< < back
(this review was originally written April 26, 2023)
A summary of Jazzuo's Sexy Hiking: you're a guy with a very big nose, and you have a hammer. You move the mouse to control the hammer, and push it against the level geometry to get your guy to the goal. There are four levels in vaguely ascending order of difficulty, and a special surprise at the end for completing them all. It is a very hard game. It's free and not much of a time commitment, but because you spend about 95% of the game's runtime in various states of frustration and failure, most people who try it don't get very far. Of course, this is also why it's interesting. When progress is slow, your mind has time to wander. You start to imagine where the game is going, what happens next, what you'll see when you finish. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
When you start Sexy Hiking, you're standing next to this dead tree - it blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. This tree is worth dwelling on. Every level except #2 starts with a different dead tree (#2 has a branch later on), and they're all distinct obstacles. Their geometry is more detailed and interesting than the plain square tiles of the rest of the game, but more importantly, they're attached to a context. A tree is a real object, it has details to it, it implies something about the world. The trees are iconic, in a way that the square tiles aren't; an otherwise contextless opening becomes That One Tree That A Lot Of People Never Got Past. That the context is totally arbitrary (what do dead trees have to do with anything?) only makes the tree more of an icon. It becomes the first symbol in a makeshift mythos, the bottom layer holding up a mountain of trash iconography.
If that sounds too flowery, let me rephrase in video game terms. Sexy Hiking isn't just a funny gimmick. Sexy Hiking is a full-on game world. Not only that, it's a game world with MECHANICS. There is a rope you can hold onto with the left mouse button; there are (extremely janky) vertical moving platforms; there are kill-planes at the bottom of each map. There's even - and this one really surprised me - a walk ability. You can actually just use the left and right arrow keys to move in this game and Jazzuo never tells you about it. It's not very useful, since you can't walk in midair, but he makes a funny little dancing motion as you do it. In fact, I'm not sure I should even mention this, but there are save states in this game too. You can press F5 and F6 to save and load from any position. This felt like cheating, so I never used it, and I'm pretty sure it's just a GameMaker built-in Jazzuo never got around to removing anyway.
It doesn't matter if the mechanics are useful. The best video game is never the one staring out at you from the screen; it's the one implied by the content of the screen, played out in your mind's eye after the computer has been turned off. Sexy Hiking, with its light smattering of mechanics and MIDI covers, holds within itself the dream of a perfect video game. Level 3 is the one that really sells this, I think. The music is a cover of a Donkey Kong Country song; unlike the other tunes, it is calm, pensive, almost beautiful. Not coincidentally, this is the level that introduces the rope mechanic. It has you pull your sexy hiker precariously along a floating rope, endless kill-plane beneath, desperately gripping the left mouse button to keep hold. The MIDI flute reaches a crescendo, and - in a flash - the vision is there. A grand journey through vast wildernesses! Seven themed worlds full of secrets! A moon level with low gravity! A volcano level! You start to visualize a whole new game, set on a mountain of junk, climbing ever higher from the safety of your bucket as-- well, anyway.
Sexy Hiking is like if you took that imagined game, and trimmed out every level that had no chance of making someone fling their computer across the room. Depending on your perspective, this can be both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, games are like pornos*, and Jazzuo is sensibly choosing to cut out all the chaff and skip straight to the good bit. On the other hand, because the obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, the game is uniquely frustrating. In fact, I'd argue that Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game. This sort of thing is a classic obsession of hobbyist developers; it's the same reason so many Flash games were trying to be "The Hardest [x] Ever". Jazzuo, like anyone else on the internet, is trying to make you, a stranger, feel something with crude tools and limited skills. Anyone can make a video game that's too hard, and anger is immediate, visceral, undeniable - real. But aim to engage with anger, and it's easy to overshoot.
