Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017) is deceptively simple: move up an increasingly surreal mountain using only your trusty sledgehammer. In this Steam Next Fest demo, you can basically now do it in VR too.
From indie studio OP Softworks comes Clamb, an upcoming VR game that maroons you on an island with one goal: clamber up the mountain with your sledgehammer—that, and don’t fall.
You’d think things would actually be easier in VR than controlling the wibbly 2D sidescroller original because you have more direct control and have more flexibility in your movements. But after having played the free SteamVR demo, I can safely say that’s not true. At all.
Confession: I haven’t make it to the top of the lighthouse yet, which is provided as a vertical slice to the full game coming at some point. I was however left with a surprising appreciation for the independent VR take on Getting Over It, and think it might actually have legs—despite not having any virtual legs to speak of.
For one, it’s not a puke fest. From the short gameplay vids out there which show off the unique locomotion method, it definitely could have been.
Thankfully, both snap-turn and automatic vignettes come standard in the demo, which means I had little excuse to shy away from being extreme with the weird, wonky movement scheme. You’re basically free to focus on the task at hand of bouncing and scraping around, and pushing the limits of just how far you can blast yourself without falling off the edge.
While the oddly-shaped tool can be used to ‘row’ yourself in short hops forward, more often you’ll be using the head of the hammer and its handle to gingerly latch onto the game’s craggy geometry, which offers ample opportunity for failure. Because the hammer is physics-based, and offers multiple surfaces and edges, the skill floor is unexpectedly high, even from the outset.
Visually, the demo also looks pretty great, replicating everything you’d expect from a faithful 3D reimagining of Getting Over It too, including oversized assets of all sorts scattered around, making for a ton of varied terrain to traverse.
I’m not such a massive glutton for repeat failure, but if you are, you can nab the free demo now for Steam VR headsets during Steam Next Fest, which runs until October 21st.
