When the player character-this anonymous man with a terrible beard and useless legs-fails, he groans and huffs. It's also a nominee for the Independent Gaming Festival's highest honor of the year. It's a game that, over the past month, has been the delight of Twitch streamers everywhere who build their brand on games that invite histrionics. So I don't know how seriously to take Getting Over It. A strange and terrible glory, just to navigate space at all. It's a blessing, a marvel, a gift in and of itself. Enough terrible plummets down Foddy's unerring summit will teach that much. Playing Foddy's games, you get a sense that movement itself is something that should be treated as sacred.

QWOP deconstructs walking, and in the process conjures a feeling one might have upon tearing something in their knee, a sense of awe and horror at how complicated locomotion is and how impossible it is without the proper equipment. All told, it makes Getting Over It, as funny as it is, feel at least as sincere as it is cruel. Getting Over It casts its creator as both a vengeful Old Testament God and an unlikely guru, both doling out punishment and consoling when the pain hits. Here, Foddy appears as himself, wryly narrating the player's failures with ruminations about failure itself, about the pain of falling down and having to get back up again, while smooth lounge jazz plays behind his voice.