Today, I’m going to talk about a "masterpiece" called QWOP. You don’t need to download it—just open your browser and play—but it will absolutely make you question your existence.

Before opening the game, I thought that as a veteran gamer, running 5 meters would be a matter of seconds, even if I had to crawl.

Thirty minutes later, staring at the screen where the athlete was twisted into a pretzel, looking like he was made entirely of cartilage, I fell into deep self-doubt.

Q and W: Control your thighs. O and P: Control your calves. Running is supposed to be the thighs driving the calves, but in this game's physics engine, coordinating these four keys is a total disaster.

You think pressing Q and W will make the athlete take a strong, athletic stride?

Nope.

The reality is: your left leg does a split backwards, your right leg flying kicks forward, and your upper body falls backward from inertia. Your athlete instantly turns into a breakdancing mollusk before faceplanting with a crisp bone-cracking sound. Game over.

The magic of this game is that you know you just need to alternate your legs to move forward, but your hands just won't listen.

First attempt: I pressed Q and O without even figuring out the direction. The athlete did a backflip and hit the ground. Score: -1.2 meters. Yes, a negative score.

Tenth attempt: I tried to find a rhythm, Q-W-Q-W... As a result, his legs twisted together like a pretzel, and he dragged himself half a meter on his knees.

After who knows how many dozens of tries: I mastered the legendary "knee-crawl" technique. I'm not standing up! I’ll just kneel on one knee and scoot forward inch by inch like a worm! It’s ugly and slow, but I finally broke the 5-meter barrier!

However, I looked it up. The finish line is at 100 meters.

I braced myself and looked up the mechanics for later stages, and what I found made me gasp.

At 50 meters, there’s an invisible killer—a hurdle.

Yes, just when you’ve painstakingly inched your way to 50 meters, sweating buckets and thinking you see the light at the end of the tunnel, a hurdle suddenly appears in the middle of the track.

Even better, if you miraculously make it to 100 meters, the game isn't over. It turns out to be a long jump competition! You have to jump at the finish line.

This game, with its minimal controls but maximum frustration, seems to teach us a lesson: failure is the norm in life, and success is often accompanied by countless face-first falls.

I recommend it to you because watching the little guy on screen contort into anti-human poses is actually quite stress-relieving (provided you don't take it too seriously).