Fail to Win

Abuse the game's quirks to progress through sophisticated slapstick deathtrap puzzles, uncovering the secrets of a world going through an identity crisis.

Death is your friend. As the avatar suffers, the player lives on, using the ragdoll corpse to progress through a combination of timing, precision, observation, and ingenuity.

The challenges center around the idea of game state persisting after a respawn. You can reach a new checkpoint even in death. You can clear traps by sacrificing one of your avatar's infinite lives. You can even respawn mid-ragdoll-flight to fly away from the checkpoint in the same direction. Basically, the solution to most problems is to hurl your puppet at powerful explosives.

The game is best tested for mouse+keyboard, but gamepads should work as well. However, the in-game prompts will mostly assume keyboard+mouse for now. Fail to Win is also available on Steam.

FAQ

Is this my kind of game?

I hope so! I'd classify it as a metafictional puzzle-platforming comedy game. It's narrative style is similar to The Stanley Parable / The Beginner's Guide, but mechanically it is probably more similar to something like Portal because of its puzzles. I call them "puzzles", but in addition to logical reasoning, some of these challenges do require some level of timing, precision, and careful observation.

Hey, I think I saw something about this a couple years ago! A demo?

A while back I released something called "Fail to Win: Chapter 1" for free here on Itchio. This was originally designed to be a vertical slice of the future full game with later chapters building off these early puzzles. As I've gotten helpful feedback from that chapter, it has undergone major revisions. The first chapter is now very different from the one in the demo, and it's seen some improvements in controls, difficulty curve, etc. But if you still want to check it out to get a sense of what the full game is about, you can find it here: https://tykenn.itch.io/fail-to-win-chapter-1

How long is it?

Play times from testers have varied quite a bit. If you already know all the solutions to all the puzzles, and have mastered the art of controlled ragdolling, then you could speed through it in about an hour. Although most players will take much longer, so expect at least a couple hours. There are 17 levels in total, and each level has a few different challenges/puzzles.