Failure is an important part of life, but it rarely feels good. In an ideal world we’d all succeed at everything we did and feel amazing, but that’s basically impossible and you’ve got to get used to that. Video games can be an incredible tool for teaching you how to cope with failing, as long as they’re used correctly at least. Roguelikes especially have made me particularly attuned to failing over and over again, and learning from this experience. Fail Fail Succeed is a game where you actively have to fail to even progress past the first stage, and its safe dreamy environment allows you to do just that without feeling bad.
There’s not a whole lot of narrative to lead you through Fail Fail Succeed, with no actual speech or text at all. You play as a square headed little person, who is trapped in a mysterious world full of portals and spikes. The only helpful presence in this place is your dog, who guides you to the end of each stage by standing and looking cute as your own personal furry goal.
Fail Fail Succeed is a pretty traditional puzzle platforming experience. To get through each stage you’ll need to use the tools at your disposal to reach the end, which always involves placing square blocks. These blocks only appear though when you fail, or if you want to be morbid, die. This is why you have to fail to succeed, because otherwise there wouldn’t be boxes to use to hop over walls.
You’ll only leave behind a box when you die if you collect a mysterious orb. These come in a selection of different types, and add extra depth to the puzzles. There’s usually a pretty specific way to complete most puzzles, but with a handy undo feature you can quite easily rectify any mistakes and jump straight back into the problem solving.
In the first world of Fail Fail Succeed you’ll only use standard boxes to make your way to the exit, but as you progress through the other four worlds you’ll uncover new puzzling elements. The first of these are ice blocks, which can be manually pushed after you leave them behind in death. Next you’ll get cloud blocks, which act as trampolines to bounce you to higher areas. Using all of these types of boxes together will become second nature after a failure or twenty, so don’t be afraid to experiment a bit.
Alongside these different orbs you’ll also encounter various hazards as you progress through the game. Spikes are self explanatory and just need to be jumped over, but lasers generally need to be blocked entirely to access certain areas of a stage. Some lasers reflect when you put a box in front of them too, and you’ll need to use this to your advantage as a way to die and spawn a new box in some of the tricky earlier stages. By the end of Fail Fail Succeed there’s a shed load of moving parts to think about, and I felt incredibly tested in the brain department.
There’s not a whole lot more to Fail Fail Succeed, so if you like a straightforward but testing puzzle platformer then it’ll likely be the game for you. There is undoubtedly a lack of bells and whistles though, and in some instances this is a little bit frustrating. I would’ve loved any way to get a little hint on some of the tougher stages, because if you get stuck your only option is to keep on failing with no success in sight. You’ll only really get a few hours out of the game before it’s over as well, and there’s not much to do outside of completing the stages.
Fail Fail Succeed is a well crafted puzzle platformer that’ll really test your brain power, with a clever mechanic based around failure. If your idea of a nice night in is solving fiendish puzzles then you’re in luck, but don’t expect a whole lot of help when you’re stumped a few worlds in.