After seeing the quick look for Fall Guys last week, I picked it up -- and I have to say, it's been fantastic so far. In short, it is exactly what it appears to be, so if you haven't liked what you've seen, then it's probably not worth it for you to get. By that same token, however, if you have liked what you've seen, you'll probably enjoy it for at least a weekend.

For those of you who've been under a rock this past week, or simply been bewildered by the flurry of clips over Twitter, Fall Guys is a multiplayer platformer with battle royale and game show influences. Much like Wipeout, or Takeshi's Castle, a crowd of up to 60 players run through a grab bag of obstacle courses and challenges, with the bottom-scoring or finishing players being eliminated round by round. Most of the fun of these aforementioned reality TV shows is watching ostensibly capable, dexterous adults flop around helplessly on slippery courses, or take embarrassing falls into slime/mud/water after being pummeled by a padded wrecking ball. To that end, Fall Guys intentionally controls very loosely, with a priority placed on physics. Between player collision, the obstacles on the course, and your character's tendency to ragdoll after clipping any surface or player too hard, the playerbase is really just a comedic, writhing mass of humanoid limbs. With this kind of setup, it's fair to wonder whether what's funny translates into actually being fun. We'll get back to this.

Fall Fall Guy's WYSIWYG quality makes it pretty easy to dismiss out of hand -- the goofy art style, floppy physics, and fast pace led one of my friends to note, "It looks like a streamer game." Which is to say, it looks like the kind of amusing, yet shallow experiences that are meant more for people to watch on Twitch for a weekend than actually play themselves. And while this has a lot of surface-level traits in common with a Goat Simulator or Surgeon Simulator, (man is there a cottage industry around jokey "simulators,") unlike a lot of "streamer games," Fall Guys, upon playing it for a while, feels like it was designed with care.

Take, for example, the obstacle course layouts. There is a conscious widening and narrowing of the player space -- most Race events start in a wide thoroughfare that players can simply run forward in, but soon enough, the platform starts to taper out, and players are forced to stampede each other as the players on the outer edges cut in. This is meant to leverage one of the game's greater assets, the physical comedy. "Hit Parade" uses this to great effect, as players are forced to go through a narrow, opening and closing gate in the center of the track (and right next to some revolving doors too, it's a real doozy,) almost always resulting in a Black Friday mob jumping, grabbing, and diving over a pile of ragdolling players in the center. "Slime Climb" has Wipeout-esque pushers (not sure what to actually call them) that need to be ran past at certain intervals. That's very doable, except for the throng of eager players right behind you who will inadvertently push you into the obstacle's path at just the wrong moment. Or was that intentional?

This brings me to the next thing I really enjoy about Fall Guys -- the wide range of player expression and agency. There are four simple actions, running, jumping, diving, and grabbing. This simplicity makes the game easy to pick and play, which is great, but the real boon here is how every one of these verbs can interact with other players. As I pointed out before, the simple act of running is impeded by the other players. Jumping is similarly fraught. You can collide with players mid-air and miss a crucial jump, and you can jump on top of another player and bounce off of them (this is either a good or devastating depending on the context). Diving in mid-air gives you more lateral movement at the cost of voluntarily flopping yourself on the ground, a vulnerable position. But it can be a great last-minute save, or a way to take unorthodox paths in certain situations. (Pro tip: good players jump, great players know when to dive.) Diving can also screw others over if you want to tackle them. Speaking of screwing people over, GRABBING. This one is pretty self-explanatory, you hold Right Trigger next to another player, and that person can't run for a bit. It's purely a griefing tool, but I love it. Say you're playing "Block Party", where different block shapes move across a stationary platform to knock players off. Well, you can hold another player long enough they can't get out of its way, and you're one step closer to the crown, baby! That example feels developer-intended, but my favorite grabbing trend in the game always occurs near the end of a round. During races, some people intentionally stay right next to the finish line instead of finishing to tackle and grab slower players before the finish line like demented linebackers (that's the correct term, right? I don't really football). So there aren't a lot of actions the player can take, but all of them have interesting considerations and can express what kind of contestant you want to be in the game.

