OK, so there are plenty of types of games out there, and obviously not everything is made with a broad audience in mind. Most of the time I actually have some respect for super-niche titles since they often take pretty massive risks to deliver something fresh and unexpected. But there are also those that instead just feel like low-effort affairs, designed to pull in some cash while doing as little actual work and design as possible. 

Enter the precision jumping subgenre, a space for people who simply want to spend their time hoping to ascend a series of platforms to get to the end. While it may sound simple, these experiences are anything but… and that’s the point. Mixing a pretty quick window from holding down the button to charge to your maximum strength, it’s all about trying to get your internal clock attuned to understanding how long you want to hold things down to achieve what height and general trajectory you want. To further complicate matters, there are also gaps and sometimes what are effectively traps all over to ensure that if you miss a key spot you can count on losing a substantial amount of your progress.

Hellstuck: Rage With Your Friends is the less aggressively aggravating of the two recently-released titles of this flavor from the same publisher, though under the hood they offer the same core experience. Both will allow you to undertake this pain on your own or share it with a friend, which I suppose could somehow make the experience more fun to some degree as you compete with and razz each other until you more than likely just get tired of it and move on. The key difference here is just that overall this is at least a marginally more approachable example of the subgenre on the whole, still full of challenges but at least less blatantly sadistic.

Honestly, outside of being played by streamers for the sake of entertainment for their followers who enjoy watching people rage and shout, I honestly don’t see any appeal in this style of game. Among the many types of titles I’ve played, this by far also seems to be among the lowest effort types I can think of. With the goal being to simply make everything as disruptive as possible, irregularly placing relatively small platforms about, or deliberately leaving small windows to try to jump through, no matter how many of these I’ve played I’ve failed to see any craft in it. To the people who dig this style, knock yourself out, but for me I can’t see how it could be recommended with a clear conscience.