Playing God of War again (still). Learned something from a theological perspective last night: Hell is full of jumping puzzles.

See, I’m to a particular spot where my character, Kratos, has died and is trekking through the underworld trying to get back up to the surface and it seems that there are three major redundant puzzle types I’ve had to face so far, all of which are reasonably frustrating.

The first puzzle type is the “elevated platform” puzzle. This is where you have a bunch of somewhat randomly placed platforms, all at different heights, that you have to jump across. This puzzle is primarily made difficult by the inability to control the camera, so rather than being able to turn things around and see how high the next platform is or how far away it is, you end up jumping directly into or away from the camera and hoping that you don’t die and have to start over.

The second puzzle type is the “log rolling” puzzle. This is where you have a series of platforms that are connected together by logs that spin in an arbitrary direction (sometimes changing direction). The logs, of course, have blades on them - after all, it is hell - and since you can’t walk diagonal faster than the logs roll (you’d walk diagonal to both compensate for the rolling nature of the log and move across the log simultaneously, right? like a drill bit…), you end up having to do a series of jumps to cross them. Of course, if you hit a blade, you fall off the log and have to start over.

The third puzzle type, and by far the most infuriating, is the “bladed column climb.” This is where you have a huge column broken up into segments, each segment of which spins in alternating directions (so the bottom segment spins to the right but the next segment spins to the left and so on). Each segment also has the prerequisite blades on it. As the columns spin, you have to climb up the column, but if the blades touch you, you fall to the bottom and have to start over. The reason this is so infuriating is the scale of the puzzle - the height of the column is probably 50 times your character’s height, and you have to do two of these columns back-to-back. Not only that, but your character doesn’t really climb fast enough, so you have to “jump-climb” up the columns (if you jump while you’re climbing, you can move a lot faster, but in a more uncontrolled nature). I won’t even get into the level of profanity issued from my lips during that ridiculous debacle.

That said, all of that contributes to my firm belief that the rendering of hell is correct - it is, in fact, full of jumping puzzles.