Pogo Girlfriend
Review
Hop Along
by Samuel Corey
reviewed on PC
Getting Over It
The obvious spiritual liege of Pogo Girlfriend is Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, that climbing game from a few years back where you played as a guy in a pot with a sledgehammer. It achieved a degree of popularity mostly because it gave YouTubers and streamers something to scream at. Less significant to the game's success was its core demographic of genuine masochists who secretly got a perverse thrill every time they tumbled down the mountain and had to start all over again. Pogo Girlfriend is essentially a lite version of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. I'm not overstating the influence, as the game's description on Steam even labels it as a Foddy-like, and the first obstacle in Pogo Girlfriend is a tree that looks suspiciously like the first obstacle in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
The main gimmick in both games is that all movement is challenging and risky. Any mistakes, even very small ones can result in immediate and lasting consequences. In Pogo Girlfriend, you are constantly moving around on your pogo stick, and can never dismount it (though you can buy upgraded pogos and find custom skins hidden across the map). You can move to the right or left by slightly angling your pogo and can bounce higher and faster by pulling off a sick mid-air flip (not sure about the physics behind this one but it's a cool mechanic all the same). If you bump into anything, bash your head on a ceiling, or just land at a slightly wrong angle your character will explode into a fountain of gore. Not entirely sure why this happens, maybe the main character is secretly a sack of overripe tomatoes disguised as a human being.
Believe it or not, Pogo Girlfriend is actually a great deal more forgiving than its predecessor, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. It gives you a number of checkpoints that you can lay down to save your progress so you won't have to jump back to the start after each screw-up. It also doesn't have a smug British guy who reads inspirational quotes after any particularly gruelling setbacks. While this does make the game a good deal less annoying, it also detracts somewhat from the appeal of this sort of game. This is meant to be rage bait, so paradoxically, quality-of-life improvements actually make it worse.
A Noble Quest
More significantly than these superficial aspects though is the fact that Pogo Girlfriend actually has a story, albeit a somewhat simple and threadbare one. You are a guy on a pogo stick. One night you're out on a date with your girlfriend, after she is about to tell you something important you get up to use the bathroom. When you return she has vanished and you're confronted by a mysterious Power Rangers cosplayer who identifies himself as your rival. You rush outside and see a rocket ship take off presumably with your girlfriend on it. Someone has kidnapped your girlfriend, and you have to get her back.
It is honestly kind of refreshing in an age of subverted expectations and re-imaginings for a modern audience, to see a game go with the classic "Your girlfriend has been kidnapped, go get her back" plot line. Indeed, it's a solid enough basis for an epic quest, and there are far worse reasons than chasing after a lost love to brave the dangers of a hostile world (even if almost all of those dangers could be avoided by getting off your stupid pogo stick).
Aesthetics
Pogo Girlfriend is an extremely ugly game, but it is ugly in exactly the sort of way that I find charming. It looks like something that was drawn by a child whose fine motor skills are still developing. The scale of the characters, obstacles, and environments are all wildly inconsistent, to the point where I wasn't even sure if the main character was meant to be some kind of dwarf. Sure, some are clearly supposed to be bigger than the others like the giant blacksmith at the game's start, but after the first checkpoint you meet a house cat that must be the same size as a horse, and nobody acts like this is terrifying or unusual.
The visuals remind me of one of those old Flash games that would be posted on Newgrounds back in the late 1990's and early 2000's. So this means that while yes the game is ugly and amateurish, it also fills me with a warm feeling of nostalgia for a simpler time when I'd come back home from Middle School, and play crudely animated web games where I could subject crude caricatures of politicians and celebrities to cartoonist acts of violence.
The style won't appeal to everyone, but it certainly worked for me.
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6.0
fun score
Pros
Engaging gameplay, Charmingly ugly art style, Game retails for around the same price as a bag of chips.
Cons
Progress is not saved when you quit out, Becomes tedious and frustrating rather quickly.
