Mediatonic released the bouncy, bumbling Fall Guys game in August 2020. During the pandemic, it served as a spot of joy in uneasy times. The game felt like what would happen if you made 50 Teletubbies compete on American Ninja Warrior simultaneously. It was bursting with energy. But now that it’s come to Fortnite, Fall Guys feels like a hollowed-out version of what it used to be.
To understand how we got to Fall Guys in Fortnite, we need to take a step back and look at Fortnite’s larger transformation and Epic Games’ plans for it. As early as 2021, Epic Games has been in the process of changing Fortnite from a single game to a “metaverse,” in the words of founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. Now, the game functions more like a platform and users can play the classic battle royale shooter known as Fortnite, but also try other games like the survival crafting game Lego Fortnite and the rhythm game Fortnite Festival.
When Epic Games bought Tonic Games Group, the parent company of Fall Guys developer Mediatonic, in spring 2021, it did so because Mediatonic could help Epic build the metaverse. “It’s no secret that Epic is invested in building the metaverse and Tonic Games shares this goal,” Sweeney said in a statement.
Image: Mediatonic/Epic Games
And now, with the release of a small selection of Fall Guys-inspired games on Tuesday, we get to see what a step toward that metaverse looks like.
I played three official Fall Guys games from Epic: Pegwin Pickup, Tumble Towers, and Falling Up. In Pegwin Pickup, you run around different areas — one level looks like a roadside diner — and try to find penguin icons as fast as possible. Falling Up plays like one super long platforming obstacle course. And Tumble Towers is also an obstacle course, except you play from a variety of fixed-camera angles that add a bit of challenge and clunkiness to the gameplay.
The original Fall Guys has players compete in a battle-royale-style competition with obstacle challenges. The game is known for its tubby, bean-like characters and rag-doll-like platforming physics as players stumble along to complete courses and beat other players. But the new games don’t capture the charm of the original and fall short of a polished experience.
Image: Epic Games via Polygon
The games in Fortnite allow you to play as the Fall Guys characters and use the game’s unique approach to platforming, where the characters perform a jump and then an additional dive mid-air. However, including the trademark dive and the recognizable characters isn’t enough.
With Pegwin Pickup, you just repeat the same pattern of collecting icons over and over and trying to do it as fast as possible. The penguins respawn in the same place and you run around the same small location until the round is over. It gets to feel repetitive quickly even within one of its short rounds.
Falling Up is a nice and varied obstacle course for sure, but it’s only that. It doesn’t feel competitive in the same way because it’s not part of any larger battle royale competition; you just happen to be jumping beside other people as you go along since the lobbies were so empty. It didn’t capture the joy and sheer frenetic energy of blasting out of a gate with dozens of other bean characters.
Interestingly enough, one day after release, the most popular Fall Guys-inspired game was a user-made obstacle course. A few weeks prior to release, Epic Games released Fall Guys-inspired assets so people could make their own games using the Unreal Editor. One user-made game called Only Up functions like a little platforming challenge, except playing it gives players a juiced-up amount of experience points. So if you found ten crowns — which took me less than ten minutes — it would award you with more than 38,000 experience points. (For context, my daily quests gave me anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 experience points.)
Playing the user-made game made it feel like this vibrant title now exists only for people to grind out experience points for their Fortnite battle passes. What used to be a game with unique gameplay and its own quirks is now just a way for people to unlock cosmetic items in Fortnite.
The official Fall Guys in Fortnite content, and the user-made game I tried, don’t live up to the exuberance of the source material.
When Mediatonic first released Fall Guys, it became an overnight sensation. The developer said that the game had more than 50 million players after it made it free-to-play — and a fiscal report from Unity said it sold more than 10 million copies within two months of launch. But a lot has changed since.
We’re increasingly seeing what some have called the “Roblox-ification” of games, a term that refers to a shift toward gaming platforms that rely on user-made content. Epic Games released Unreal Editor, which allows its own users to make and publish games on Fortnite, in spring 2023. The following fall, massive layoffs at Epic Games impacted a significant portion of the Fall Guys development team. One developer described the team as being decimated by the loss of workers. At the time, Sweeney attributed the layoffs to a changing business model that relies on user-made content.
Fall Guys in Fortnite is just one example of how the metaverse and the platform-ification of games has impacted a beloved game.
As it stands now, Fortnite’s vision for the metaverse is still a work in progress. Popular games like Lego Fortnite are being updated on a regular basis as players complain about the lack of content.
We might get some better Fall Guys content in Fortnite in the future, but as I’m left to mess around in the Fall Guys games Epic did publish, I can’t help but feel a bit sad about the game I remember. So for now, I think this has just inspired me to go back and play the original.
