Co-op blunder sim Chained Together now lets you create your own hellish maps

Abandon all hope, all of you chained to your fellow Chained Together. The “cooperative” game about escaping Hell now features a map editor that lets you create your own frustrating obstacle courses for condemned souls to hurl themselves at. You can finally create the endless mountain of destruction you’ve been dreaming of since you were emotionally scarred by Getting Over It.

“This update is designed to unleash your creativity,” developers Anegar Games say in the brief patch notes. The editor lets you place moving platforms, swinging axes, pulsating spikes, and all the game’s other hideous machines. There are already a few levels up in the Steam Workshop, including the one pictured above, in which I slid to my death five times before returning to the desktop. You win this time, spinning log.

We at RPS have already had a brief foray into the fiery pits. It was a journey that saw Edwin, Nic and I argue over the correct way to execute a countdown before committing to death-defying jumps and scrambled sprints. The darkest place in hell is reserved for those who run into a hedge of lasers and insist “let’s just take the risk, lads”.

As a co-op multiplayer platformer, Chained Together is cheap, silly, and unsurprisingly janky. In other words, pure streamer bait—the video game as meme. But I often admire games like this for their playground simplicity. It reminds me as much of Sen’s Fortress as it does of Bennet Foddy’s cauldron-like clamberer. Nic called it a “layer cake of fuckery,” a description both accurate and pleasing.