Today, Mediatonic showed up one of the levels for Fall Guys‘next fourth season. The new stage, “Skyline Stumble”, looks like a lot of fun with its gravity-based hijinks and bean-sized pinball bumpers – but it instilled in me an invasive, immobile thought: Dude, we really have been Doing this for a while, huh?
Last August, Fall Guys took the world by storm. Thanks to a streamer-based marketing campaign and a month as one of the “free” PS Plus titles – where it became the most downloaded PS Plus game always, in fact. It seemed like everyone was talking about Fall Guys, and for good reason. Fall Guys it served as a bubbly distraction during a time when it seemed reasonably good to be swept away by bubbly distractions.
Fall Guys it is still here, and now I am less convinced of its power as a bubbling distraction.
As bad as it is now, the landscape of the covid-19 was very different last summer, when Fall Guys it went out. On August 4, 2020, the official release date for the game, the New York moving average hovered at less than a tenth of what it is today. It remained that way for the rest of August and for much of September, before again scoring over 1,000 on October 1, 2020. The pandemic, of course, has never abated, but for a solid two months, you could see the other side.
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It is not so easy to feel that way today.
In New York City, where I live and where Kotaku is based, we are in the middle of a huge second wave of the pandemic. By most measures, despite a steady increase in vaccinations, it is worse than the first wave that initially hit our city last spring. According New York Times tracker covid-19, New York State currently has an average of more than 7,000 reported cases of covid-19 per day, many of which are reported in the five districts. Six weeks ago, in mid-January, that number reached 16,000, higher than last spring. You can cross out the number for all kinds of variables – including an improved testing apparatus and fewer restrictions – but you can’t ignore how frighteningly devastating it is. (Much of the rest of the country faces equally devastating situations. You have undoubtedly read the statistic that more than half a million Americans died as a result of the coronavirus, a number that we should never, ever allow those responsible during this down time. .)
There is also the least discussed, but not least, toll on mental health on the general public. In August, I met some people who, against all odds, were thriving in the new structure of working at home. They appreciated the loneliness, the lack of daily pressures, like commuting, and they weren’t exactly social butterflies in the first place, anyway. Furthermore, here in New York – and in other parts of the country – it was considered relatively safe to meet in small groups outdoors, in parks, cafes and restaurants that followed the guidelines for social detachment. Compared to the oppressive and freezing temperatures of the past few months, in August, one could really tolerate sitting at the picnic table for hours on end. It didn’t replace “Before Times”, but it certainly helped.
Today, I don’t know a single person who can reasonably say that he is in a better position in terms of mental health than where he was at the beginning of it. You wake up. You go to the couch. You move to the dining room table. Every day is the same, and it is reaching a breaking point. I felt it. I bet you do too. We are all angrier, more anxious, more depressed – just fed up with it.
It’s not just in your head. For a recent feature in The AtlanticEllen Cushing, editor of special projects, spoke to a number of mental health professionals, all of whom detailed the ways in which extended blocking is legitimately changing the functioning of our brains. Long periods of sadness, stress, boredom and depression can have an erosive and damaging effect on the psyche.
I certainly didn’t wake up today thinking Fall Guys, of all the fucking things, it would be the thing to boost this line of thinking. I didn’t consider Fall Guys to be the ruler by which I measured how long we have been trapped in a mismanaged crime pandemic. Maybe it was the result of hearing that irresistibly catchy theme song, which acted as a de facto theme song for my downtime last summer. But man, we’ve really been doing this for a while. On March 20, 2020, New York implemented their first statewide shelter application on the state – arriving within a year after the day.
At least we have seven new Fall Guys levels soon.
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