99 FAILS
Surrealism and grief combine in a nightmarish puzzle-platformer
Developer/ publisher Frying Jelly
Format Android, iOS, PC, PS5, Switch
Origin US, Poland, Netherlands
Release Q1
From a distance, 99 Fails looks like selfpunishment for the joy of it: a trial-anderror puzzle-platformer with warped, Double Fine-esque characters and a learning curve reminiscent of Super Meat Boy. To pick out one of the more ghoulish touches, missing a jump here drops you into an expanding purgatory of dead protagonists, recalling how levels in Team Meat’s game were slowly redecorated with Meat Boy’s guts. But there’s much more to 99 Fails than failure. Or rather, all those failures pay into an exploration of some complex ideas and emotions: transhumanism, surrealism and the personal traumas of Frying Jelly’s founder Paweł Pachniewski, who describes the game as an exercise in “gameception” – forming patterns only to break them as it tunnels into the suffering of a character whose body is constantly changing.