Hou Xiaoguang died twice and was shattered mainly because the gaming environment nowadays is just too extreme.
In a world where paying means you're the man, every game developer would love nothing more than to pamper the players—do whatever the players like, just so they spend money happily.
Make the players suffer?
What a laughable idea!
What if you pissed off the great players and they stop topping up?
Must cajole them, absolutely!
But in this game, iwanna.
Dying brutally without any warning twice seemed like a full-blown malice released onto the players.
Until now, Hou Xiaoguang had never played such an odd game.
Having a low rage threshold made sense.
But he noticed another problem.
That was... he seemed to not really reject this kind of game?
Even though he cursed it fiercely,
deep down, he was itching to play another round.
He wanted to see how the heck this level was supposed to be passed.
Walking on the ground didn't work, nor did jumping from mid-air.
You can't be telling me this game is all made up of bugs, with no way to clear the levels, right?
Driven by a stubborn spirit, Hou Xiaoguang started over.
This time, he approached the tree with a mindset fixed on dying, moving his character cautiously, bit by bit.
"Pfft!"
The apple fell on his head as usual, killing him once more.
But Hou Xiaoguang became excited.
"So that's it!"
He had deliberately fed just now to test the apple's falling hitbox.
He found out that the apple would only fall if the character was directly underneath it.
"Which means, I have time to lure the apple down and then quickly turn and back away."
"After the apple falls, wouldn't the path be clear?"
With the strategy set on paper, he began to practice it.
He controlled his character to briskly walk under the fruit tree, then adjusted the distance bit by bit.
Just as the apple was about to fall, he quickly turned around.
Dodged it perfectly!
"Genius!" Hou Xiaoguang had just started to congratulate himself,
when he saw the apple that had already fallen off the screen.
Suddenly, it swooshed back up, hitting kid dead center like a missile.
GAME OVER
The familiar words appeared, and Hou Xiaoguang stared blankly at the computer screen.
Just now, he had scorned the game for not even being worthy of an idiot's time.
Yet he couldn't even clear the first level...
Numb.
Am I the idiot?
After a long silence, he bit his teeth.
Without a word, he started another hundred rounds!
Just like that, half an hour slipped away quickly.
Not until the night shift reviewers came to greet him did Hou Xiaoguang realize it was getting dark.
And he...
He still hadn't managed to clear the first level.
The cumulative death count in the top right corner of the window had reached 131 times.
This first level was just too maddeningly tough!
It seemed intentionally difficult, with just that one apple having over a dozen ways to kill kid.
After he finally got over all the traps surrounding the first apple through trial and error,
he took a closer look.
Alright, there's still one more tree before the save point.
And on this tree,
there were three apples...
"Hahahaha... okay, okay, this is how you make a game, huh? I'm the fool who can't even get past the first level, happy now?" Hou Xiaoguang laughed out of anger.
He admitted that he really had no talent for gaming.
But after working in this profession for a while, he had also made quite a few friends related to gaming.
One of them happened to be a technical streamer of the gaming zone.
He had a higher gaming aptitude, with good understanding and reaction abilities.
If I can't deal with you, I don't believe others can't either?
————
Eight o'clock in the evening.
Thunderbolt live streaming, gaming section.
"Brothers, I'm here, arrr!" a streamer with the ID 'Old Mouse', was just about to start his new day of broadcasting.
Suddenly, his WeChat pinged twice.
After glancing at his phone, he told his punctual viewers with a smile,
"Friends, we're not going to stream that matching game from yesterday. I just got a friend recommending me a new game. He says it's really interesting; he played through it all laughing."
"If it's that cheerful, then of course, we should share it with everyone."
Hearing about a new game, the audience also perked up.
"Come on, let's see it!"
"Honestly, I'm tired of that matching game; bring on something different to freshen things up."
Soon enough, a locked installation package arrived via WeChat.
Players could only unpack it without the ability to change any of its settings.
Old Mouse quickly extracted the package and opened the game interface.
The moment this simple and poor UI appeared, it triggered a flood of question marks from the barrage of messages.
"?????"
"Pixel style? What year is this?"
When the name of the game's creator came up, it sparked a rush of jabs from the audience.
Ke Jin was an honest kid.
So he straightforwardly put his real name in the creator column.
"Ke Jin? Microtransactions? Wow, the creator must be insanely greedy for money."
"Maliciously enticing players to spend, reported! /Dog Head"
"But seriously, who would spend money with such rudimentary graphics..."
It wasn't just the barrage of messages; Old Mouse also frowned slightly when he first saw the game.
He is considered a mid-to-upper tier broadcaster on Thunderbolt, with a real daily viewership of around ten thousand people.
Therefore, he has certain expectations for the quality of the games he plays.
Poor-quality games not only fail to deliver in terms of broadcasting but can even result in losing followers, a loss that's not worth the gain.
But since it was a game recommended by the internal staff of WWgame.
It shouldn't disappoint too much, right?
With some doubts, he still clicked to start the game named "iwanna."
Soon, the game popped up instructions on how to play.
The moment the text came up, it triggered a wave of mocking comments in the barrage.
