Fall Guys Makes Losing Fun
Mediatonic’s newest game is all about friendly competition.
Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has been making waves since it was released on August 4th. Its success is largely owed to the team’s move to put it as free to play for PS Plus subscribers on the PS4, a tactic that helped Rocket League grow to become huge in 2015. It being free on PS Plus isn’t the only reason it’s rocketed into the spotlight though, its rapid gameplay loop has been great for people to watch streamers play on Twitch, as well as been very fun to play.
The Fall Guys gameplay loop is as follows: Start a match, get loaded into a match with up to 60 players, then play through a bunch of random minigames. Then, if you don’t get disqualified because it takes you too long to make your way through a level or if your team fails at a task, you’ll make it to the final minigame where you can win a crown. Crowns are the most coveted item in this game, other than the fun costumes that your jelly bean character can wear. The mini-games are typically obstacle courses, Wipeout-style, or team games with some strange stuff in-between.
The efficient gameplay loop allows you to lose quickly, which sounds bad, but is actually good? At least typically. It’s difficult to feel annoyed whenever you can laugh at yourself tripping over another player and falling into some slime. And when you lose, it’s so easy to just play another game. With how quickly you can lose and start another game, Fall Guys has cemented itself as the game of the moment. One has to wonder if it is also partially because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Something that feels extremely silly and ridiculous to play might just be the thing people need when everything feels so stressful at the moment.
Fall Guys has also tapped into a nearly untapped vein of potential: the non-shooter battle royale. We’ve seen many iterations of the PUBG-like battle royale (Fortnite being the most popular), but there hasn’t been a popular battle royale quite like this until now. With Fall Guys as the first big game in this genre, I’m personally hoping for more, fun, creative games like it. They’re likely hard to get off the ground, as a dedicated server network can be expensive, but for Fall Guys it paid off.
Besides, this game shows that you don’t need to win in order to have fun. The music feels Splatoon-esque with human(bean?)-like voices that feel like they’re cheering you on as you try not to fall off a see-saw and get set back in the obstacle course you’re dashing through. Losing being fun might seem unusual to some, but it’s because the game can be so enjoyable to play. As a lapsed Overwatch and Splatoon player I know I’ve had games where everyone I was fighting played great and the match was fun but I still lost. And it’s fine! Losing is fine sometimes. Close games where I lose are sometimes the most fun games I play. In Fall Guys especially, it’s so easy to play another game that I don’t mind.
Some examples of how I lost matches in case you you still don’t understand:
- Could not hop over a wall after sliding down a slime-covered slope
- I fell into some slime and got eliminated
- I tripped over a wooden bar and fell into slime
- I fell off a seesaw that went too steep
- Another player took my tail and my team was eliminated because too few of us had tails
- Another team blocked a ball I was pushing down a slope and their ball got into the goal first
- A different team stole too many eggs from my team
All of these situations feel ridiculous to explain, and at times frustrated me. But once I exited the game it was so easy to say “maybe just one more game” and try again.
How silly your little jelly bean character is, how goofy they look when they land slightly wrong and topple on their side, and how funny it is to watch others just walk off a ledge because they accidentally jumped too late makes the game too enjoyable to be angry at. The game can be so silly to lose. And you don’t have to be first in any regard until the last round, where you need to typically need to be the first to do or not to do something.
There are even checkpoints mid-level to make sure you don’t get too discouraged. The most annoying thing that could happen in terms of progression is getting up to the last minigame then losing, which took maybe ten minutes over a couple rounds. You’ll still gain some experience and “Kudos” (the in-game currency) that you can use to buy different costumes or patterns for your jelly bean to wear.
Fall Guys is the game of the moment, and I personally am hoping it keeps that spot for awhile.
Fall Guys is out now on Steam and PS4