Now, suppose you're an amateur developer making a B-game, and a funny thing happens. You have an idea for a new obstacle. You build it, test it. And then it turns out to be unreasonably hard. What are you going to do? You can't bring yourself to make it easier - it's your baby! You couldn't possibly butcher the work you put so much of yourself into. There are a few ways out of this dilemma. You could declare it your fault as a player, rather than a builder; "skill issue" to wipe away the problem. But this only works if you're already kind of an asshole, because it does nothing to alleviate the pain of the human being sitting on the other end of the screen, screaming their guts out. Jazzuo, in toying around with his funny game-creation tool, must have unwittingly found himself staring face-to-face with the understanding that he is causing other human beings pain, because of the things he did, and it is his fault. So he takes another tack.
Consider the text of the instructions screen: "use the humer as if u were really climbing something and ull see". This is placed over an abominably ugly MSPaint menu while a terrible MIDI cover of the X-Files theme plays in the background. Now, I know English isn't Jazzuo's first language, but I'm pretty sure he knows how to spell 'hammer'. Why would he do it like that? The intended effect, it seems, is to mask Sexy Hiking in a layer of defensive, self-conscious jocularity. The ending is the same (spoilers ahead). You're offered a full-on Jazzuo face and voice reveal, with a text scroll and accompanying song that make an exaggerated show of self-aggrandizement. He calls it a "great game", he's "influenced our lifes greatly", and if you look closely at his "beautiful humbeled smile" you will "aswell understand why some people would call him Jesus". Jazzuo is trying, with this charade, to lull you into complacency via sarcasm. He seems to be saying: "you're not supposed to like my game, because it was really just a joke. I'm trying to make it not-fun, that's the bit, you can't attack me for it."
Here's the thing: Sexy Hiking IS fun. Really fun. It's sort of like pinball: you have a very small range of motion to influence the world, and you watch your limited movements cascade into wild bouncings and flingings around. Jazzuo is insecure, not because he made a bad game, but because he put his heart and soul into making a good one. I laughed out loud at the ending to Sexy Hiking; I thought it was sweet and very endearing. You can hear a saxophone playing in the background while Jazzuo sings. I wonder if the sax player is his friend. I imagine Jazzuo asking his friend to help him make a funny song for his amateur video game, and the two of them sitting down with some cheap-ass recording equipment to hash out something that fits. That's adorable. And you know what? He does kinda look like Jesus. I mean it! He does!
I didn't catch it at first, but I see now why I fell so hard for Sexy Hiking. Bright imagination half-glimpsed through crude tools, rough and unpolished difficulty, insecure enthusiasm barely hiding under a layer of clumsy irony. The same texture as a first-time custom level, teenage Nintendo mod, or stick-figure Flash game. No wonder it feels so much like home. No wonder I found it so soothing, so easy to understand, almost more comforting than it is frustrating. I must have played Sexy Hiking three hundred times by three hundred different people. Each time it plays out a little bit different, but the point is the same. A cozy little enclave carved out of the ash-heap of creativity's landfill.
Much like the hobbyist levelmaker, Jazzuo is seeking a way to make his mark, to imprint something of himself onto the digital world. Nothing makes more of a mark than That One Level, so every level becomes That One Level. Every obstacle is Doing Things The Hard Way. With no external force to hold him accountable, he has no reason to compromise. Good. Compromises make games forgettable. Piled up in the landfill, filed in with the bland things. Sexy Hiking is nothing if not memorable. A game with 500 levels might start to have them blur together, but when you've only got four, each one is a keystone. When the tools are so limited, even a dead tree becomes an icon.
In case it's not obvious, I really, really like this game. I planned, at the start of the month, to play Sexy Hiking twice; I assumed it wouldn't be much fun, and I wanted to push myself to understand it anyway. I have now played it enough to semi-consistently complete it in under ten minutes, and my record is six. After writing this, I intend to force myself to never touch it again. It's too powerful a drug. A quick sexy hike during class breaks until it's over too soon and you're back in the vastly inferior real world. Lucky for me, in the abyss of trash culture there will always be more Sexy Hikings to try, more Jazzuos with humbeled smiles looking to make their mark on the world. Some newer thing will beckon. It always does.
9/10
* (according to John Carmack)