Rage and Fury Make These Diabolical Games Easy to Watch

A swarm of new video games is channeling anxiety as an aesthetic.

A Difficult Game About Climbing asks players to claw their way up treacherous rock walls. Chained Together tethers people to their friends and forces them to ascend a world littered with deadly obstacles. The Game of Sisyphus, named quite appropriately after the Greek myth, requires participants to roll boulders up a hill for what feels like forever.

In this emerging genre, all it takes is one slip for the boulder to careen away or the player to be flung to the bottom of the screen, forcing a restart of the grueling climb.

Yet these games have gone mega-popular, producing a deluge of YouTube videos and becoming a favorite among Twitch livestreamers. They are addictive yet agonizing. It goes beyond rage — this is a new level of fury-bait that verges on masochism.

Brandon Loreti, a YouTuber known as The Frustrated Gamer who has made videos playing A Difficult Game About Climbing, said the indie smash was so tough that it made him physically sick. He spent more than two hours failing to conquer one devious jump.

“The room was spinning because I was staring so closely to the screen,” Loreti said. “I felt like I was getting nauseous.”

Loreti says these infuriating games are so thrilling to watch because every micromovement feels incredibly consequential.