I didn't knew Haelian or this 64 Heat situation, but I usually watch speedrun and gaming challenge videos and the impossible max heat video popped up on my feed earlier this week. I gave it a watch and ended up reinstalling Hades just to check out how stupidly hard the challenge was. Not two days after that, the winning run pops in my feed, and the day after I watch Haelian reacting to the run. Somehow, by pure luck, I got to watch a record beaten almost in real time, and the context needed to understand why it was such a huge deal! Kudos to everyone involved!!!
Oh, I thought it was a lot. Keep trying mate! Playing less arcade-ish and paying more attention to deliberately dodging incoming attacks, rather than just dashing around to end up right on a trap helped me a lot.
The good news is that it gets easier the more you play both because your skill goes up and your upgrades start to make a real difference in survivability. After my third or fourth clear I could reliably beat Hades every 2 or 3 attempts, depending on the RNG.
I absolutely adore how Hades is balanced across an impossibly broad skill range. With some practice, even more casual players can eek out a win and then you have these absolute top 0.0000001% players that can chase challenges like this. Very few titles have achieved anything remotely close. Kudos to the player here raising the bar and let's see if anyone can string two of these back to back.
Back to back is functionally impossible. The odds of getting the required boons to just leave the first area is very low. Getting the boons on the right rarity immediately after clearing a run on the highest heat just won't happen.
I was mostly saying back to back in jest and was more referencing the next "impossible achievement". Who knows, maybe some new exploit will be uncovered that broadens the viable builds for this particular one.
The game has difficulty modifiers that can be added (enemies get more shields, you can't heal, etc.). No one had ever beaten the game on max heat (all modifiers) mostly because of a modifier that restricts your time to complete the game. The problem isn't killing everything - it's killing everything fast enough to beat the clock. There's basically only one build in the game to get the DPS needed but you need a series of exceptionally lucky events to happen to make it possible. This run was thought impossible not because it's literally impossible but because it was unlikely for someone to put in the mind-numbing effort to grind for hundreds or even thousands of hours just to get potential runs. The crazy thing is that Angel got the insane luck needed for a run after just like an hour of serious attempts.
We usually look at this sort of effort at the individual level but the amount of hours needed for this to have happened is technically dispersed across all gamers attempting max heat. That greatly increases the likelyhood of it occurring but the real victory is Angel not whiffing the opportunity. Who knows how many other people died a fraction of the way through what may have been an 'impossible' run.
A 64-heat run is a run with EVERY ingame difficulty modifier switched on, so enemies are tougher, more numerous, and ignore the first couple of hits, whilst the player is weaker, barely heals, has no invincibility frames after getting hit, and can't use most of the upgrades earned by unlocking things between runs. Oh, and all the bosses are entirely reworked, harder versions including an entire third phase for the final boss.
What REALLY makes it difficult though, are two specific stipulations, because they're heavily influenced by RNG (random number generation).
Through a run, the player is given a series of powers that modify and upgrade their abilities. Each time they complete a room where a deity's power orb is located, they get to choose between three randomly selected powers associated with that deity. This is limited enough to make a player have to think on their feet, but enough to allow an experienced player to create a build (a suite of powers that all work well with each other) quite easily. Heat 64 reduces the choice to one item out of the three. Basically, aside from the occasional collectible reroll, your build is almost entirely at the mercy of the random number generator. Get the wrong rolls? Your powers are going to suck and you're going to either die quickly or be slowed down by a low DPS (damage per second).
The other is that under Heat 64 the player has 20 minutes to complete the game, rationed out as 5 minutes per region. This is an extremely slim number even if you're playing normally, but with the full Heat 64 suite of limitations it's utterly hellish. The player needs to do everything they can to get through quickly, and in many cases just needs the game's RNG to straight up co-operate. The biggest and most obvious example here is that the final stage takes places through a series of 5 tunnels, one of which has the item needed to progress to the final boss, whilst the others all have minibosses. A player can have a perfect game up to that point, but then find the item too late, thus guaranteeing that the clock will run out during the boss.
The RNG is extremely unlikely, and the skill level required to even perform at this level is incredibly high, so the combination of the two seemed extremely unlikely.