Fall Guys is still the best casual game. I think that’s the problem

Fall Guys does it again, huh? Having set the record for most-grossing PlayStation Plus game when it launched in August 2020 – a platform where, mind you, Rocket League made its debut, which also made history – Epic reported 50 million after the move to free-to-play players in two weeks. A message that clearly underlines the strengths of the nice but dogged hopper without big words, if you think about it more closely.

Because the fact of the matter is, Fall Guys exudes an endlessly welcoming vibe. When you see them, these beans in their mercilessly commercialized but always charming licensed costumes and their bright but tastefully chosen colors, you just want to join in. It looks like an open-hearted, social and maximum fun party that you would like to dance to immediately.

The disciplines in which you measure yourself against 60 other players are ingeniously self-explanatory. They started quickly and ended just as quickly, and the element of chance ensures that your own dexterity plays a role, but you don’t automatically have no chance because there are players who have better control over their beans. A low “skill ceiling” is what they call it, and in this game, for once, it’s the reason the game works.

There is no question that Media Tonic did so many things right conceptually and creatively that it is easy to understand the success of this game. And yet, it only took four or five rounds in the free-to-play version for me to realize that this success can’t last. As nice as it is to take the lead in a fun race and to let your colleague Random help you, the joy leveled off just as quickly. Because it is seldom that you really deserve to be at the top.

At some point it only takes one or two defeats in an early match phase for the desire to try again to disappear completely like a sugar high. Striking that balancing act between accessibility and sophistication is a very old problem, and Fall Guys still wobbles a lot. The Battle Royales have always done an excellent job of that, but there are simply more variables at play here. Here, the random factor ensures that you have a good chance of not running into the gun of a player with 3 K/D early on.

In addition, with a little loot luck and tactically clever movement across the map, you have every chance of winning or at least achieving a high placement, even without hummingbird reflexes and the hand-eye coordination of an NBA shooting guard. In Fall Guys, you don’t even see it because its players are thrown out in groups. Attaching a fairly ambitious monetization including a season pass to a game with such a short half-life… I’m not sure if it will pay off.

Fall Guys’ accessibility is both its greatest strength and its kryptonite – and the reason this game won’t have very long legs. If I look at his protagonists like that, it’s probably only logical. But as a great philosopher once said: nothing is beautiful just because it lasts. Fall Guys draws more beauty than most other games from the short, intense burst of harmless and ruthless fun. For the moment – and every now and then in between, maybe at a party with distant friends or relatives – that’s reason enough for me to leave it installed for now.