670 - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount

Best Games - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount

What’s the dumbest thing that you can think of to build a game around. Whatever it is, it might not be dumber than Porrasturvat.

Porrasturvat, known in English as Stair Dismount, is a game about falling down a flight of stairs. A weird crash dummy looking character stand atop an unreasonably long flight of stairs. With the mouse, you control a motion vector that will push the character in whatever direction, with whatever force, that you want. That will start the character tumbling down the steps.

Every impact is recorded and the more damage the character receives, the higher the points.

You win by falling. With style.

That’s really all there is to the game. There is no progression. No alternate characters. Nothing that you can do to interact with it past that initial push. It shouldn’t work, but Porrasturvat is extremely addicting.

Maybe it’s the slapstick comedy of watching someone flail head over heels down some stairs. Maybe it’s the fact that it is only a representation of a person and can’t actually be hurt. Maybe it’s the rapid replay time. You can play a round and have the character back up at the top of the stairs and ready for mor in a few seconds.

Maybe it’s just that, in 2002, no one had really seen anything like that before. It wouldn’t be long before game characters would be comedically rag-dolling all over most games, but at the time it was fairly novel.

The early 2000s were a time of real experimentation in games and on the internet. Strange new ideas popped up every few weeks. People were really throwing it at the wall, or down the stairs, to see what sticks.

Porrasturvat might not be one of the biggest games, but it is one of the Best Games.