On July 25 this year, a YouTuber named Haelian uploaded a video called “Why No One Has Beaten the Max Heat in Hades or Probably Ever Will”: a breakdown of the hardest possible run-through of Supergiant’s incredible 2020 roguelike action-RPG and why it is, effectively, unbeatable. 

The probabilities are just too low: Activating all of the game’s difficulty-boosting Pact of Punishment modifiers turns a challenging game into a gruelling gauntlet. It ratchets up the game’s heat (effectively its difficulty level) to its maximum of 64. With enemies buffed to the max, the player character as weak as can be, and only 5 minutes to complete each area, you’d need to be both immensely skilled at the game and secure an impossible string of lucky drops during your unseeded playthrough to even make success a possibility. As far as the community knows, it had never happened before and it was never going to.

Anyway, it’s now eight days after that video was posted and, obvio…