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The Crushing Joy of OlliOlli 2

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

I’ve inadvertantly started playing 2 incredibly punishing games at the same time: Bloodborne and OlliOlli 2. I’ll have much more on Bloodborne in the coming days, but I just wanted to say this about OlliOlli 2.

OlliOlli 2 feels like an impossible game at first. You have to press a button to land and move the joystock to land on a rail to grind. You also have to learn to manual to link tricks together, and you have to do tricks in the air as well. And of course there are those goals you have for each level that you need to do while you’re just trying to survive until the end of the level.

It’s a lot to wrap your head around at first, but it comes to you over time. Once you get the hang of things, you have runs like this that feel great:

But even when you get pretty good, you still have strings of failures like this:

OlliOlli 2 is one of those games that is soul-crushingly frustrating most of the time, but absolutely euphoric in those moments of triumph. The game is free for PlayStation Plus members on PS4 right now, so got get it!