New Steam game wants you to beat it in two hours so you get a refund

The appropriately titled Refund The Game is a deceptively challenging platformer meant to emulate viral hits like Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy.

Compared to Sony’s awful refund policy, where you can’t get your money back on a game the moment you download it, Steam’s is far more generous.

As long as you’ve only played less than two hours of a game, you have two weeks after your purchase to get a refund. However, this isn’t wholly ideal for very short games, since there’s nothing stopping people from beating them and then getting their money back afterwards.

However, one pair of indie developers has figured out how to make a joke out of it by challenging players to beat their new game fast enough that they can claim the refund.

The game in question is appropriately titled Refund This Game and is a co-production between two studios called Cactile Games and dofhouse.

Billed as a first person physics-based platformer, it launched earlier this week on October 12 and the goal is to simply reach the end of a vertical level by sticking a pole into nearby objects and flinging yourself upwards.

On paper, that doesn’t sound difficult but even looking at the trailer, it’s clearly meant to be a frustrating and challenging experience.

The Steam description compares it to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, which famously had deliberately bad controls. This and QWOP (which were made by the same developer) have inspired similar games like Biped 2, where the enjoyment comes out of conquering a purposely unfair challenge.

Unlike Biped 2, Refund This Game is a purely solo experience, so there’s no one to blame your repeated failures on but yourself. While you can place a checkpoint anywhere on the level, you can only ever have one at a time and need to manually carry it with you.

So, if you want to mark a new checkpoint, you need to backtrack to where you placed the last one and then return to where you were without dying and losing all your progress.

The game isn’t overly expensive, only costing £3.67, so you’re losing little if you fail to clear the developers’ challenge. This is a temporary discount for the game’s launch that ends on October 26, though even at full price it’s still just £4.59.

It surprisingly hasn’t gone as viral as you’d expect, as its all-time player count is only in the double digits, but that could quickly change once more people become aware of it. Especially if any notable streamers show it off.

At the very least, what players it has attracted have left nothing but positive reviews, encouraging others not to refund the game even if you beat it in two hours.

‘The game is fun, it’s a nice challenge though I think you shouldn’t refund games that you have enjoyed if it’s a reasonable price which it is,’ says Brak.

‘I wouldn’t refund this game even if I did complete it in two hours (I didn’t),’ admits rabidPancake.

‘I love a good challenge. While I didn’t beat it at all because I’m a chud, I feel like the mechanics of this was interesting. Even if I did complete the challenge, I don’t think I would’ve refunded it anyway,’ adds LeliaV.

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