Getting Over It With Rico Rodriguez is a wild Easter egg
But who dares reference Jazzuo's other games?
Screenshot via "MathChief" on YouTube, whose video is below
Grappling hooks make getting around easy. Hopping into a hard iron cauldron and navigating only with a two-handed pick? That's true mastery. Sexy Hiking was the last game I expected to see referenced in Just Cause 4, today's AAA explodathon du jour, but that's exactly what we've got, give or take one degree of separation. Hidden up an innocuous mountainside in Just Cause 4 is a mini-game based on Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, the soul-shattering physics nightmare that speedrunners recently flocked to. Best thing? Avalanche even got Foddy to narrate it.
"I created this Easter egg for a certain kind of person - to hurt them." - one of Foddy's first lines of narration sums this up. As if Just Cause 4 wasn't a wild and wobbly playground enough already, applying its slippery, chaotic physics to a game as precise as Getting Over It feels like an exercise in sadism. Still, it's an impressive bit of effort they put into this. While the map is obviously smaller than the real Getting Over It, the exacting, precise movement is mostly replicated. I'm also happy to see Jazzuo's original Sexy Hiking credited right at the start, as it should be.
I love when studios put real love into Easter eggs and secrets like this. This particular one reminds me of some of the things hidden away in Redlynx's Trials Fusion, which among other things includes a first-person walking sim and an arguably furry visual novel. Of course, it's hard to hide secrets like this, too, unless you're a tiny independent studio. The all-seeing, all-computing hivemind that is the internet has a way of picking a game's bones clean. I'll be surprised if Just Cause 4 contains any other secrets of this calibre, but I hope there's just one more squirrelled away.
Just Cause 4 is out now. John reviewed it earlier today, giving it a less-than-stellar grade. Over my shoulder, he adds "The clumsy controls still entirely unimproved in JC4 mean it was most the way to Getting Over It already" - oh dear. Maybe one to check up on in the sales and after a dozen patches, then.