Over the weekend Fall Guys held a beta period and managed to chart inside the top 20 games on Twitch and hit a peak concurrent viewership with just over 218,000 viewers. Not bad at all for a game that’s not out yet, and wasn’t in open beta. 

I dived into the beta with Ciaran and Ashley for nearly four hours over the weekend and had a great time. We were even streaming on Twitch the whole time (hint: follow our channel.) 

It’s basically Takashi’s Castle or Total Wipeout but you play as these cute cartoon characters that you can customise in weird and wonderful ways.

By the end of the stream, all three of us had dressed our fall guys up in pigeon costumes.

Each game begins with a total of 60 players including yourself and at the end of each round, some will be dropped until the fourth and final round where there’s usually around 5-10 competitors racing up a hill with boulders and other things in their way of grabbing the golden crown and snatching up the win.

In the full release, there will be 25 different mini-games and I think we played 6-10 in the beta period. A small sample of the size for the true experience and this obviously led to some frustration at seeing the same couple of games come around so often.

You’ll be really good at a selection of games and bad at some others. When those bad games come around — especially in the third round — you’ll let out a big sigh of frustration. It can’t be helped. But it’ll be mitigated when there are more games and fewer chances to play the same one every round.

Ciaran, for example, hated running a course that featured swinging balance beams. I hated seeing the soccer game show up because my team seemed to not understand the rather simple goal: kick it in the enemy’s goal.

We were playing in a squad each game which meant if the soccer game came up, or another team-based challenge appeared we’d be working together. In any of the single competitor challenges, there’s not really much you can do to help your team. 

In the platforming games, there’s nothing any of us could do for the other person, but in a tile-matching-like game, we were able to track more of the symbols as they appeared on the tiles below us as a collective and then coordinate the correct answers.

This is going to lead to some golden moments yet to be captured on video. Imagine getting to the final round and it’s your squad of four with three others. You four quickly surpass the others and it’s now a free-for-all for the win. Do friends turn foes in the face of the golden crown? Or will teams begin sharing around the wins? I want to see a team on Twitch just turn feral on one another in a moment like that. Maybe I’m a bit sadistic…

After nearly four-hours none of us picked up a win but it’s easy to see how Fall Guys will suck a lot of hours out of us chasing that golden trophy and prestigious bragging rights. 

It’s also obvious how massive this game will be for services like Twitch. It’s a party game on a huge scale and the “just one more game” mentality is going to see many players streaming past their original cut-off point. It happened to us.

Falls Guys is releasing for PC and PS4 on August 4th. Beta codes were provided to the Explosion Network.