About

A Difficult Game About Climbing is a single-player game similar to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy in that a player controls a person as they attempt to reach an end goal through precise movement and imprecise controls. Following the trend of other recent additions to the Foddian genre, such as Only Up!, the game became a quick success in March 2024 after streamers on platforms like Twitch started to play the game.

History

On December 23rd, 2023, YouTuber and video game creator Pontypants^[1] uploaded the first announcement trailer for the game in which he directly calls out the inspiration gained from Getting Over It. In the trailer, the basic premise of the game is shown in which players control a character using only their arms and hands, moving them up a rocky surface by slowly climbing it one hand at a time. The trailer received over 660,000 views in three months (shown below).

On March 6th, 2024, with the official release of A Difficult Game About Climbing, Pontypants released a video^[2] detailing his 12-month development cycle. In the video he showed snippets of footage from Getting Over It while describing the state of gaming at the time that he started his development of the game, several ideas he had initially, and finally talking about the finer details of the creation process. The video, often watched by streamers before they start playing the game on stream, received over 975,000 views in six days (shown below).

Online Presence

After the release of the game in March 2024, several streamers who made content during the Only Up! meta were quick to jump on this new addition to the genre of difficult games.

For example, on March 9th, 2024, Twitch streamer and Red Bull sponsored Kaizo Mario player GrandPooBear uploaded a supercut^[3] of his run of the game, nicknaming it Only Up 2, which other streamers were quick to also do (shown below).

In the days following its release, several gamers attempted to speedrun the difficult game, with many trying to do challenge runs of beating it within an hour. On March 8th, 2024, YouTuber and streamer Ludwig Ahgren went live,^[4] with the stream title of saying he would beat the game within one hour or gift 100 subs to his community, with the stream lasting over four hours and 40 minutes (shown below).

Search Interest

External References