Some games like to hold your hand throughout the story to improve the player experience. Others, not so much…
Many people turn towards video games to escape reality, even if only for a brief moment, and enjoy a brief break from the stresses of the modern world. Others look at video games as a potential source of challenge, basking in the suffering of difficulty. Both attitudes see video games as a source of satisfaction, it is only the process in which they achieve said satisfaction that differs. Before continuing on with this list of difficult games, let me set the stage as to how this genre of ‘Foddy games’ originated and exactly what it entails.
The term ‘Foddy’ describes a slightly wider genre matching the style of games created by Bennet Foddy (the first feature on this list). Typically, Foddy games feature a frustrating style of gameplay consisting of climbing towards the top of the map. Climbing, however, is no easy feat. Falling back down the map is a common setback players will face. Even worse, there are no checkpoints along the way. It is meant to be a game in which the player can not mess up even a single jump or they fall back down a significant portion of the map, sometimes even all the way to the beginning. There are other attributes typical of a Foddy game, but that mechanic is the core feature that defines the genre. Above all else, games within this genre require a level of patience and commitment that no other genre can demand. Now that you have a good idea of what a Foddy style game is, let’s get into the hardest games of all time, all playable through the Steam marketplace:
There is no better place to start out with a list of Foddy style games than the original inspiration for the genre. Getting Over It came out back in 2017 and quickly gained traction amongst the streaming community. After all, everyone loves watching their favorite streamer rage when they fall and lose all of their progress they have made.
The controls of Getting Over It are extremely simple. Your character is a man in a cauldron wielding a sledgehammer that you will use to navigate the terrain. Utilizing your mouse, you control the sledgehammer to pull yourself up and across the terrain. This seems like a simple concept, but is much more difficult to do in practice. There are also multiple parts of the map that require the player to use the sledgehammer as a jumping tool by placing it beneath them and pushing in the opposite direction. This makes for some close calls on some of the biggest jumps in the game. Even better (or worse), these big jumps happen to overhang a massive gap in the map meaning that a missed jump often results in losing a huge chunk of progress through the map.
The first playthrough is often the best in terms of player experience as the narration provided often mocks the player and insists on making them quit. After a couple of game completions, you will get used to the mechanics and can constantly improve your time. From this, many people have taken up the game as a speedrunning game. The current record is set at a mind-boggling one minute and 24 seconds by Lockness06. While this is a pleasure to watch, replicating such an act is nearly impossible. I’d estimate that a first time player’s run will take somewhere in the realm of six to ten hours, depending on how often you fall and your experience with games like this one. As you can see from the record, however, there is plenty of room to improve your skills and consequently your time!
Next up on this list of difficult games we have Jump King. Jump King came out back in early 2019 and quickly rose in popularity due to the streaming community yet again. While the concept of the game is the same as Getting Over It, Jump King differs greatly in terms of mechanics and aesthetic design.
The mechanics of Jump King are as simple as they are frustrating. The only controls in the game consist of holding space to determine the strength of a jump and left or right to control the direction. With such an easily understandable control system, you would think that the game can’t be too difficult, right? Unfortunately, you would be very wrong. While the map starts off relatively easily, the platforms get exceedingly tighter the higher on the map you go. There are a variety of elements like wind, sandy platforms, and ice that will affect your jump in ways that you can only figure out through trial and error. Even more frustrating, the game often has narrow landing platforms hovering over massive holes in the map which will drop you down a major chunk of your progress in a matter of seconds. The worst part? Watching your character slip and slide all the way back to the beginning followed by a *splat* noise that you will soon be accustomed to hearing. At least there is a smoking hot babe at the top for motivation.
Jump King differs from Getting Over It in the fact that the map consists only of platforms rather than interactable terrains. This almost makes it feel like an extreme version of Doodle Jump, only a thousand times more frustrating. Jump King also has additional maps available in the form of DLC that come with the initial purchase. Furthermore, the community has created a modded map that is much more difficult than the original map. Even for experienced veterans of the original map, this newest Jump King map took many hours and multiple days worth of progress. Allowing the community to create modded map packs is a stellar move on behalf of the developers as it allows for more community interaction and results in new content coming out with zero effort from the development team. It makes me wonder why more games don’t allow their community to create modded maps or game modes as there are few drawbacks.
The final inclusion on this list of Foddy-esque games is Pogostuck: Rage with Your Friends. Like the others, Pogostuck sticks to the trend of scaling up a more or less vertical map while trying not to fall back down. Instead of jumping or climbing, however, you will hop on a pogo stick to reach the top. Pogostuck is likely the least punishing game on this list as there is a built-in mechanic to help recover from massive falls. Essentially, your vertical height lost when falling is stored within the pogo stick. Whenever you jump again after falling, you will jump up just as high as you have fallen. That being said, many of the times you fall from a great height, it is nearly impossible to recover without hitting the perfect angle on the bounce-back.
Another great part to Pogostuck is the ‘Rage with Your Friends’ aspect. Within any public lobby, you can see the other players in real time. You can not physically interact with them (which makes sense given the style of the game) but you did get to see others potentially fall all the way back to the beginning. There is also an in-game leaderboard which shows the users in the lobby who are farthest along in the map and their respective time. One nice thing about seeing everyone else is that you can see how others complete certain challenges within the map. Most notably, there is an extremely precise jump near the end that is tricky if you do not know the technique. One solution to that is just waiting for someone else to do it first and then replicate what they did. However, if the other players in the lobby are as inexperienced as yourself, you may need to look to YouTube to figure out the tactics you need to reach the top!
Popularized by Ludwig on YouTube, the god gamer gauntlet is a cumulative speedrun made up of the three games on this list. The order does not really matter, but most people start out with Getting Over It as it is the easiest to get a short time on. The best time that I can find online is just under ten minutes, which is an absolutely stunning time if you have ever played any of these games. Even many experienced players can not beat one of these games in under ten minutes, yet some dedicated speedrunners have managed to beat all three in that time frame.
The added time aspect to the speedrun adds a whole new level of frustration to the games. All three of these games were made with frustration in mind, so adding even more reasons to stress into the equation only makes it more so. Oftentimes, challenges of the god gamer gauntlet will be really good at one game, mediocre at another, and outright bad at the final game. This adds another level of frustration if you happen to get good runs in the first two games and then completely throw the run by messing up on the final game. If you really want to add a challenge, some players have even added in all of the DLCs into the speedrun. There are a couple of DLCs for both Jump King and Pogostuck making each speedrun more of a time commitment and, ultimately, more frustration when you throw a run after hours of playing well.
If you have never speedrun a game before, I actually think this is a great place to start. Not so much due to the games in question, but more the fact that all of these games are easy to see progress in. There are no glitches/skips that require luck, only mechanical skill that will get better as you play more. Just because these are the hardest games available on Steam (in our opinion), doesn’t mean you can’t speedrun them!
The hardest games of all time (on Steam) are a beautiful combination of solid mechanics, frustrating map designs, and even more frustrating controls. Their simplistic nature makes them seem easy on the surface but a couple minutes of gameplay will quickly reveal how aggravating these games can be. Play them all back to back to back in the god gamer gauntlet challenge for the ultimate display of patience and skill. If you happen to beat one or all of these games and you haven’t put a hole in your monitor then good on you as many others can not say the same...
Image courtesy of gamefabrique.com
