing exemplifies this as clearly as the inclusion of checkpoints. Part of what made Getting Over It so cool is that after you complete an obstacle once (and especially after completing it a handful of times), you’re basically good to go every time you reach it. It embeds itself in your muscle memory and you kind of form a mental checkpoint. This would not be possible, or would at least have to be very different, if the movement were not precise. A Difficult Game’s movement is, as a casual, basically nonsense that is greatly concerned with momentum and swinging, but we still want the obstacles to be crazy because that’s what we all think Getting Over It does, right? So now you have a problem– nobody is going to try the pillar-to-pillar jump at the start of the second level 50 times under threat of full reset. Instead, we get checkpoints, and you get to try the jump, scramble up out of the water, try the jump, scramble up out of the water, try the jump, over and over and over again. Do you get better at the jump? Yes, probably. But is there a sense of progression, like how after doing Devil's Chimney a few times you kind of stop fearing Devil's Chimney at all? At least for me, the answer to that question is "no," and whenever I was struggling with an obstacle in A Difficult Game, I struggled with it all the way until I hit the next checkpoint. Whatever feeling you get from making incremental brain progress in Getting Over It, it’s largely absent in this game and replaced with the normal feeling of being a gamer and gaming through levels in a game. More on this later.

I think that all of the mechanics surrounding grabbing things with your hands are clever and it's a fun way to move around, but I have to draw a comparison to your primary means of interacting with the environment in Getting Over It: the hammer. In Getting Over It, by the time you pass Orange Hell or thereabouts, you basically know exactly how the hammer is going to interact with every surface for the remainder of the game (except for the snowy mountain, whyy). There are lots of materials and angles to learn. How solid is the contact between my hammer and the ground at this moment? You pick these things up as you climb until you have a pretty complete picture at the top of the mountain. This game gets sooo close to something similar in its friction thing, but it only ever goes as far as surface you can grab, surface you can grab but don’t move too fast or you’ll maybe slide, and surface you can grab but you’ll slide down regardless of movement. It’s not bad, but I don’t feel like I’ve got every material on lock, and the bottom line is that it is experientially less satisfying than operating and mastering the hammer in Getting Over It. If we want to do Getting Over It "again," we need something as good as that hammer.

I can’t help but draw a comparison between the hardest parts of each game. In Getting Over It, that’s gotta be Orange Hell. In A Difficult Game, it’s whatever that level after the construction site is, before the ice zone. I will henceforth call it “Really Bad Rocks, Where Everything Falls Apart”. Orange Hell feels like it’s an order of magnitude harder than what came before it, and there’s the potential for huge losses of progress if you slip. It should be unreasonably annoying and nobody should complete it, but they do. This is of course because of everything we’ve already talked about. The controls are rock solid. The sense that you’re making progress is strong. The strange way that the funny gamer man talks to you has you hooked. And, importantly, it’s actually not so difficult. You already have almost everything you need to complete it the moment that you see it, you’ve been learning it all along the way. It’s a hard obstacle that does a really convincing job of looking impossible. None of this is to say that you won't spend four hours on it the first time– you probably will. But you'll spend only a fraction of that time on the rock face proper and the rest will be spent mastering the route up to Orange Hell from the grill.

Compare this to Really Bad Rocks, Where Everything Falls Apart. You crash through the first several levels of the game in 30 minutes and then suddenly you’re here. It is superficially similar to Orange Hell in that it is a monumental jump in difficulty midway through the game that essentially opens up “the end part”. You have four ludicrously precise jumps to make in sequence, including the hardest jump in the game, which comes last. In my case, I did JUST the first jump for an hour. Jump, splash, scramble back up, jump, splash, scramble back up, jump, splash, and so on. At this point I had a 20 percent success rate on jump one. Now I get to practice jump two, but only on 20 percent of my attempts. The fudginess of the controls means there isn’t a lot of learning beyond devising new ways to throw yourself at the stupid task before you. The checkpoint directly below you means there are no stakes. The only thing threatening you is the possibility of the awkward swim back to the left if you fall. Nothing about this arrangement works.

Looking at these two obstacles, the central difference between the two games is clear: Getting Over It is hard, is meaningful, because of tension. A lot of the individual obstacles and jumps aren’t super precise, it's the threat of falling that gets you. The tough parts imprint themselves in your brain such that you become nearly incapable of messing them up after you learn them, and replaying the more mundane sections as you go means that eventually you will have done every part of the game enough to not even fear falling. And when you no longer fear falling, you will have overcome the tension that is the game's true challenge. Maybe a few hours ago you were tearing your hair out when you fell. Now you aren't really bothered. You got over it. The whole arrangement is enabled by tight gameplay, and the heartfelt message at the center is the cherry on top. A Difficult Game fails to replicate any part of this. It is not without merit. I think a lot of the individual levels leading up to Really Bad Rocks, Where Everything Falls Apart are fun to traverse, occasionally clever, sometimes bordering on genius (that big red beam in the construction site was especially cool to parse) and the game is good for an hour or so of fun if you take it slow. The art replicates the look of Getting Over It basically perfectly. It is a very functional piece of software that does not crash or bug out. But the nonsense really snaps into focus midway through, and I'm left feeling like maybe we don’t need to recreate the shape of a great game without having anything to add.