When I played Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout at E3 a year ago, in an air-conditioned trailer parked in the sunny parking lot occupied by Devolver Digital, I had a nice time with it. I’ve always liked Takeshi’s Castle, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Double Dare and Wipeout – the kind of dumb video game shows about people who smack in the face, which apparently inspired Fall Guys. I thought it would be a fun game, but I was wondering if it would make a lot of impact when it was finally released.
Of course, I underestimated the die-hard spirit of a group of fun, bean-shaped competitors, all desperately trying to climb on a pastel Aggro Crag covered with spiders of torture instruments and spraying giant, pieces of fruit. Fall Guys have managed to crash through the wall of the gaming zeitgeist, where so many others first hit each other in a false wall, only to fall behind and be forgotten. The goofy little party game where you can barely control your character well enough to be competitive has become the game of the summer.
Given the state of the summer of 2020, honestly, it may be more surprising than Fall Guys the net resonate with just about everyone. It’s the perfect game for the moment.
Fall Guys delivers some relief in a world where Battle Royale games are still some of the biggest names in multiplayer and deliver stressful and sweaty “there can only be one” style competition. Sure, Fall Guys borrows aspects of Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone – but one person ultimately wins their competition – but adds a notable caveat to them: winning doesn’t really matter.
I mean, yes, at its most basic level, Fall Guys’ point is to win. You and 59 other vicious, hurtful competitors run to be first in five different rounds of competition in a typical match (or, to listen back to the TV show’s inspirations, in a typical “episode”), and only one of you can win. But Fall Guys is deliberately designed not only to be hard to win, but hard to be play, in the same way as comic party games like Gang Beasts. Some of the game types, like the one where you crash through doors into a series of walls, where some doors are real and others are just walls, where you throw your face in like Wile E. Coyote, are intended dope. There is no skill in figuring out which doors are real and which are fake. There’s just luck, speed, and stress over when the competition erupts, and hoping your body throws you through the hole will get you across the finish line in time to qualify.
In this way, Fall Guys is similar to something like Mario Party, where an enormous amount of the experience of winning or losing comes down to the outcome of a coin flip, a lucky jump or grab, or appears at an easy time. The game is designed to make it easy to lose in dumb ways, because Fall Guys’ goal is not an intense competition, but a pleasant one. The game is an engine for hilarious, goofy moments. Competition is just the fuel that drives that engine.
And that’s what Fall Guys at this particular moment feels like a much-needed whipping of fresh air. It’s not a game where you have to buckle with two friends, refresh your skills, practice your callouts and go crazy when things do not go your way. It’s a game where you’re sometimes wallowed in by a spinning whirlwind that catapults your character off the map, where you can be absolutely bodied by a 25-foot banana, where you and 30 of your opponents all over each other can push as you try to walk through a door, and where seeing your friends try and fail is just as fun as trying and failing yourself. That’s the whole point.
I can not overestimate how great it is to have something that is just funny, inviting, social and that does not really make
The summer of 2020 is not the biggest time to live through, as it happens. In the US, social interactions are personally almost silent, and optimism for the future as the country I live in is in conflict and, for the most part, not dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is hard to come by. We can not see our friends, we can not really go out, and it does not seem like that will change anytime soon.
Then here come Fall Guys, tripping over themselves on stage. It helped a lot that developer Mediatonic released the game for free on PlayStation Plus, but that’s only part of what helped drive it. Fall Guys is an excuse to laugh with low stress, low stakes, preferably with friends. You can play it for hours, lose every game and you will not feel inferior for the time you spent in it. It’s just as easy and fun to watch as it is to play, and the simplicity of Fall Guys means it does not require any esoteric knowledge of game systems to understand. In many ways, it’s a perfect quarantine game, in the same easy and social way that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is, appearing at the right moment to brighten things up for players who are indoors and not feeling particularly great about the world.
I’ve had a blast playing Fall Guys with friends – or even watching them just play. Because when I play Fall Guys, it doesn ‘t matter if I slipped off the side of a seasaw or managed to slide and slide to the top of the Slime Climb. Nothing about this game is important. And at the moment, I can not overestimate how great it is to have something that is just funny, inviting, social, and that does not really matter – because with all the other things in the world right now, the stakes are feeling too high.