One of my favorite multiplayer interactions in gaming is in Halo, when another player with a Warthog has a seat available and just stops next to you. It's the most human thing, no voice chat needed -- "Hop in!" Between the expressive animations and player verbs, Fall Guys achieves a similar feat several times during play. You can just intuitively tell what kind of player the guy next to you is by how they move. If you're near an edge and they start hovering towards you, your fight or flight lizard brain kicks in and you know, this guy is bad news.

Increasing this player expressiveness are some of the unique gamemodes outside of Races. "Door Dash" feels like a madcap variation on those classic statistics game show door problems, where only some doors can be opened, but you can only tell by flinging yourself at it. Being one of the first to jump can result in a lead... or a horrible loss as you futilely bounce against the door and watch everyone else stream through the gap 3 doors over. "Seesaws" play out like game theory, where you want to be on the winning side of the seesaw, but enough people have to be on the other side to lift you up to begin with. "Hex-a-Gone" alternates between defensively using as few tiles as possible, or offensively taking out other people's tiles. My personal favorite, though, is "Tip Toe", in which players have to make their way across a treacherous set of mystery tiles -- only a fraction of them can actually be walked upon, the rest vanish and plummet you to your demise, and a start from the beginning. Since there's only one way to find this out, a methodical, yet urgent game of chicken starts to take place, where a huddle of players stay on the last known tile, trying to push each other to each potential path forward as guinea pigs.

Not all the extra modes are winners, though. All the "Tag" modes are fun in a "us versus them" (some interesting dynamics start to play out as who has a golden tail and who doesn't changes) way, but like most of the team modes, it's an absolute toss-up whether or not you'll progress, and you have very little control of the outcome. "Roll Ball" and "Fall Ball" similarly, have some of those interesting player expressions I was talking about earlier, but they're just coin tosses when playing with randos. In the three team modes, especially, a dynamic takes place where two teams just informally agree to gang up on the other team, as only one team is eliminated from those modes. Also interesting, but... veering into the territory of not very much fun. The real lemon, however, is "Perfect Match" -- a memorization game that is not hard to memorize and doesn't have enough opportunities to screw other players over. On paper, I like the idea of a memorization game where social dynamics, like following where everyone else goes, or deliberately pushing other players off when the wrong tiles disappear, occur, but it's just too easy. I don't have a single interesting anecdote from my time with "Perfect Match", unlike almost every other mode.

But overall, that's okay, because loss in Fall Guys is incredibly low stakes. Much like PUBG did for Arma-style tactical shooters, a lot of the frustration here is alleviated when you can get into another game in less than a minute. This quick restart is also what makes other "bullshit" losses -- like when you're the first down the pit at the end of "Door Dash" but everyone else falls on top of you and you get stampeded so hard you don't qualify -- less disappointing. I should also shout out the floppy physics again, here, because the slapstick comedy goes a long way to making failure more amusing than frustrating. I asked earlier whether this game's loose control was funny or actually fun. The low risk, quick restart here makes sure they're one and the same. These low stakes also make Fall Guys a great glorified chatroom with your friends. It takes attention, but not too much, when you lose you can spectate your buddies and cheer them on. It reminds me of Trackmania in several ways.

So yeah. Fall Guys is very unashamedly goofy and easy to pick up, but I think there's a whole lot of good here. It's not the deepest game, but there are enough interesting courses and player verbs that I've had something memorable happen almost every match. The server issues from earlier, on PC at least, seem mostly ironed out (though there are random disconnects occasionally). The Fortnite-esque monetization, store, and battle pass makes me a little queasy at first glance, but for whatever reason, I'm finding it easy to ignore. If you're sitting on the fence, check it out! It's a lot of fun.