A Difficult Game About Climbing

Introduction

A Difficult Game About Climbing does not hide what it is: a mouse-controlled climb up a treacherous mountain, arm over arm, with no legs, no combat, and nothing standing between you and the bottom except your own grip and patience. Solo-leaning developer Pontypants released it 6 March 2024, and it built a following fast, sitting today at a Very Positive 88.2% across 3,461 English reviews. It also, by design and by its own store page, invites a direct comparison — this is openly a spiritual successor to Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and reading through every corner of its negative review history confirms that comparison is doing almost all of the critical work in this game's reception. Most of its detailed critics don't think the climbing itself is broken; they think it doesn't earn the comparison it invites.

Getting Over It's cousin, not its equal

Community tag votes describe the game precisely — Difficult, Precision Platformer, Physics, Philosophical, alongside Psychological Horror and Survival Horror tags that reflect just how unsettling some of its later zones get. The core loop is genuinely well-liked: pull yourself up using only your mouse-controlled arms, feel the constant threat of a slip sending you back down dozens of minutes of progress, and find real satisfaction in mastering a section through repetition rather than luck. Where the negative sample turns sharp is almost entirely comparative. Getting Over It is named directly in 35 of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews, and the verdict is remarkably consistent: this game "couldn't hope to be as meaningful or clever," shares "recycled assets and low production value feel" without matching "the same level of craft," and — most often — lacks the narrative voice and philosophical framing that made its inspiration more than a rage-game gimmick. One detailed review calls it "a love letter to Bennett Foddy" while still declining to recommend it, which captures the shape of the whole corpus: real affection for the idea, real disappointment that the execution doesn't reach as far as its clear influence did.

The cost is your hands

The second major thread in the negative sample has nothing to do with Getting Over It and everything to do with a genuine physical concern worth taking seriously. Thirty of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews describe real hand or wrist discomfort from the control scheme, which requires holding mouse buttons down continuously to maintain your grip. "This game is carpal tunnel syndrome," reads one; another says plainly, "holding your hands on buttons constantly is the most uncomfortable way to play. I can't say I'm ever having fun because I feel physical pain." This isn't the usual "the difficulty made me angry" complaint that comes with any rage game — it's a specific, physical ergonomics issue distinct from the challenge the game is deliberately selling, and it's frequent enough in the negative sample to be worth flagging directly rather than folding into general difficulty grumbling. Steam's own patch history shows the developer eventually responded with a November 2025 key-rebinding update, though that arrived well over a year and a half after launch.

A free second chapter, and a controversial 50

Pontypants has been genuinely generous with post-launch support in one specific way: a full second chapter, adding nine entirely new zones on top of the original seven, shipped 25 August 2025 as a free update rather than paid DLC — real, substantial content added to a NZ$14.75 game at no extra cost. That update came bundled with a change that has drawn sustained, ongoing criticism from the game's most dedicated players: the two hardest achievements, previously earned by completing each chapter once, were changed to require fifty completions each. Steam's own achievement data shows exactly how brutal that bar is — 0.4% and 0.2% of all players respectively, against 13.5% and 2.3% for simply finishing each chapter once. Reviews raising this specifically span from the update's immediate aftermath through mid-2026, including one from a player 26 hours in who calls the original single-completion goal "reasonable" and asks the developer to at least lower the new requirement to 25. It's a fair complaint to weigh against the goodwill of a free expansion: adding content generously and then making the achievement list drastically harder to fully clear are two different decisions, and this review's negative sample shows real, sustained frustration specifically with the second one.

Final Verdict

A Difficult Game About Climbing is a genuinely satisfying, well-supported rage-climber that mostly earns its popularity — the core mechanic works, the developer added a full free chapter rather than monetising it, and the comparisons to Getting Over It exist because the game invites them directly rather than because critics are reaching for an unfair yardstick. What keeps it from scoring higher is exactly what its own detailed reviewers say: it doesn't quite reach the craft of the game it's built from, a real share of players report genuine hand discomfort from the control scheme, and a 2025 achievement change turned what used to be a reasonable completionist goal into a fifty-times grind that's still generating frustrated reviews a year later. Play it for the climbing and the free content — take breaks for your hands, and check the current achievement requirements before you commit to chasing 100%.