Sisyphos 4+

This game isn’t fun, and that’s okay. Not every game needs to make you feel powerful. This game is meant to make you feel the frustration and despair that the character “Sisyphus” would feel. It does that pretty well, at the beginning at least. You don’t know what to do, do you follow the tutorial. You quickly learn how to beat the game system after ten minutes filled with despair. You learn that any failure is your fault alone, which I feel takes away from the intended feeling of the game. My opinion is that personal failures are less frustrating than those by pure chance, and much less than those by the choices of others. I think that it would be much more frustrating if there was RNG in the game, a VERY small chance of randomly failing through no fault of your own.

Counter to a lot of reviews, I found this game fun initially. The fun game from having a goal. First, learn the rhythm. Then crest the mountain. Then make it back. Then build a streak. However at that point you basically have no reason to continue. Sure you could build your multiplier to infinity and top the leaderboards, but I’ve found that I’ve no desire to return to this game that I consider good. Maybe that’s the point and that’s fine. My gamer brain just craves more goals to climb towards. The irony is that it would be more fun if it wasn’t possible to get to the top

This game is not fun; however, if you are familiar with the myth for which the game is named, you should not expect it to be fun. The developer has asked you to spend $.99 to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill. In a Flappy Bird-style score mechanic, your score is based upon your willingness to continue a monotonous repetition of taps that move your boulder up and over the hill. The skill required for this is very limited. Patience is much more important.

The trick: you can't stop if you're pursuing a high score. There are no levels. Just a strength meter that increases (+1) every time you successfully push the boulder over the hill, and a stoicism meter that increases at a trivial rate (+.2) every time you fail. Your score is multiplied by both numbers after you fail. Your stoicism carries with you when you fail, but your strength resets.

This game gets brutal fast. There is no relief as you attempt to achieve a high score. Just the unforgiving fact that your failure is only inevitable if you choose to give up. However, you will give up, so failure is inevitable.

Great game.