The Guy Movie

I Wanna Be the Guy: The Movie: The Game (IWBTG) is a 2D action-adventure freeware game created by Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly, first released on October 5, 2007. Unlike many other adventure games, IWBTG is widely known not only for its takings of characters, graphics, music and special effects from many other games, but also for its “anti-humanly” high difficulty. In this essay, I will try to explore and analysis what makes the game difficult and hence, how does these difficulties contribute to the game’s playfulness.

Firstly, the “unorthodox” level design of the game greatly contributed to the difficulty of it. This mainly manifests in two aspects: The first one is that, unlike many adventure games where the main character has certain amount of lives and the ability to take damages, in IWBTG, players may die as many time as they want, as there are save points at all places to save their progress. However, the main character, “the Kid”, will die with any single hit as he explode himself and splatter his blood all over the screen, at which time the player will have to start over from the last save points. The second aspect of its “unorthodox” level design is that, along with those obvious threats, like pits and spikes, there are many other less-noticeable threats which are hardly possible to avoid without previous experiences. Things like falling tetris blocks, sofas in the background or “delicious fruits” hanging on a tree
Jumping is the most important, characteristic and the hardest controlling system of the game. Unlike many games in which the height of each jump is fixed, in IWBTG, it is related to the time the player pressed the jump button. The longer the press, the higher the jump and vice versa. So does the double-jump. Fangames of IWBTG, many of them only tests the player’s jumping techniques, make another strong proof of the importance of jumping in the