CLIP CLOP: Horsing Around In Hest Til Fest

Four legs good, two legs bad, eight legs wow just ridiculous I mean really. QWOP creator Bennett Foddy turned his physics-driven leg simulator all horsey with CLOP a few years back, and now a team of Nordic Game Jammers have slapped on another four legs and another twelve movements to make a game they didn't, for reasons I can't imagine, call QWERTYUIASDFGHJK.

Hest Til Fest [official site] translates from Danish to something about a horse and a party, and is about an eight-legged horse travelling to a party. Each leg can be pulled up or pushed down, resulting in the keyboard-taxing controls of QWERTYUIASDFGHJK. Naturally, there are obstacles.

So off the horsie goes, clipping and clopping, retracting and extending limbs in the hope of reaching the distant party. Why it doesn't just walk around the cacti and shrubs in its way, I don't know, but we'll have to help it scale them. I passed some with wild button mashing, others with careful thought, and one with a glorious leap I shall never replicate. It's not too difficult, but having a keyboard which lets you hold as many keys as you jolly well please might be useful.

Unlike QWOP and CLOP, you can't topple badly enough to flip and need to start over. Or I haven't managed to, anyway. It seems eight legs down a long body add a fair degree of stability. I don't know why horses don't have eight legs in real life, the evolutionary fools.

Made by folks in the Nordic Game Jam over the weekend, with a soundtrack recorded in a lift, Hest Til Fest is free to play in your browser. Don't worry about that big notice at the start. I copied out enough to double-check and yep, it is a comedy oversized disclaimer.