Pogostuck: Rage With Your Friends

Pogostuck is a single-input climbing game where you control a small figure on a pogo stick, bouncing your way up a surreal, hand-crafted mountain that seems personally motivated to ruin your afternoon. The mechanic is deceptively simple: you have a pogo stick, you have gravity, and you have a mountain that does not care about you at all. What unfolds from that premise is something that sits in a very specific, very honest emotional register somewhere between zen meditation and screaming into a pillow. The mountain itself is the star. Superku built a single continuous environment packed with strange visual flourishes and obtuse geometry that feels less like level design and more like outsider art given physics. Each section has a personality. Some stretches lull you into a false rhythm before a poorly-timed bounce sends you sliding back fifty vertical meters. The lack of checkpoints in the traditional sense means failure is intimate and cumulative, which is either the game's best quality or its worst depending entirely on your temperament. If you finished Getting Over It and felt something shift inside you, Pogostuck is speaking the same language. The multiplayer layer is where the game earns its subtitle. Other players appear as ghosts on your mountain in real time, and watching a crowd of tiny figures wobble, fall, and occasionally rocket skyward transforms a punishing solo experience into an accidental community event. There is something quietly beautiful about the shared suffering here. Players leave each other alone but are never really alone. Progress feels more meaningful because a stranger just watched you nail a section that had been destroying you for twenty minutes. What holds it back is the same thing that defines it. The difficulty curve is not a curve, it is a cliff face, and there is almost no hand-holding for players who want one. The intentional cruelty of the physics will drive away anyone who needs forward momentum to stay engaged. The visual style is deliberately strange rather than immediately pretty, and some players will find the aesthetic more alienating than charming. It is also, genuinely, a game you can finish in an evening once you understand it, though most players will not finish it in an evening. For the right player, though, Pogostuck delivers something rare. It is a small, handmade thing with a coherent vision and the conviction to commit to it fully. The soundtrack and ambient audio do quiet, careful work under all the bouncing, lending the mountain a mood that is stranger and more memorable than the concept has any right to produce. At 83 percent positive across over six thousand reviews, players are clearly finding what they came for. Come for the pogo stick, stay for the mountain, and try not to throw anything.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Pogostuck: Rage With Your Friends.