August 2023

NOTE: This post is meant to be a supplement for the original writeup, with many corrections and additions, therefore reading it first is mandatory to understand a lot of the context.

As you might have deduced from the original post, Only Up is a VERY bad clone of Getting Over It with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. However, I somewhat offhandedly mentioned something I will come clean about: I’ve never actually played Only Up. Yes, I know, how shocking that I’m talking shit about a game that looks terrible from the gameplay alone. However, I have good news for the potential naysayers who would like to discredit me for that fact alone: I have played the game! At least for a little bit.

I recently did a stream of myself playing the game, for the purpose of correcting any potential errors and adding to the original writeup I made, as well as to feel how it actually plays for myself. I didn’t expect to really have my mind changed that much, as I saw enough to understand how the game worked. Still, I figured I should give it a try. And wow, do I fucking hate it even more.

We’ll get to that shortly. But first, I’d like to mention something: a lot of the statements I provided in that post were based off some aspects that have since been updated by the developer. For example, the off-center camera has since been fixed with not only an option to center it, but also the ability to go first-person (albeit with a very low FOV). So yes, while some details were technically wrong, that really doesn’t matter when you consider how fucked the rest of the fundamentals still are.

Now, let’s talk about how it felt to actually play the game. Like I said, I didn’t expect to have my mind changed or my original points debunked, since again, a lot of it is fundamental to how the game works. There is one major thing however that I got wrong: there actually is commentary. You might be thinking, “well, it can’t be any good when we’re talking about Only Up, can it?” And you’re absolutely correct. The commentary is the most grating thing my ears have ever suffered through.

Like I said in the original post, a pointless commentary is worse than no commentary, because all it does is become grating white noise, since it has absolutely no substance. And that’s definitely the case for Only Up’s commentary. What sounds very much like a fucking AI voice is saying random “deep” quotes about #Society and some vague backstory and details about the main character from a first person perspective, implying this is the main character narrating. The latter actually sounds kind of interesting on its own, if it had any substantial relevance to the map, but again, it does not. All of the relevant narration is incredibly vague and serves as nothing but a pointless distraction. And to make it worse, unlike Getting Over It, the triggers for the commentary are not cleared after you pass a certain point. So if you fall all the way, you literally get to hear the commentary again, and it begins to drive you insane if you fall enough times. That includes the random music triggers, which have absolutely no purpose whatsoever and seem to be a very pale imitation of Getting Over It’s music triggers that trigger when you fall enough times. But Getting Over It actually has music relevant to the gameplay/themes. Here, it is literally put in there for no reason.

Beyond the commentary being pointless, the map is also still a mess, and it’s even worse than I imagined. My original criticisms of the map were its lack of safety nets and any purpose and connection to the commentary and/or message the game is trying to tell, and those still ring true. However, it is also godawful gameplay-wise. Many times I have constantly gone towards dead ends that knock me all the way to the beginning, due to the messy nature of the map. There is absolutely zero communication to the player about the proper way forward, which means a lot of the time you’ll stumble upon what looks like a fork in the road and end up going the wrong way.

And like I said previously, it’s still a mess, with free assets strewn everywhere because “platforming, lol.” At times it looks like a Roblox obby with the amount of random shit you have to platform. None of the sections are remotely memorable, and, like mentioned earlier, the efforts to tie them in somehow with the commentary are pathetic. They essentially boil down to quotes like “my grandpa used to work at a railroad” when you make it to a small train station, which can be seen as some sort of attempt to give a personal connection between the area and the main character, but there is literally no substance beyond that. Compare that to Getting Over It, which actually had commentary that was somewhat in-depth and very much related to the area you just reached, such as the commentary that would play when you reached Orange Hell.

And finally: the controls. I am going to officially go on record and say this is probably the worst game I’ve genuinely ever played, JUST for the controls alone. As I could tell from just WATCHING gameplay footage, the collision and movement looked horrendous, but I really didn’t grasp the true horror of how bad they actually were until I played it for myself. So many goddamn times did I bounce off a random ledge, or slipped off a ledge I JUST CLIMBED or tried to move forward only to somehow not go in the proper direction. It completely and utterly fails in this department in terms of not only just functionality, but also difficulty, because the difficulty doesn’t come from mastering the movement and physics. Like mentioned previously, the controls are your bog standard WASD + mouse scheme with basic movement. No, the difficulty comes from trying to not get fucked over by the shitty collision and climbing for the 67th time. Which, I don’t think I need to say, is a completely terrible way to design a difficult video game.

So, despite my lack of on-hands experience with Only Up initially, it seems that all my points are indeed correct. Outside of the inaccuracy of a lack of commentary (which I wish was actually the case after playing) in the original post, all of my complaints remained and were proven to be the case after playing a pretty lengthy session of this terrible, no-good, soulless NFT shill rage game. I’m going to repeat myself: AVOID this game at all costs, and play Getting Over It. Don’t even bother in the “haha, ironic” way, because it’ll still waste your time regardless.

To wrap this post up, I’m going to give you a good example of a game in the style of Getting Over It. While not successfully replicating the three-part formula, Jump King is a very well-made difficult platformer game with the DNA of Getting Over It. It’s lacking in commentary, but it makes up for it in the other two aspects. The controls and physics have the “wonky and difficult, but in a way you can master” aspect to them, and the map has many memorable sections and is very well-made, being actually made from scratch and not relying on free assets. If you’re looking for an alternative to Getting Over It in terms of challenge and memorability, it’s a very good game to choose for that. I may have been a bit hyperbolic when saying a game like this can’t be done without all three parts, but even later on in the original post I eventually said indirectly that you can make up for it by designing the other parts very, very well. However, I still believe that if you’re going to replicate all three parts, then you better do them well, otherwise all you’re going to make is a bad and soulless clone. And, sadly for the Only Up developer, that’s exactly what they ended up making.