Mediatonic left the bouncing, clumsy Fallen boys game in August 2020. During the pandemic, it served as a moment of joy in troubled times. The game felt like what would happen if you had 50 Teletubbies battling it out on American Ninja Warrior at once. It was bursting with energy. But now that it’s here Fortnite, Fallen boys feels like a hollowed out version of what it once was.
To understand how we got here Fallen boys in Fortnitewe need to take a step back and look at Fortnite‘s larger transformation and Epic Games’ plans for it. Already in 2021Epic Games is changing Fortnite from a single game to a “metaverse,” in the words of founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. Now the game functions more as a platform, allowing users to play the classic battle royale shooter known as Fortnitebut also try other games like the survival crafting game Lego Fortnite and the rhythm game Fortnite Festival.
When Epic Games acquired Tonic Games Group, the parent company of Fallen boys Developer Mediatonic, in the spring of 2021, did this because Mediatonic could help Epic build the metaverse. “It’s no secret that Epic is invested in building the metaverse and Tonic Games shares this goal,” Sweeney said in a statement.
And now, with the release of a small selection of Fallen boys-inspired games on Tuesday, we’ll get to see what a step toward that metaverse looks like.
I played three official matches Fallen boys Epic games: Pegwin Pickup, Tumbling towersAnd TrapsIn Pegwin PickupRun through different areas – one level resembles a roadside diner – and try to find penguin icons as quickly as possible. Traps plays like a super long platform obstacle course. And Tumbling towers is also an obstacle course, but from different fixed camera angles, which makes the gameplay a bit more challenging and awkward.
The original Fallen boys lets players compete in a battle-royale-style competition with obstacle challenges. The game is known for its fat, bean-like characters and rag-doll platforming physics as players stumble to complete courses and defeat other players. But the new games fail to capture the charm of the original and fall short when it comes to a polished experience.
The games in Fortnite let yourself play as the Fallen boys characters and use the game’s unique approach to platforming, where characters do a jump and then a dive into the air. However, it’s not enough to include the signature dive and recognizable characters.
Of Pegwin PickupYou just repeat the same pattern of collecting icons over and over again, trying to do it as quickly as possible. The penguins respawn in the same spot and you run around the same small location until the round is over. It starts to get repetitive, even within one of the short rounds.
Traps is certainly a fun and varied obstacle course, but that’s about it. It doesn’t feel competitive because it’s not part of a larger battle royale competition; you’re just jumping alongside other people as you go along because the lobbies were so empty. It didn’t capture the joy and sheer frenetic energy of blasting out of the gate with dozens of other bean characters.
Interestingly enough, the most popular version was one day after its release Fallen boys-inspired game was a user-created obstacle course. A few weeks before release, Epic Games released Fallen boys-inspired assets so people could create their own games with the Unreal Editor. A user-generated game called Only up functions as a minor platforming challenge, except that completing it gives players a pumped-up amount of experience points. So if you found ten crowns — which took me less than ten minutes — you’d earn over 38,000 experience points. (For comparison, my daily quests gave me somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 experience points.)
Playing the user-generated game made it feel like this vibrant title now only exists so people can collect experience points for their Fortnite battle passes. What used to be a game with unique gameplay and its own quirks is now just a way for people to unlock cosmetic items in Fortnite.
The official Fallen boys in Fortnite content and the user-generated gameplay I tried doesn’t quite live up to the richness of the source material.
When Mediatonic first came out Fallen boysbecame an overnight sensation. The developer said the game had more than 50 million players after going free-to-play — and a fiscal report from Unity said it sold more than 10 million copies within two months of launch. But a lot has changed since then.
We’re increasingly seeing what some are calling the “Roblox-ification” of games, a term that refers to a shift toward gaming platforms that rely on user-generated content. Epic Games released Unreal Editor, which allows its own users to create and publish games on Fortnitein the spring of 2023. The following fall, mass layoffs at Epic Games impacted a significant portion of the Fallen boys development team. One developer described the team as decimated by the loss of employeesSweeney at the time attributed the layoffs to a changing business model that relies on user-generated content.
Fallen boys in Fortnite is just one example of how the metaverse and platformification of games have influenced a beloved game.
As it stands now, Fortnite‘s vision for the metaverse is still a work in progress. Popular games like Lego Fortnite are updated regularly as players complain about the lack of content.
We might be able to get a little better Fallen boys content in Fortnite in the future, but since I can then mess around in the Fallen boys games that Epic did release, I can’t help but feel a little sad about the game I remember. So for now I guess this just inspired me to go back and play the original.