Grab a friend, play Bennett Foddy’s Pole Riders

Pole Riders is a competitive two player twist on the sport of pole-vaulting by Bennett Foddy, who best known for QWOP and, recently, GIRP. The act of vaulting is mainly repurposed as a means to jump and kick a ball that is tethered on a horizontal zip-line. At each end of the zip-line there are goals to kick the ball into. There are a surprising number of techniques that emerge: flinging an opponent when they land on your pole, just using the pole to hit the ball instead of kicking it, or vaulting onto the opponent to take them out for a moment. All of this is done within the context of what is becoming Foddy’s signature: the hilarious physical feel. The pole will wiggle up and down while running, sometimes flying over head; sometimes you’ll loose momentum and just hang in the air, groaning for your character to just go a little further. Pole Riders shows Foddy evolving in the finer details as well, notably the dynamic music. Each player’s step is a note, the left player has a set of notes while the right has different ones, and actions like kicking the ball or landing on the ground add more sounds to the cacophony. It’s another layer to the goofy feel of everything. There are few games that get feel this right but there are even fewer games that are this funny without ever uttering a word.

[Play Pole Riders]