They faced a challenge. Or, more correctly, a meta-challenge. As a game development studio that specialized in making exceedingly difficult games, they had a reputation of making very difficult games indeed. So far, they had managed to perform the difficult balancing act of keeping things difficult but not completely impossible. To be sure, most players would give up and declare their games impossible, but the games were (in an ever more technical sense) not actually impossible. Just headscratchingly, hairpullingly difficult
At various points during the studio’s many years of doing business, the question of whether they’d achieved peak difficulty had arisen. Every time, the gamers had responded by taking what seemed to be impossible challenges and rendering them far easier than they should have been. Using tools, strategies and vernaculars that became increasingly opaque and specific with each iterations, the gamer base responded by demanding more difficulty, bigger challenges and larger impossibilities
This time, however, doubt lingered in the air. They’d thrown everything that could be thrown into a game, and even the kitchen sink based challenges had eventually been overcome. All hell-class difficulty spikes had been employed, having already used the ideas previously deemed to be of merely limbo, purgatory and wrath levels of non-completability. In short, they were fresh out of hells
If only, one developer mused, there were additional hells. That’d do it
They did not know it at the time, but this one off-hand remark was just the inspiration that was needed. After some deliberation, it was decided that the next step in the studio’s trajectory would be to hire a slew of literary scholars, of which at least one had read both Dante and Joyce. It was time to up the difficulty to new, previously unimagined levels
More longer friend see that sky? 