Indie climbing game Only Up! is Twitch's latest masochist craze.
In recent months we've seen new entries from some of gaming's biggest and most popular titles, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Diablo 4, which you'd certainly expect to be high on Twitch's most-watched chart. One you might not be expecting is Only Up!, an unassuming indie game inspired by Jack and the Beanstalk that's received fairly mixed reviews on Steam. But like with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and Jump King - both punishing games about struggling upwards - it's taken Twitch by storm.
Only Up! puts you in the shoes of teenager Jackie who, in an effort to escape poverty, sets out to climb to the very top of the game's weird and disjointed world. "The game has no save points," explains Only Up!'s Steam page. "The point is that each successive level raises the stakes in the game, the higher you climb, the more painful to fall." It adds: "This makes the game more tense and nervous, but that's the point - to reach the top, you need to step over this fear and irritability, calm down and slowly but surely move toward the goal."
And it's just this struggle and tension, coupled with the game's simplistic nature, that has made Only Up! such a hit with Twitch streamers and viewers. At the time of writing, it's got over 85,000 viewers tuning in to watch a dizzying array of videos of players trying to make their way to the top. According to Twitch Tracker, Only Up! is the sixth most popular game on the streaming platform right now, just behind League of Legends and Diablo 4.
Developer SCKR Games estimates that the time it takes to complete Only Up! is around 40 minutes to two hours, though if you keep falling, it could very well go on forever! It also warns that "if you're the kind of person who gives up easily, think before you buy the game." As it's currently sitting pretty high on Steam's top sellers chart, it seems that watching Twitch streamers squirm has inspired many to attempt this quirky challenge themselves.
See more indies that are coming your way in the near future in our upcoming indie games guide.
