‘The Sonic rings came out’: Woman proves we’re living in a video game when she makes disastrous fall down a flight of steps and loses her XP

Gamers around the world may remember the days when they were just starting out in cyberspace as a small child, long before they understood that it was possible to save their progress in a video game, and subsequently having no way of knowing exactly how much more adventure lay beyond an hour of their daily allotted screen time.

As a result, they had yet to learn the frustration of losing progress in a video game, wherein all the work you put into collecting cool new gear and abilities gets snapped away by one fateful pitfall or power outage, and you simply have to start again. Nevertheless, it’s a fantastic way to prepare for the real world, as demonstrated by TikTok‘s @xssiram.

Distributed by @houseofhighlights, the 14-second video above features Marissa’s upteenth playthrough of the beloved Nintendo classic, Saturday, and she has an utterly stacked loadout; water bottle, iced coffee, and an ostensible breakfast item wrapped in some sort of parchment paper. Surely she’s prepared for any encounter that the game has to throw at her, right?

Maybe not. In all likelihood, Marissa neglected to read through the Christmas Eve patch notes, because she didn’t seem to be aware of the buffs that the stairs received in order to balance out the game’s human-centric powercreep. Sure enough, she fell right into the stairwell’s trap, dropping all of her equipment and nearly sending her back to the hub world of her apartment. All that time spent farming the kitchen biome, only to throw it all away in the vicinity of the stairs’ superior hitstun frames.

Most of the commenters outed themselves as noobs, reacting to the video as though this was a real-life fall instead of a gaming walkthrough gone wrong. “That would’ve have ruined my entire day,” said one. “I’m sorry but the more I watch it, it gets funnier,” said another.

Some, however, knew better than to ignore the presence of the matrix, likening the incident to whenever Sonic the Hedgehog gets hit by an enemy in any of his games, and subsequently drops all of his collected rings. Rumor has it that the Saturday franchise pulled most of its inspiration from the Sonic titles even outside of inventory-dropping, namely in the form of every title getting worse the further we descend into post-Reaganism.

Many players have urged the devs to nerf stairs into the ground for some time now, and even more are in agreement that they’re a bit too broken for what they were designed to accomplish. According to William D. Kickham and Associates, stairs cause roughly 12,000 game overs every year, and the amount of HP they drain in the same time frame has been known to reach the millions. They aren’t quite as overpowered as car accidents, but they remain a pain point for the playerbase nonetheless.

At present, the best way to counteract the Winter variant of a common staircase is to equip footwear with a high grip stat, or to obtain a bag of salt to use in your weapon slot, as it’s capable of weakening ice damage. Otherwise, you’re just going to have a play a lot less greedy whenever you encounter it, lest you’re forced to craft another breakfast and miss out on the Double XP that the Christmas season offers.