Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in the §341 aphorism of The Gay Science:

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"

In doing so, he described the hypothetical question about how should we ought to face our lives faced with the plausible possibility of everything being repeated again and again in an endless fashion, coined The Eternal Return of the Same. According to Nietzsche, the answer lies not only within coming to peace with it, but to actively love our destiny, whatever it may hold for us.

Fall Guys is an interactive essay about positive nihilism. A treatise about the human struggle to strive for greatness in spite of all randomness and chaos, in spite of all the times we fall down. The takeaway's that we can always stand up and put ourselves to the test in the face of defeat. It's a sweet twist on the lack of inherent meaning in our world. Why suffer under grey and brown tones when you can jump and grab your fellow men for a brief moment in the great cosmic dance and laugh all together, for such is life; we share fleeting instants that come and go, and yet the feelings stay with us until we die. Maybe there's no meaning, maybe history is not an arrow but a circle. None of these should keep us from enjoying life.

Maybe one day, you will get a crown too, and life will begin to have a meaning worth living for.

Fall Guys is super fun for about an hour at a time about once a week. It's a simple platformer game with a battle royale aspect. You must navigate an obstacle course and be among the first to finish to proceed. The courses are designed to be fun and I actually enjoy this game a good amount.

Fall Guys being now free, the cost to play it is simply your time, and for that I say it's worth it.
The visuals are pleasing, and the gameplay mostly satisfactory with few bugs.
Duo and Squad gamemodes are borderline unplayable without friends as your teammates leaving leaves you at a permanent disadvantage the rest of the run.

The match types are varied though some are clearly weighted to appear more often than others, leaving the more unique ones to get shafted by races, which is a shame.

Having not played it when it released in 2020 I can't speak to updates then, but as of 2024 new content seems to be not very common. Microtransaction skins and some other misc features are still updated, but the available game types stay the same, of which there are arguably a lack.
This is made worse by the fact that there are few game modes all together. I would've liked to see more game modes like "Survival games only" or such.

Do give it a go if you're interested and have time. The only microtransactions are cosmetics so paying money offers you no advantage nor access to non cosmetic content, which is pretty good for a free to play game.

65/100

so goddamn soulless. really fun for 5 hours max, then you want to kill everyone

Now, i am giving this a 2.5 because i have logged hundreds of hours in this game and i did have fun. But promise me, if you have a tendency to get obsessed with video games, do not buy this game.

Its such a fun, innocent bean game. Or is it? The developers are really trying their best to make this game playable but believe me, its not enough. They keep adding new content and do not focus on existing bugs. There is a new game breaking bug every week or so.

And the physics are some of the worst in the game. People run faster than you and can grab you from twice as far away than you can, because the devs don't even want to fix the game's latency. You get pushed around by everyone, since aparently you're light as a feather.

And god, team games are a thing. Given that the collective brain of your teammates always seem to be under the age of 7, its very frustrating to maintain a good place in these tean games.

And what's worse is how toxic the community is. If you point out one annoying thing about the game or something that could be fixed they shit on you for daring to say it.

I have stopped playing everyday for about 2.5 months now and i am very happy. Granted, i would play with my friends everynow and then and the content is still lacking. I think Season 1 was fun enough but all of the bugs, latency, community, and endless amount of new team games just dragged this game through the mud.

this isn't even bad but let's be real this should not cost money to play