In one of the stranger releases of 2020, My Exercise puts you in the shoes of a chubby boy who wants to do sit ups. You press the space bar and hold it down to do a sit up where you mush your chubby cheeks into your dog. Just one button. Just one motion. How is this even a game? Well, its more of a curious experimental experience.
My Exercise comes from the publisher who released Plug & Play and Kids – both interactive weird hand drawn experiences and this follows a similar vein. Every ten or twenty sit ups, something new pops onto the screen. It may be another dog. It may be a buddha. It may be a froggy friend. It all depends on how far you decide to go and what you decide to do with your sit ups. After about 300 you get the option to pull out a weed from the ground and when it snaps and goes flying, it signals the end of the game. Your score is added to your leaderboard and a new character is unlocked to join the band of animals and insects to react to your sit ups.
There are hidden actions to find. You can literally squash your face inside the dog to get doggo view. You can time your sit ups in line with a running puppy to get enlightened and change some of the character designs but its more of a curious oddity than really ever being engaging. That being said, I still sat and mashed that space bar just to see what else I could discover. The game is over in about 10-15 minutes per playthrough and you’ll want breaks between them or you’ll be bored very quickly.
Ultimately this is a difficult experience to recommend as nothing much really comes from it. The artwork is nice, there is next to no sound and once you’ve seen the animals, you’ve seen everything the game had to offer. I personally found Kids and Plug & Play offered more of a hidden narrative to them, especially Kids – it felt like it had something to say. This feels just a bit.. strange and without purpose. If some interactive quirky cartoons take your fancy, just Kids first over this one.
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