Fall Guys is the game that drives all kids crazy. They stream it on Twitch, they celebrate it on Twitter. They scream to the sky: Fall Guys is here and Fall Guys is good.
And they are right. Fall guys is Well. But Fall Guys is bad too. Very very bad.
Fall Guys is a battle royale game. You play as one of 60 players and compete against each other on a series of weird obstacle courses that bring back memories of Takeshi's castle or ninja warrior - if you've microdosed throughout the show. Sometimes you're alone playing Fall Guys, sometimes you're temporarily forced into a team setting.
Similar to other Battle Royale games, the numbers slowly decrease at the end until there is only one winner. But unlike other battle royale games, you don't play as a human with a weapon. They play as a purple blob, wear a headband and gym shorts, or in some cases dress up as a hot dog.
Fall Guys is a hilarious hotbed of mindless chaos. You bump into each other, bump each other off the edge, and mindlessly stumble towards the finish line the developers designed for you.
But Fall Guys is also a reflection of our own despair. A memorial to our most depraved instincts. A neon-lit reflection of a system that rewards the few and crushes the many into an alarmingly fine paste. Fall Guys is a dystopian nightmare, but it is our dystopian nightmare.
Fall Guys is a brightly lit hellscape of late-stage capitalism in full bloom. A video game where your potential successes and failures depend almost entirely on factors beyond your control. You could be heading for victory in the final event of a lengthy battle of the heads only to be tossed aside by a gigantic ball that happens to be shot in your direction. The slightest contact with an opposing player could launch you from a seesaw at a crucial moment. One wrong jump could be the death of you.
You could join the yellow team.
In Fall Guys, you might succeed because you were temporarily placed on a good (not yellow) team. Then in the next phase to be placed in a team that has literally no hope of survival. You could run in tight concentric circles for two minutes, somehow wresting victory from the jaws of defeat with a lucky attack on the level commonly known as "Tail Grip". You could find yourself on the other end of that lucky tail-grabber and cruelly eliminated.
And worse, if you succeed, you will slowly become convinced of your own superiority. "I won this race because of my superior skills" or "my slime climb strategy enabled me to outlast my opponents".
"Why not just the yellow team job harder and pull yourself up on your bootstraps? "
Fall Guys is absolutely a game of its time and hands down the game we deserve right now. It has captured the zeitgeist so conclusively that all other art forms could just as easily curl up into a giant fetus ball and wet each other together.
It is a compelling abomination, a Pandora's box intended to lure us further away from the light. There is no empathy with Fall Guys, no safety net for the less fortunate. In the end, only one can take the crown. The rest of us have to be happy to get to the back of the line. There is no trickle-down economy here, no mercy in this neoliberal dystopia. No hope for the oppressed.
In the end, we're all Fall Guys in this universe.
(Authors note: I think it's important to disclose, for no reason, that I've never won a game of Fall Guys.)
