I keep losing at Fall Guys and if it wasn’t for the weird and peppy music hammering my brain after every failure I would have given up by now.
Games don’t have to be fun and I certainly haven’t been having fun getting chewed up and spit out by Fall Guys’ multiplayer chaos over and over again. But I still appreciate its quirky and messy take on hyper-competitive battle roayles. With quick matches, a low barrier to entry, and maps designed to engineer dramatic moments of nail-biting tragedy it’s easy to see why the game blew up the first couple nights since it released earlier this week. Twitch loves it. My social media feeds love it. And I hate it, but I keep playing anyway because of this:
This is the game’s main theme and the music that plays in-between matches while your sitting around on the menu waiting to queue. Jukio Kallio and Daniel Hagström composed it and I can’t get it out of my head. Every time I want to give Fall Guys a break — maybe go chill out by looking for Foxes to pet in Ghost of Tsushima or dunk on some kids in Rocket League — the beat picks up, some little video game voices start chirping, and the dramatic melody pulls me back in like an old and desperate friend recruiting me for one last job. I can feel the song playing my rib cages like a colourful xylophone hyping me up like, “Just one more, you got this, this time is your time.” Then the key change kicks in and before I know I’m on the starting line of another gauntlet of pain.
Fortunately I’m not alone. “This is truly a bop,” wrote one person on the music’s YouTube page. “I threw this song on in my basement and my house turned into a mansion. Talk about baller status,” wrote another. Has the song of the summer been anointed already? If not I nominate “Everybody Falls” because seriously what’s more 2020 than that?
The rest of the game’s music is great too of course. Especially the little triumphant fanfare for winning (appropriately titled “Didn’t Fall!”) that plays as all the goons you trounced get kicked out of the roster for failing to qualify. It’s now the tune I hear when I successfully pull a slice of reheated pizza out of the oven with two butter knives because my spatula is in the dishwasher, or manage to transport all of my dirty dishes out of my home office at the end of the week by pilling them on top of two coffee mugs that I hold by the handles like I’m Tom Cruise climbing Dubai’s Burj Khalifa with suction cups.
Unfortunately, there’s no catchy menu music in real life to lift my spirits when that doesn’t pan out.
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