In the Team Fortress 2 promotional video ‘Meet the Pyro,’ the brutish Heavy character is being interviewed, talking about Pyro. He’s in a dark room, barely lit and he says with a thick Russian accent the now highly quoted and memed line “I fear no man but that…thing…it scares me.” I feel a lot like him right now. I have reviewed many a Souls-like, also having conquered many other famously labelled difficult games myself. I’m a Bloodborne and Sekiro fan for crying out loud. But playing Ascending Inferno scares me.

Ascending Inferno is a game developed right here in Australia. Locals might recognise it from prior PAX Aus showings. It was the one where you engaged in 2D precision platforming, transporting a soccer ball upwards across 9 floors of Dante’s Inferno. It would consistently gather a lot of crowds due to how simultaneously rage-inducing and joyous the challenging venture is. Having now the full experience to play myself ahead of launch, I can confirm that come release players will find it is exactly that but with a higher scale. Oh yeah and also this game broke me. I can’t beat it. It’s a skill issue, I know. Dozens upon dozens of physics games and platformers over the years still haven’t prepared me for this. You have bested me, Ascending Inferno. Good game.

Dani is freshly dead. It’d be more of a bummer if it weren’t for the fact she is reunited with her deceased brother in the depths of hell. Learning the pair of them weren’t made for this underworld and their arrival was a mistake, the pair work to escape the many floors of Inferno. The only catch is Dani’s brother Vincent’s soul lies in a soccer ball; one that must be kicked, headbutted, and launched upwards to scale the several hundred metres tall tower. If you’ve struggled with difficult 2D platformers in the past, believe me when I say you ‘ain’t seen nothing yet.

If it weren’t apparent already, Ascending Inferno is modelled after the weird growing niche of difficult climbing ventures before it. It tasks you with precise and rage-inducingly difficult platforming where there are little to no (in Inferno’s case no) checkpoints. If you fall and lose progress you have to dust yourself off and keep moving. This was arguably popularised with Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and eventually inspiring similar ventures and evolutions in the maddening Jump King, the excellent Beton Brutal, the viral Chained Together and others. Here, it feels like the cream of the crop for the subgenre, thanks to a more purposeful design and at the very least a semblance of a story.

You see, with Ascending Inferno a majority of the floors are themed, with some of them sharing the namesake of the seven deadly sins. You begin in Limbo, a rundown castle lost to time where your challenging kicks and dribbles across and up its landscape that sees trepidatious jumps across chandeliers that are barely hanging on, slanted rubble and the like. Lust, the second floor is a nightclub highrise with rich neon purple and green lights, traversing through the dancefloor and onto surrounding apartment balconies and a fire escape. In Gluttony, you make your way past goblins in the background that are looting a refinery for precious metals before it opens up to a fast food restaurant floor named Devil’s Diner, where you’re trying to navigate small punts across a series of fluorescent lights that slowly ascend in height.

All of these environments and the obstacles you’re overcoming within them feel congruent, which is more than I can say about their other counterparts. Where other ‘rage games’ are arguably glorified asset flips where random obstacles and platforms are placed without rhyme or reason, Ascending Inferno is a breath of fresh air. It has enough striking and curious environmental storytelling to interest the player too; there’s a room in Limbo where past demonic rituals were conducted. Get to the top of the Lust nightclub and you’ll see a monolithic kaiju demon with a goat skull for a head leering over a gigantic eye; perhaps the source of what has the clubgoers (pole dancers, DJs, people twerking and everything in-between) so entranced. The real masterful secret sauce of the game however is the platforming and soccer ball handling, being a unique and perfect balance of unpredictable physics and satisfying magnetism when the situation calls for it.

When Dani is close enough to Vincent, he can easily be dribbled and moved about. With a single jump, while he’s at your feet, he rises in the air with you to only just above your head. You can get momentum going with this then, now performing header volleys to yourself to incrementally increase Vincent’s height. Time your jumps (and double jumps) right in between each header and Dani can really get spin on Vincent, launching him just over that one ledge or gap you’ve been struggling to clear for a while. One of the biggest challenges of all comes in knowing when to opt for a softer or harder kick over obstacles. Constantly, I found myself weighing up the risks. I was thinking laterally and asking myself questions: “I know a heavy will kick will definitely clear this gap immediately in front of me, but if I’m not careful I’ll end up overshooting and sending Vincent out a window and plummeting down the side of the building. What do I do?!”

Issues only arise with these types of obstacles when I go to quickly course-correct and catch Vincent before he’s sent hurtling down. Dani’s hitboxes where Vincent will connect with her and not clip through her are only on her head and feet. If I’m midair and he flies by my chest, I’m out of luck and I’ve lost him. I’m not a game developer. I don’t know if there’s an exact reason developer Oppolyon Studios chose this; maybe it’s simply feasibility or challenge. It doesn’t matter. The potential feeling of clutch mid-air saves is so regularly ripped from me because of it.

Ascending Inferno’s charm and colour is what’s kept me going even though my progress is akin to beating a head against a wall. Dani and Vincentg have an ample amount of banter between them that feels like authentic sibling speak; light ribbings mixed with moments of important and needed sincerity. When Vincent speaks, the text follows him on screen. In a humourous example, in some instances, you kick him and he’s sent flying he’ll exclaim “WEEEeeEEeEeeeeeeeeeee,”  with the letters painted across your screen. Maybe they’ll even humorously but tragically follow him downwards should he plummet.

Certain scripted story moments that play out in visual novel-style dialogue exchanges are experienced should Dani and Vincent arrive in a room together. These are incredibly sweet and see the pair reminiscing or share their worries for the hard journey ahead. A highlight of this is winding up in a representation of Dani’s bedroom, filled with the obligatory pixelated band posters of My Chemical Romance, Green Day’s American Idiot, Pink Floyd and more. I see her teenage room and mine were one and the same.

I fully respect Oppolyon Studios’ vision of making a bloody hard game. No ifs and no buts. However, I wish there were one or two more quality-of-life things in it to make it land that slightly bit better than it already does. At all times you can see how high you currently are and how long your current save has been running for, but I would’ve appreciated an addition that notes what the highest point in meters you’ve reached is thus far. Though I’m not someone who necessarily needs any of them, I’m curious to see what the teased accessibility options for the games are, labelled right now as ‘Coming Soon.’ If you ask me, it’s a pretty sizable omission to have at launch. In a similar vein, be very careful that you do not accidentally click New Game while at the Main Menu of an already pre-existing save. It’ll boot you to the start and won’t even have a prompt asking you if this choice you made was correct. I learnt this the hard way and lost 2 hours of progress. Not exactly fair of a loss while I’m only in menus, is it?

At the end of the day, I hope Ascending Inferno takes off in the way that several games of its ilk have so far. Not only am I rooting for it because it’s an Aussie-made game and I love to see local wins, but it’s undeniably the best game of its kind. The potential streaming and speedrunning culture for this game is tantalising. I want to see how someone ten thousand times better than me tackles that one jump I’ve been stuck on forever. I want to see the story bits I’ve missed and the clippable moments of tragic falls and loss of progress that occur. I want Ascending Inferno to soar and reach the heights it deserves.