The very first thing anyone says about I Wanna Be The Guy is that it's hard. They are absolutely right. I Wanna Be The Guy is quite possibly one of the hardest games you will ever play. It relentlessly punishes you for the smallest mistakes. It has lots of unfair spikes and gruesome deaths and every genre convention that you absolutely hated about 8-bit platformers. It's almost a tribute to the incredibly unfair difficulty of the glory days of the NES. Why is it so good, then?

Partially it's because the game is never unfair in a way that feels insurmountable. There's no insane AI that can block every move and hit you in-between blinks. There's no terrain that randomly changes to kill you when you go across it. Everything is trial-and-error, and this changes the game from being a completely unfair, hair-pulling disaster into a game which, while still unfair, encourages you to keep playing to find that one little sweet spot where you succeed in your goal.

The game's overall goal is for you, The Kid who wants to be The Guy, to gather all the orbs so you can be declared The Guy. The Guy is a pastiche of every cliché of the 8-bit era and you admire him like nothing else in your little existence. Obviously, you must now go subject yourself to the myriad death traps that weren't around when The Guy became his awesome self. The story, while throwaway, is intriguing. The concept that you, a Kid who has far less experience than your idol The Guy, are far more heroic than the guy has a sorta of ring. You are more of The Guy than The Guy is! And all because of your masochism and an unwillingness to actually die. You are also a spunky Kid. Who says youthful optimism never got anyone somewhere?
The gameplay itself is excellent but extremely hard. Your short-term goal is to reach each save point with a minimal amount of deaths. Everything from invisible blocks to moving spikes to pixel-perfect jumps conspire against you in an attempt to drive you completely insane. If you just view these as puzzles to overcome, though, we promise you'll have more fun with the game.

The controls are tuned just right. You can control the height of your jump, as well as double jump anywhere during a jump or fall. You move around quite fast, but your movements are very precise. And thanks to the aforementioned traps, they need to be. Shooting is also part of the game, but beyond the boss fights, rare enemy, and triggering save points, you don't really need it.

The graphics and sounds are both average. Some better sampled music, maybe some original remixes would have spruced up the feel of the game a lot. Likewise, making all of the sprites a uniform style would've helped the game quite a bit too. But they are both functional and effective, and when you are playing a game like I Wanna Be The Guy, that's all you really need.

That's really all there is to I Wanna Be The Guy. I don't normally like to be so short when writing Freeware Friday, but that's all there is to the game. It is an exercise in pure platformer masochism, and if you have the patience, it will become one of your favorite games. Just give it time to grow on you. You can download the game through our downloads section or through the developer website. The game also crashes more frequently than one would probably like, so make sure to save often!

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