"This first level is just too childish..."
"C'mon, give it some intensity! It's hard enough to find a control-based game, and you make it this delicate? Are you afraid of upsetting the players?"
Old Mouse tried to smooth things over with a laugh: "Everyone, don't rush it; maybe this first level is just a tutorial for beginners, so it's made simpler."
But his laughter didn't last long.
When he watched his character, kid, get killed by a random apple that rolled by.
The smiles began to shift to the audiences' faces.
And when he tried to jump and dodge the apples and yet still got hit in an almost un-physical precision by them.
The barrage started to boil.
A series of '23333' and 'hahahaha' began to dominate the screen.
"Something's definitely off, not just a little, but nine or ten points off," Old Mouse, who was also a seasoned gamer with years of experience in the industry, realized.
After sensing that this game was a bit different from the ones that are compliant with player demands.
He started to concentrate: "Guys, stop laughing. I'm about to open my eyes wide now!"
No sooner had he finished speaking than he died again.
The barrage laughed even louder, filling the air with cheerful vibes.
Finally, after half an hour of fierce battle and countless live-die-live cycles.
Old Mouse finally made it to the save point.
"That's it? Easy peasy!" He smirked proudly: "Guys, not to brag, but the difficulty of this game's first level is definitely not beginner's level."
"No worries, though, I've already got the hang of it. The most important thing in playing this game is to keep a steady mindset."
As he spoke, he saved his progress and then continued to guide kid to the right, towards the next level.
The screen suddenly went dark.
Then, a line of text emerged.
"Congratulations, you have successfully mastered the skills of the beginner's tutorial. Now let's try the hell difficulty!"
Old Mouse: "???"
Beginner's tutorial?
The first level that I barely scraped through after dying seventy or eighty times, you call that a beginner's tutorial?
And what's more outrageous is...
What do you mean 'you've mastered the beginner's tutorial, come try the hell difficulty!'
Game designer, are you even listening to yourself?
But Old Mouse didn't have much time to rant.
The next moment, the screen brightened up intensely.
The level that appeared before him left him dumbfounded.
Spikes made of triangles, shining with a silvery glow, were arranged neatly and nearly filled the entire screen space.
On the floors, the walls, the steps, even in mid-air.
Everywhere you looked!
The cold gleam coming off of them left no doubt that touching the spikes would instantly result in death.
At a glance, the few sparse footholds that could be seen were all sandwiched between spikes.
The gaps were controlled so precisely that they were just big enough to accommodate the sesame-seed-sized kid.
In other words, to get from the left side of the screen to the save point on the right.
He would have to leap through countless spikes in a single breath, dancing on the edge of a knife.
What was even more despairing was.
Given the nature of the author in designing the beginner's level.
This already tough spike-filled level probably hid countless traps...
"Nima, are you for real?" Old Mouse almost blacked out and died in front of the camera.
He thought it was all just a joke from the author.
But, damn, a hell level of difficulty on the second attempt?
Watching Old Mouse's stunned face in front of the camera.
The mischievous barrage was almost dying of laughter.
To them, having never seen such a player-torturing game before, it was a completely novel experience.
"Hahahahaha! Man, I can't stop laughing!"
"Amazing! This is the most badass game designer I've seen this year!"
"I've never seen such an outrageous game... Other developers can't wait to spoon-feed the players, but this designer seems to want to smash players to the ground. Are they going through a rebellious phase or what?"
"I declare that this game designer, Ke Jin, has won my approval! He knows how to make games."
"Bold! Is the designer's name something you can casually invoke? Call him Baby Ke!"
"Interesting, really interesting, where can I download this game? I want to recommend it to my roommate."
"I'm different, though; I want to download it for my game-addicted son. No sleep if he can't get through a level."
"Son: Stop talking, pull the plug!"
The comments were all laughing, but Old Mouse really couldn't laugh.
He now desperately wanted to look up this game designer's mental state while creating this game...
And at that moment, the ever-encouraging comments started egging him on.
"Old Mouse, if you can get through this level, I'll gift you a Fire Arrow!"
"Right, I wasn't satisfied with the last level, but if you can get through this one, I'll set up a royal salute for you straightaway!"
"I'm just a poor student without much money, but if you really can get through it, I'll definitely send you a gift card!"
"I also..."
As the viewers' stakes in the barrage kept rising.
Old Mouse grew even more anxious.
With the second level being this outrageous, he wouldn't be able to get through it before the stream ended.
He might still be struggling come tomorrow morning...
And he'd never encountered this kind of game before, so relying on experience wouldn't be of any help.
"Wait, I've got it!" Old Mouse suddenly remembered something.
This was a game, after all!
If it's a game, there's bound to be paid content available.
He was no spring chicken; there was no need to be so stubborn.
If money could solve the hurdle, then why not?
How expensive could the paid content be in such a simple game?
With this thought, Old Mouse suddenly felt much more at ease.
He boldly declared to the viewers with a rallying cry.
"Alright! Since you guys are so generous, as a technical broadcaster, I'll lay it out here today. I won't stop streaming until I get through this level!"