Video Game / Only Up!

Upwards. Onwards.

"Have you ever wanted to walk up to the clouds? Embark on an exciting journey in Only UP! Exploring a huge world full of secrets and mysteries, you have to get as high as possible, and the most interesting starts above the clouds..."

Only Up! is a platform game by SCKR Games. Built out of various recycled assets, its premise is deceptively simple: you control Jackie, a teenager who wants to get out of the slums and find a brighter future. To do that, all the teen has to do is find a way to climb higher... and higher... and higher...

Sadly, the game reportedly caused its creator a great deal of stress and so, on September 7, 2023, the game was delisted from Steam at SCKR's request, making it unavailable for purchase or download. Statements made from SCKR indicate that they want to put the game behind them and are not planning on releasing it again for a long time, if ever.

See also Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which is basically a spiritual precursor to this game, but in 2D.

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This Video Game contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: The player's narration at one point describes how their father would beat their mother. When they arrive at a factory-like place, they describe how they hoped their father would one day not come back from work.
• Bullet Time: Players can slow down the speed of the game at will, allowing them to correct a long jump mid-trajectory... or watch their imminent miss with futility.
• Checkpoint Starvation: There are no checkpoints at all. If you make a mistake and fall, all you can do is climb back up again.
• Continuing is Painful: Jackie is literally incapable of taking any damage at all. It's still not recommended to mess up, however, because they can plummet straight down to the beginning at any point in the game.
• Game-Breaking Bug: It's possible through getting knocked by certain objects to get warped to an out-of-bounds area at the bottom of the map that's impossible to escape. All the player can do is quit and start over.
• Getting Eaten Is Harmless: One route has the player travel into the mouth of a gigantic orca, through its gut, and out the other end. The player is completely unharmed (nothing in this game can damage them, in fact), but they do pass by a skeleton in a boat while inside the orca's stomach.
• Giant Woman: In the original release, a model of an Animesque young woman many times larger than the player character was one of the required landmarks they have to traverse. They'd need to climb various objects surrounding her, then jump onto her arm, and navigate across the cloth she's holding behind her to reach the next part of the course. A later update removed the model and provided a bed-skip in its place, as it hadn't been intended for commercial use. Probably didn't help that this area is rife with sexual innuendo with varying levels of subtlety in an otherwise safe for work game. That said, the developer has confirmed that the creator of the model has now allowed him to use it, with him clarifying that an altered version of it will be added back into the game in the near future.
• Interface Screw: Some sections mess with player's perception just to make the jumping trickier. One series of narrow paths has the screen brightness turned up, as if the player is staring straight at the sun, while another turns the screen monochrome.
• Journey to the Sky: True to its name and premise, the game revolves around the protagonist climbing several floating or suspended objects (such as trains, rocky platforms or even a factory) to leave the ruined city in the ground and reach the skies.
• Our Dragons Are Different: A giant two-legged, two-winged dragon serves as a moving obstacle in the beanstalk segment, being able to knock the player off their platforms upon contact. Amusingly, a number of speedrunners have figured out that if they jump onto the dragon's back and then bounce off its wings as it raises them, they can skip the entire beanstalk and potentially even the penultimate segment afterward!
• Platform Hell: Like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Only Up challenges players to scale a series of awkwardly placed, completely arbitrarily shaped platforms with no way to save progress, but plenty of intentionally frustrating design choices and traps to impede the way.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • At the end of the rainbow bridge halfway through the game, there's a platform that looks like a circular picnic table with a few Giant Food items on it. Jumping onto any part of the table causes it to collapse, potentially leading to the poor player descending all the way down to the beginning of the game. And just to add insult to injury, if they fall down from there the game specifically forces the player away from anything they could potentially land on until they reach the ground. There's a bunch of floating platforms that form a pathway around it and an eerie noise as you approach it can potentially alert you to what's coming, but that hasn't stopped many streamers of this game from accidentally springing the trap and losing hours of progress.
  • In the department store of the city section, an elevator will open up, inviting you inside. Taking the bait will have the floor break off, sending you plummeting.
• Sequence Breaking: If you know where to look, you'll find several bouncy beds or trampolines that propel you a fair distance up. Speedrunners use them to jet past several stages of the game.
• Ship Out of Water: One auto-scrolling segment has a giant ship in a bottle whose bottle is broken; getting on board the ship itself causes it to start sailing over an actual floating body of water to the next segment, but for all intents and purposes, it's basically airborne. Getting the ship to move the right way, however, can be a surprisingly touch-and-go business.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the assets used by the game is a desert area, with a camper van and a pair of lawn chairs laid out next to it.
  • And above the aforementioned camper van, in the middle of the construction site area - is a flying house being kept airborne by a bunch of balloons.
  • At one point during the black-and-white segment where the dialogue talks about death, the player collects a coin, and then jumps onto a gondola that carries them to the next segment. Together, these add up to a reference to Charon of Classical Mythology, The Ferryman who takes departed souls across the river Styx.
  • The rainbow bridge is a reference to the Bifrost of Norse Mythology, but more specifically the version of it that appears in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, particularly the first Thor movie.
  • The temple with the golden apple has a mannequin in a golden pot with a hammer - a direct reference to Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which this game can be taken as a Spiritual Successor of.
  • The beanstalk segment as a whole references Jack and the Beanstalk. Late in that segment, assets that can be seen include a TV set with Green Hill Zone and several chests from Minecraft.
  • The penultimate segment includes assets based on the long-legged elephants from the paintings of Salvador Dalí. Also, at the end of this segment, the player enters a black hole that looks very much like the one seen in the climax of Interstellar.
  • At the very end, when the player takes off into space, the narration states, "May the Force be with you."
• Stairway to Heaven: One segment invokes the trope with a Fluffy Cloud Heaven-like, temple-filled aesthetic, with multiple stairways taking the player upward.
• Stepping Stones in the Sky: Every single platform from the second segment upward is basically this. These platforms include such things as trucks, train cars, ladders, shelves, boxes, entire broken segments of buildings, giant skeletons, paper lanterns, a pirate ship, a killer whale with swords stuck in it, food boxes, giant floating flowers, and other weirder stuff.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: Jackie speaks entirely through text-to-speech.
• Victory Fakeout: A few platforms are designed to look like players have reached the end, including one inside a Tower of Babel asset, and one early platform that sprays confetti and is decorated with text congratulating the player. Of course, then one steps onto the next platform, which then rises... and reveals there's still more objects to scale.
• Visual Innuendo: In the area near the giant girl (prior to her removal), which includes going under her skirt, the objects to climb on include flowers, strawberries, a tentacle, a showerhead, an eggplant, a fish, a tongue, a bottle of wine, and, just in case the game was being too subtle about it, a condom.