Just days after it was proclaimed "impossible," a Hades player has beaten the game on the highest difficulty without any mods or exploits.
If you're not up-to-date with the Hades community, the whole lot of them have been trying to figure out how to complete the game on Heat Gauge 64 for around three years now. A top player deemed it would take at least 85 hours to pull off, and not only that, but players stood a 0.0147% chance of landing the optimal gear and abilities to give themselves the best chance of beating the difficulty.
So of course someone's actually gone and beaten Hades on Heat Gauge level 64. The video below shows a commentary-free run of YouTuber Jade's playthrough of Hades on the hardest difficulty, beating the game with all its most punishing difficulty options active in just under half an hour in total. This is the sort of feat that needs to be seen to be believed.
Hades legend and GOAT Angel1C clears 64 heat unmodded unseeded🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐 from r/HadesTheGame
And yes, if you were wondering, Jade does accomplish the run with the shield, the very weapon that the aforementioned Hades expert proclaimed players would need in order to stand a fighting chance. There's also the crucial Explosive Return ability from a Daedalus Hammer right out the gate, which is also another key factor the expert deemed to be absolutely paramount for the run.
There's really no other way to describe it: Jade has all the luck in the world. The sort of Boons they earn are just wildly lucky, including abilities like the Static Discharge, which makes foes Jolted, and the High Voltage Boon from Zeus, which increases lightning bolt blast radius by an excellent 60%.
It's not just luck though. After getting Boons like these, Jade still actually needs to beat the hard-as-nails difficulty in Hades, and they've done just that. Even knowing the outcome of the run, the climactic fight against Hades was utterly nerve-wrecking. This is a feat we might genuinely never see accomplished again in Supergiant's game.
It's worth noting that Jade did actually clear Heat Gauge level 64 in Hades previously in another video, but with mods enabled. For the unfamiliar, this was basically the only way the Hades community deemed the extreme difficulty to be feasible, by having mods guarantee certain Boons appear like the Explosive Return ability.
Jade didn't need any of that though, as they've proven in the video above. "Welp," is a comment from the Hades community on Reddit that pretty succinctly sums up the whole response to this ordeal. "For anyone unaware this is most certainly the most impressive thing ever done in this entire video game, and possibly one of the most lucky and skillful things accomplished in any game ever," reads another comment. Yep, that'll do it.
Hades 2 is still on the way at some point in the future, and you can bet this community is eager for another challenge.
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