LogFAQs > #932654926

#38





Years of release: 2016 (PC), 2017 (PS4/XB1), 2018 (Switch)
Beaten?: I've won a few times but I kind of suck

Everyone remembers the Summer of Pokemon Go. But do you remember the Summer of Ultimate Chicken Horse? Me and my friends do.

The scene: Summer Games Done Quick 2016. It was my first, and still only, time attending. Since Spootybiscuit and Mudjoe were running Necrodancer at this marathon, I thought it would be a really good time to show up, and so did about 10-11 of my Necrodancer playing friends; we formed up and made a group sharing two hotel rooms and spent most of the time together at the event. It was a really great time - I was meeting all these people for the first time and they were like old friends to me. We planned to spend a lot of time at the event doing different stuff; hanging out in the stream room, playing games, playing Necrodancer, hanging out in the arcade, checking out the city, whatever.

Probably about a third of our time ended up being spent on Ultimate Chicken Horse.

Sure, we went to the stream room to watch the really important stuff. Super Mario Maker, Pepsiman, etc. Elad and I woke up at something like 6 in the morning once to go see the two best Zelda II runners in the world. But whenever a run didn't interest any of us too much? It was back up to the hotel room. It was time for Ultimate Chicken Horse.

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a multiplayer, Super Meat Boy-like platformer for up to 4 people. The gimmick of the game is that the level starts out really easy and empty, but the players get to add obstacles to the layout. You take many turns running the level over and over, and each time, each player adds one more obstacle to the mix, making the level more and more crazy every time. You get points for beating the level, but only if everyone doesn't beat it - if everyone beats it, it's too easy, and nobody is awarded anything. You also get points for killing other people with your obstacles, so it pays to try to place obstacles that will be as painful for others as possible, while still allowing it to be possible to be completed (which almost always goes out the window eventually in my experiences).

This is just a perfect multiplayer game. It captures both the fun of platforming with the creativity of level-building in a really simple way, and you're almost always either doing something, or cheering someone on (or rooting against them if you're a truly hateful person) as they try to somehow climb over the ridiculous pile of buzzsaws and crossbows you've created. For us, it was pretty much the best social gaming experience we could ask for. We had about 10 people trading off controllers while the rest of us would chill out and either watch the game, or watch the GDQ run and see how it was going. I remember this time really fondly. I do not regret spending a lot of GDQ playing Ultimate Chicken Horse.