Despite my liking for watching fangames, I had always been afraid of playing them.
I used to have a save somewhere in the middle of I Wanna Be The Guy (IWBTG) many years ago, and I never considered touching a fangame ever since. I Wanna Be The Guy used to be one of the few games that used to run on my old XP machine without any complaints. Alongside Osu, Super Hexagon, and several flash games on Kongregate, that used to be one of the few games I tried to complete. Needless to say, I failed at that.
IWBTG doesn’t hold your hand, it is troll-heavy, and it is very, very difficult. Many other games have been made in its style now, plainly called “fangames”, some of which have gained popularity in streaming: I Wanna Be the Boshy is one that brought me into looking at fangame speedruns (largely from witwix and BBF), and one day I happened upon I wanna Kill the Kamilia 2 (K2) on BBF’s stream. Kamilia 2 is a game most people shouldn’t end up playing in their lives (and so is Boshy to some extent), but it is much more effective in showcasing the sheer range of fangames available. K2 is a “medley” fangame, which strings together content from hundreds of fangames into one single behemoth of shifting difficulties and genres. I am not kidding when I say that K2 has a minesweeper level hidden in it. From watching any popular fangames most would conclude that they are too difficult to even start with. Even Kamilia tends to point toward the more difficult ones among the bunch.
Fast forward to 2023, I came upon a realization in another BBF stream that there may be nicer introductions to the genre. There were some kind souls who pointed at cwpat’s beginner fangames list, and I instantly knew I was going to play chungo’s gauntlet.
Many fangames mimic the style of the classic IWBTG:
In general it seems like IWBTG was a space for a younger Kayin to create a fun, twisted game while paying homage to his own inspirations. He even shows a great understanding of why intellectual property is nonsense, and the technicalities of how his game borrows from other franchises and I think that has carried his ideas a long way. There are now thousands of fangames available, and an excellent level creator in I Wanna Maker, making it very easy to start creating platformers and see people play them. Chungo’s gauntlet however isn’t exactly in the same vein.
Even though it is well known as a fangame, Jane_Chef’s game Chungo’s Gauntlet is still very much it’s own thing. The physics, main character and the platforming style is a big departure from the other games on cwpat’s list, and it even has the pluck to add natural difficulty progrssion into the platforming. You only get a double jump around 3/4ths (?) in to the game, and most of the time you don’t require the gun. Chungo’s Gauntlet despite being a massive meme, is also an excellent place to see how Jane has improved her game making skill from her previous games (see: Chungo Kong 2). It completely manages to shrug off the feeling that the game is made from scraps of other games, seamlessly blending its own artwork into the fabric of the games it’s inspired from. Even the troll sections become increasingly more readable, it’s just so smart to make even that masterable in some sense. The player is trained to read background sprites and guess the effect of a troll before they land on it. Maybe the only genuinely unfair part of this game is the bullet hell bosses, which do occasionally come up with impossible patterns.
My favourite parts of this game among the many beautiful stages was the LISA the painful stage (hehe Lois I’m a JOY MUTANT), the one where you play Simon Says with the rock, and the ticking time bomb. Even in the sheer variety of platforming challenges available, it doesn’t compromise on creativity or its sense of balance. Even among the other games I’ve been playing lately, it felt incredibly fulfilling.