A Hades player defies the gods, completes ‘impossible’ run

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A Hades player defies the gods, completes ‘impossible’ run
polygon.com
23

Hilariously this happened barely more than a week after popular Hades YouTuber Haelian made a video about how max heat would never be broken.

I didn't knew Haelian or this 64 Heat situation, but I usually watch speedrun and gaming challenge videos and the impossible max heat video popped up on my feed earlier this week. I gave it a watch and ended up reinstalling Hades just to check out how stupidly hard the challenge was. Not two days after that, the winning run pops in my feed, and the day after I watch Haelian reacting to the run. Somehow, by pure luck, I got to watch a record beaten almost in real time, and the context needed to understand why it was such a huge deal! Kudos to everyone involved!!!

Shows how his video was pretty spot on though, since the run basically went as he it would have to be

Never underestimate the speedrunning prowess of trans catgirls.

Meanwhile I’ve completed my first scape after 40 attempts…

After only 40??? Lol I still haven't beaten it.

Oh, I thought it was a lot. Keep trying mate! Playing less arcade-ish and paying more attention to deliberately dodging incoming attacks, rather than just dashing around to end up right on a trap helped me a lot.

Can't remember how many it took me but you definitely haven't taken a ridiculous number of attempts.

Man I love this game. Need to start a new play through.

The good news is that it gets easier the more you play both because your skill goes up and your upgrades start to make a real difference in survivability. After my third or fourth clear I could reliably beat Hades every 2 or 3 attempts, depending on the RNG.

And then you turn on the extreme measures and you feel like a beginner again 😂

Hey the good news is after you beat it like 5 times it becomes way way easier.

Took me in the 30s to beat it once but now it is rare for me to not beat it.

Seems about right. I think mine was in the 40s. She's been playing for a few years though :)

I was up into the 100s or 200s attempts when my controller broke lol. I'm bad at this game, but it's fun.

I absolutely adore how Hades is balanced across an impossibly broad skill range. With some practice, even more casual players can eek out a win and then you have these absolute top 0.0000001% players that can chase challenges like this. Very few titles have achieved anything remotely close. Kudos to the player here raising the bar and let's see if anyone can string two of these back to back.

Back to back is functionally impossible. The odds of getting the required boons to just leave the first area is very low. Getting the boons on the right rarity immediately after clearing a run on the highest heat just won't happen.

I was mostly saying back to back in jest and was more referencing the next "impossible achievement". Who knows, maybe some new exploit will be uncovered that broadens the viable builds for this particular one.

Could someone ELI5 how hard this is, what makes it hard and how insane it is? Are there modifiers that make it harder ? Tough mobs? Hard Bosses?

I'm a gamer but I've never played or seen Hades.

Here's a video that perfectly breaks it all down but the TLDW is this:

The game has difficulty modifiers that can be added (enemies get more shields, you can't heal, etc.). No one had ever beaten the game on max heat (all modifiers) mostly because of a modifier that restricts your time to complete the game. The problem isn't killing everything - it's killing everything fast enough to beat the clock. There's basically only one build in the game to get the DPS needed but you need a series of exceptionally lucky events to happen to make it possible. This run was thought impossible not because it's literally impossible but because it was unlikely for someone to put in the mind-numbing effort to grind for hundreds or even thousands of hours just to get potential runs. The crazy thing is that Angel got the insane luck needed for a run after just like an hour of serious attempts.

We usually look at this sort of effort at the individual level but the amount of hours needed for this to have happened is technically dispersed across all gamers attempting max heat. That greatly increases the likelyhood of it occurring but the real victory is Angel not whiffing the opportunity. Who knows how many other people died a fraction of the way through what may have been an 'impossible' run.

My man used the shield with Zues bones. That combo absolutely crushes.

This is considered the only viable setup for attempting 64 heat.