When I played Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout a year ago at E3, in an appropriately themed trailer filled with bean bags and squishy, Kindergarten-safe flooring, I had a pretty good time with it. I'd always liked Takeshi's Castle, Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, Double Dare, and Wipeout--the kind of dumb TV game shows about people getting smacked in the face, from which Fall Guys obviously drew inspiration. I thought it'd be a fun game, but I wondered if it'd make much impact when it was eventually released.
Obviously, I underestimated the die-hard spirit of a group of cute, bean-shaped competitors all trying desperately to climb a pastel Aggro Crag covered in spinning torture implements and spewing giant, crushing pieces of fruit. Fall Guys has managed to crash through the deceptive foam blocks surrounding the gaming zeitgeist where so many others smacked face-first into a real 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 might be more surprising if Fall Guys didn't resonate with just about everyone. It's the perfect game for the moment.
Fall Guys provides some much-needed relief in a world where battle royale games are still some of the biggest names in multiplayer and provide stressful and sweaty "there can be only one"-style competition. Sure, Fall Guys borrows aspects of Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone--only one person wins its competition in the end, after all--but adds to them a notable caveat: winning doesn't actually matter.
I mean, yes, at its most basic level, the point of Fall Guys is to win. You and 59 other wobbly, squishy competitors race to be first in five different rounds of competition in a typical match (or, harkening back to the TV show inspirations, in a typical "episode"), and only one of you can win. But Fall Guys is intentionally designed not just to be hard to win, but to be hard to play, in the same way as comedic party games like Gang Beasts. Some of the game types, like the one where you crash through doorways in a series of walls, with some doors being real and others just being walls you slam your face into like Wile E. Coyote, are dopey on purpose. There's no skill to figuring out which doors are real and which are fake. There's just luck, speed, and clamoring over or bouncing off the competition, hoping that smashing your body through the gap will get you over the finish line in time to qualify.
In that way, Fall Guys is akin to something like Mario Party, where a huge amount of the experience of winning or losing comes down to the outcome of a coin flip, a lucky jump or grab, or showing up at a convenient time. The game is designed to make it easy to lose in stupid ways, because Fall Guys' goal isn't to make an intense competition, but a comfortable one. The game is an engine for hilarious, goofy moments. The competition is just the fuel that drives that engine.
And that's what makes Fall Guys feel like a much-needed gasp of fresh air at this particular moment. It's not a game where you need to buckle down with two friends, hone your skills, practice your callouts, and get mad when things don't go your way. It's a game where you sometimes get walloped by a spinning whirligig that catapults your character off the map, where you can get absolutely bodied by a 25-foot banana, where you and 30 of your opponents can all trip over each other as you try to get through a door, and where watching your friends try and fail is just as fun as trying and failing yourself. That's the whole point.
I can't overstate how great it is to have something that's just funny, inviting, social, and doesn't actually matter
The summer of 2020 is not the greatest of times to be living through, as it happens. In the US, in-person social interactions have come to a near-standstill, and optimism for the future as the country I live in struggles and, largely, fails to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic is hard to come by. We can't see our friends, we can't really go out, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon.
Then here comes Fall Guys, tripping over itself onto the stage. It helped vastly that developer Mediatonic gave the game away for free on PlayStation Plus, but that's only part of what helped drive it. Fall Guys is a low-stress, low-stakes excuse to laugh, preferably with friends. You can play it for hours, lose every match, and not feel worse for the time you sank into it. It's just as easy and enjoyable to watch as to play, and the simplicity of Fall Guys means it doesn't require any esoteric knowledge about game systems to understand. In many ways, it's a perfect quarantine game, in the same easygoing and social way that Animal Crossing: New Horizons is, appearing at the right moment to lighten things up for players who are trapped inside and not feeling especially great about the world.
I'm having a blast playing Fall Guys with friends--or even just watching them play. Because when I play Fall Guys, whether I go careening off the side of a seesaw or I manage to slip and slide my way to the top of the Slime Climb doesn't matter. Nothing about this game matters. And right now, I can't overstate how great it is to have something that's just funny, inviting, social, and doesn't actually matter--because with everything else in the world at the moment, the stakes feel way too high.
Fall Guys News & Guides
