My partner hates playing online games, but this weekend I made him try Fall Guys and now our relationship is in peril.
Online games just aren’t for him. He doesn’t think interaction with or dependence on strangers should be a requirement to finish a game. Plus, he’s social enough in his offline life to not need it in his online one. Knowing this, it’s no surprise that his tastes in video games skew toward retro titles with a few notable exceptions (like the ungodly number of hours he’s sunk into Dragon Quest XI because he has to, as he put it, “finish literally everything”).
But I thought Mediatonic’s cute and chaotic “Wipeout but make it video games” (see I bet you thought I was gonna say Takeshi’s Castle) would be quirky enough to pique his interest, so this weekend we gave it a try.
I warned him beforehand that the controls and the “chicken with its head cut off movement” might make it difficult for him to move his avatar. And when he started, he did have some trouble moving. But that didn’t last. Not only did he qualify on his first try (something it took days for me to accomplish), he qualified again, and a third time, making it to the final round where he was finally eliminated 4/6 in Hex-A-Gone. In a game he never played before, in a type of game he actively avoids, he almost won it all.
Completely unrelated to any of this, I am now single.