Confessions Of A Fall Guys Grabber

If you’ve played Fall Guys, this has happened to you: You’re about to cross the finish line. Everything’s looking great. Then, out of nowhere, some jerk grabs you. A bunch of other pastel-colored beans sprint by. Just like that, you’re disqualified. The person who disqualified you was me—and I’m not sorry.

Fall Guys is a simple game. There are only three actions: You can jump, you can dive, and you can grab things. Practically speaking, you can use grab to scale ledges, or pluck up tails or eggs in certain mini-games.

But players have also repurposed this core move for nefarious gains. As Polygon pointed out, less than a day after the game’s release, players were already latching on to others at the finish line—not to win, but just to sow wanton chaos. Scroll through social media, and you’ll see countless posts decrying such tactics. No matter how you slice it, it’s kind of a dick move. To summarize the collective thought: If you use Fall Guys’ grab deviously, you are Just The Worst.

Here is where I must confess: I think the Fall Guys grab is good. I’ve done it before, and I’ll gladly do it again. In fact, I probably grab a fellow pastel bean at least once per round, just for kicks. I am a master of Fall Guys fuckery. Do I ever win? No. More often than not, grabbing someone results in me going down with them. But I always get a chuckle from it.

I’ve caused a lot of hilarious hijinks with my grabs. I’ve thrown opponents into the rotating bar in “Jump Club.” I’ve grabbed tails off my own teammates in “Tail Tag,” just so I can blame them when we lose. In “Hex-A-Gone,” one of the final mini-games, I’ve grabbed another player off a platform and sent us both tumbling to our doom. And in “Perfect Match,” I’ve grabbed players attempting a last-minute leap to the correct square, just to torment them. Remember how that famous streamer spent eight days repeatedly trying and failing to win a Fall Guys game, only to have players grab him as he was seconds away from victory? I would have done that, if I’d been there.

Why am I like this, you might ask? Look: As far as online games go, Fall Guys is pretty low-stakes. It doesn’t feel great to get unfairly killed off in other multiplayer games, like Fortnite (screw you, snipers) or Halo (eat dirt, jerks who equip energy swords and then crouch in blind spots near common thoroughfares). In Fall Guys, though, it’s not so bad. This is a silly game, through and through. Everything is brightly colored. The fall guys themselves are the picture of ridiculousness. This game was almost called Stumble Chums, for crying out loud. There’s a goofiness baked into Fall Guys’ DNA that makes it really, really difficult to take things too seriously.

If we must get practical, getting booted doesn’t even set you back. You still leave with some Fame and Kudos, the game’s currency, upon disqualification. Given the presence of team-based mini-games, winning is often a matter of luck anyway. Besides, matches are, what, seven minutes long, tops? If you’re booted, you can just queue up in another one in seconds. (The once-shaky servers have largely stabilized since launch.) When I get grabbed—which happens to me a lot, because karma, I guess—I just laugh it off and get back in the game. I hope those I’ve grabbed do the same, or at least get a funny Twitch clip out of it.

Fall Guys is the rare multiplayer game where being bad isn’t all that bad. This year has sucked in one million different ways. Let’s have as much fun as we can, people. Next time you’re in a round of “The Whirlygig,” stand by the finish line and stop that lime green bean from qualifying.

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