Ascending Inferno Review - I'm On A Highway To Hell
As a reviewer, seeing a game through to the end is highly desirable. To, at the very least, experience all of the story beats that inform the narrative, overcoming the challenges put in your way as you strive to give an informed opinion of the state of the game you are playing. Some of these games can be played on their intended difficulty without too many obstacles for the player to adapt to, others will allow the player to decrease the difficulty so that they can focus more on enjoying the narrative experience. Then you have the notoriously hard Souls-like games that exist to grind you down and make you learn every movement of every enemy so that you can finally conquer these daunting foes.
Then there is Ascending Inferno, an exceptional type of hell all of its own.
As you may have inferred from the title, Ascending Inferno has you traversing through a modernised version of the layers of Hell from Dante’s Inferno in a 2.5D precision platformer from Canberra-based developers Oppolyon Studios. You take control of our heroine the recently deceased Dani who, caught up in her grief for the passing of her younger brother Vincent, decides to play football among the scaffolding of a stadium construction site. With no hard hat, high-vis shirt or safety rope in sight, Dani falls to her death, waking up in Limbo with the soul of her brother Vincent, who just happens to be the same shape and size as a soccer ball.
Here is where Ascending Inferno makes its mark as a truly rage-inducing game. Not only do you have to get Dani through the levels of hell, but you have to get Vincent through too. With no arms and a soccer ball shape, you can probably guess by now that it is up to Dani to kick, dribble and header your way through the layers. This is decidedly harder in practice than the concept would have you believe.
See, kicking Vincent into the air is the easy part, controlling him in the air and making sure he goes where you want him to go is where your real skills come into play. While the traversal of the initial level, Limbo, is challenging, everything comes down to how you launch Vincent towards your objective. The more times you fail, and you will fail quite a lot, the better your understanding of the movements and actions needed will be. Soon enough you will be able to quickly traverse through Limbo, which is a good thing as there is always a very real chance you will lose Vincent due to a misplaced header or jump and find yourself having to drop back to the start again because he has bounced his way back to where you started.
Here is where I must admit to the shame of not being able to beat the game, at least as of the time of writing. Getting through Limbo, while challenging, was something I managed to accomplish within about 45 minutes of playtime. The next layer, Lust, just kept grinding me down over and over until I would rage quit. You know the GIF of the guy who grabs his keyboard and smashes his computer with it? This was me, every time I attempted to get back on the horse and give Lust another crack.
The problem with Lust is that there are new obstacles in the form of dancers that spin around stripper poles. If Vincent is sent into their radius they suck him in and spit him out, literally shooting him through the air, and while it is possible to intercept him mid-flight, more often than not he is flung through an opening, dropping back to a lower part of the level. Now this in itself is not too bad, but there are a few of these dancers that can send Vincent rocketing from dancer to dancer, sending him through almost the entire layer and plonking Vincent right back where you started.
I have spent over four hours trying to make my way out of Lust. There has been a large amount of rage quits, an even larger amount of swearing and cursing, and possibly some tears of failure hidden in the fur of my cat, as I have tried and tried and tried to beat this game. A few times I have made it through and reached Gluttony, only to fall victim to the new unknown and send Vincent plummeting back down into the depths of Lust where I must once again fight my way back up.
I feel for the little guy, I do. He deserves better than being damned to Hell because I suck.
This is not to say that I am giving up on getting Danni and Vincent out of Inferno, I just recognise that as it stands I do not have the skill needed to succeed, and as much as I would like to take the weeks or months needed to hone my skills and complete the journey, I have to get this review written promptly. Maybe, one day if I find myself in the favour of the gods, I will complete the journey and triumphantly write about it while reminiscing about what I could have done with my life in the hours and hours sacrificed to conquering Ascending Inferno. Maybe I’ll just revel in quiet satisfaction that I have beaten a game that has mentally pushed me to my limits.
Either way, there exists an achievement for completing the journey in under an hour. I salute anyone with the dedication to unlocking that achievement, you are a better human than I.
Ascending Inferno was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
