My favorite video game that isn’t a first-person shooter (which I’m arbitrarily grouping Portal 2 under), the only one I’ve paid money for in the past five or so years, is one that I don’t know if I’ll ever finish, or even get more than a quarter through. Mostly this is because I’m simply not very good at it, and I don’t know if I’ll ever take the time to dedicate myself to mastering its single control and mechanics. But it’s also because there’s a certain purity in my mind that I’ve built up around the game, a deliberately contrary view of it to the various videos I’ve seen of those who have tried and failed and saw it as something to be mastered, even conquered, rather than savored.

That game is Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, the masterpiece from the eponymous creator of the even more infamous/reviled QWOP. On first glance, the incomprehensible simplicity of that game seems equally applicable here: once again, the player controls a person who can only move towards an unknown objective through absurd means; there, the individual control of leg muscles, here, by being propelled with a rock-climbing hammer while seated inside a pot. The construction of the game, ascending a tall mountain while constantly in danger of falling off and losing all of one’s progress, has been the central bugbear of any streamer or YouTuber who has attempted it, focusing on gameplay and accomplishment above all else.

But to look at this game this way seems to miss the entire point, to me. For the other half of the game (leaving aside the actual mountain/objects the player is scaling, which I’ll get to in a moment) is its audio component. Most of this comes in the form of Foddy’s narration, which is scripted to a certain degree — in the form of something akin to a developer’s commentary, though the musings are too wide-ranging *and* too intimate to be limited to that categorization — but also incorporates music cues and quotes from such varied sources as Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ice-T, triggered when the player inevitably falls from a great height.

It’s absolutely hyperbolic to say this, but I truly believe the only possible way to adapt this game would have been directed by Godard and starring Buster Keaton. I fully acknowledge that my experience with games is intensely limited, but there’s something so singular about Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy‘s perfect unity of form and content and its ties to its status as an indie game with limited resources. The idea of repurposing digital assets into a weird amalgam hodgepodge, and having that be a tribute to one’s artistic forebears, is a brilliant way of having one’s cake and eating it too, of making a work of art that’s almost designed to be taken the wrong way and introducing varied ideas about consumption and outsider art into the Internet mainstream.

Last week, I loaded up Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy for the first time probably since I had bought the game. My grasp of the controls still isn’t great, I haven’t made it past the “first” screen. But when I fell, after initial frustration, I felt that calm satisfaction once again, at basking in the simple brilliance that this game continues to be an exemplar of.