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.

I could say more about each game mode, but I did want to comment on Perfect Match. I agree with everything that you said about it, and my opinion is similar to your own. As you said, it's too easy. That you can sort of stand in one place and just step over one or two spaces in each round of the game is a huge issue, too. It's rare for a correct match to be any further away than that unless the player has stood in a corner.

I feel like that game may have been more meaningful when the original idea of Fall Guys was to start with 100 people. There would have been more jostling about, and it would have been more difficult for everyone to squeeze onto matching tiles.

So how to fix it? One option would be to make the tiles smaller; but I feel like at that point they're just making a new map and may as well make a new game to replace the one being discussed. They could add more fruit, but that could make the memorization element overly difficult, especially for the younger crowd. I lean towards adding dummy tiles: pictures that are not fruit, but could look similar to the fruit. A bunch of purple Fall Guy faces instead of grapes, for example. Players would have to be more careful, without the difficulty ramping up too much.

@hansberg: Yeah, I think those are good options for increasing the difficulty on Perfect Match.

After writing this, I did have a game where I purposefully stood on a wrong tile and about 5-10 people followed me. At the last second, I jumped away and they all fell into the slime. So there are ways to make it interesting in the cutthroat manner of the other modes, but you really have to search for them.

I tried that once and it failed miserably; but maybe it was poor execution on my part. I'm absolutely not going to claim to be some sort of expert player. :-)

I've gone on a ride with this game. I tried it on my base PS4 a week and a half ago and genuinely hated it after playing it for about an hour. However, I decided to give it another shot and started having more fun with it and actually won during my second hour. I did notice, though, that the base PS4 running the game at 30FPS with frame dips in certain games mixed with worse than average input lag were holding it back and since my friends were playing on PC, I picked it up on there instead thinking I'd get like 5 hours out of it with friends and that would be that.

A week and a half later I've put 14.3 hours into it and have 15 crowns to my name (13 wins + 2 season pass freebies). It's got loads of issues but I'm having a much bigger blast with it than I thought I would. My only worry now is that I feel the pace they'll have to regularly roll out new events to keep things fresh and retain such a large player base may be too much for a small studio to handle. They brought in one new event, sure, but it apparently already existed in the beta and was only left out of the initial retail release due to a bug.

Also, I second Tip Toe being a good game. Lots of people hate how random it is but it's a fun mind game and it's also less random than it appears since only fake tiles jiggle every now and then.

Speaking of Tip Toe:

https://youtu.be/BRN7RtGgFPY

The 6:40 mark is key, here. This is a video of my latest victory, but Tip Toe is the most interesting part here. First place... without finishing the course. I hate that this is how I won.

@squadaloo: An unstable 30 FPS with input lag sounds awful! I think the sheer volume of players that have picked this thing up guarantees at least a niche-sized playerbase in the long term, but I agree that retaining more will come down to how frequently new modes come out/existing modes are tweaked in interesting ways.

A big help would honestly be some kind of system to ensure that players see more diverse modes more often. A few nights ago, my friends and I saw the same 4 or so repeated throughout the session. Some modes like Fruit Chute or the Wipeout-spinning-bar-platform-that-I-forget-the-name-of have only come up 2 or 3 times in 15 hours.

Now FALL BALL, on the other hand...

@hansberg: Ha, haven't seen that particular bug before. Congrats on the "victory*" :P

Played it a lot when it came with PS+ sub, after a few days kinda got stale.
Not a huge variety in maps or mods, luck is sometimes a huge factor especially in team games.

It's a fun experience and I'll probably play it every now and then but I highly doubt I'll invest a lot of time in that game.

@theoracleofgame: I love me some Fall Ball, but I do agree that it comes up far too often. Jinxed is one for me that doesn't come up very often. I don't love Jinxed, a team tag game where you're trying to infect the opposing team with a jinx (which is represented by a cloud of pink... looks like Pig Pen from Peanuts if he fell into a vat of Fun Dip); but it's a fine enough chase game that wipes out 50% of the players in a single round. I also almost never see it.

In my 7 hours of play time I've never won but I came 2nd like 4 times now. Not even final stage, literally 2nd place which is hilarious. A great game for when you need some happiness injected into your day.

I honestly wonder if there's some kind of equation behind the scenes which feeds certain subsets of users certain games over and over on some kind of rotation. On the weekend before last, I got nothing but Fall Mountain in finals above 5 players (otherwise it was Royal Fumble). Then for an entire week, I got nothing but Hex-A-Gone and Jump Showdown in their places instead until tonight when it again became Fall Mountain over and over. Likewise, my first week of playing I literally never got Jinxed and then I got it 3 or 4 times in the course of two days. I got Egg Scramble constantly for a week and then I started getting Hoarders in its place instead. Tonight, I literally got See Saw followed by Whirlygig in the first two rounds for 3 straight matches.

@squadaloo: There are weights given to different games. I only know that because Royal Fumble (a Final Round version of Tail Tag) was specifically mentioned as having its weight tweaked so that it will appear less often in patch notes from last week. I don't know if they have been continuing to alter that behind the scenes in a less official capacity; but I also noticed that, ever since my last post about rarely getting Jinxed, I now see Jinxed regularly.

Of course, it could also just be luck.