Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 3: Chapter #3: The Keyboard-Smashing Chronicles

The calm, philosophical words in the background track were meant to sound comforting, but in this exact moment, they felt like battery acid.

"Who the fuck made this game! Who the fuck recorded this narration!" Silver screamed.

He clenched his hands into tight fists and hammered them down hard onto his mechanical keyboard.

The stream chat absolutely exploded.

[xX_Sniper_Xx: watching a man collapse in real time LMAO]

[GamerDad88: Dev: From the scale of 1-10, how EASY is the game bruh?]

[Salty_Tears: keyboard HP -1 -1 -1 -1]

[VOD_Goblin: honestly great content I love watching someone break down live]

[PraiseTheSun_99: keyboard rights matter ✊]

[LoreMaster: bro is never voting "very easy" again 💀]

Silver stared blankly at his monitor, the harsh, bright light of the game screen reflecting off his pale face.

Ethan’s rambling voiceover continued to fill his headset, smooth, calm, and laced with quiet mockery.

Top donations and superchats flooded the broadcast, lighting up the screen as the entire chat spammed [Very Easy] in unison to troll him.

Seeing those words mocked back at him made Silver’s stomach twist.

"Damn it," he muttered, rubbing his eyes. The narration was genuine psychological torture.

"Let’s do it again. There is no game in this world that can break me."

Sitting up straight, Silver gripped his mouse and carefully began the ascent from the very beginning.

This time, his every movement was agonizingly precise.

With every swing of the hammer, Silver calculated the physics geometry in his head, terrified of making a fatal miscalculation.

Clang!

The cauldron-man landed safely on a precarious platform near the peak of the furniture mountain.

Silver let out a massive, shaky exhale. "Whew!"

"Chat, I’ve figured out the trick! As long as you’re careful enough, you can one-cycle this entire game!"

He pumped a triumphant fist at his webcam, looking like a mountaineer who had just conquered Everest.

"You just have to play with a smile! This game isn’t hard, you literally just need hands!"

Turning back to his monitor, he fell into total concentration, silently celebrating every tiny inch of vertical progress.

He had reached his highest point yet. Looming just ahead was a steep, jagged incline.

Silver frowned slightly, unconsciously holding his breath.

"Get up!" he commanded, violently swinging the mouse to vault his character toward the high ledge.

Watching the jerky, desperate swing of the hammer, the chat instantly filled with a unified chant.

[CactusJuice_00: FALL FALL FALL]

[NeonSamurai_X: DO A FLIP!]

[Toxic_Timmy: fall back to the start]

As if directly manifesting the chat’s toxic desires, the heavy metal hammer entirely missed the ledge, swiping through empty air.

The centrifugal, helpless feeling of falling backward from a massive height was physically nauseating, twisting Silver’s gut into a tight knot every time it happened.

"Motherf—! No, don’t panic... Just breathe. Don’t worry, I’ll catch it this time!"

Silver took a ragged breath. "Again!"

He missed the catch.

"Another mistake!" The cauldron-man tumbled further.

"God—! Are you serious right now?!" Silver screamed. "Garbage game! Literal trash!"

When the pixelated man finally bounced off the base of the furniture mountain and landed right next to the solitary little tree at the starting line, Silver snapped.

He raised both fists and slammed them directly down into the center of his keyboard. The plastic frame cracked audibly.

On camera, the veins in Silver’s forehead were visibly bulging.

He ground his teeth together, his eyes wild and completely bloodshot.

The light of sanity had completely left his eyes.

Ever since he started streaming, his broadcast had always been filled with jokes, banter, and energetic noise.

Now, there was just heavy, breathless silence as Silver stared hollowly at his screen.

[You have played this game for 4 hours. If you are enjoying your experience, please leave a review!]

The Nexus platform suddenly pushed an automated pop-up notification directly over the game window, snapping Silver back to reality.

’You have the nerve to ask for a review right now?’ he thought, his eye twitching.

He reached for his cracked mouse, fully prepared to slam the [Super Difficult] button, but his eyes caught the developer’s custom store description glaring back at him.

[So, you really think my games are Very Easy? Are you sure about that?]

Silver stared at that arrogant string of text in a daze.

His hand, which had been hovering over the lowest possible difficulty rating, froze.

His mouth hung slightly open, utterly paralyzed in front of tens of thousands of viewers.

The dev’s description was basically a dare. It was telling him to admit he was cooked—that he simply didn’t have the mechanical skill to beat it.

In that precise moment, Silver’s ego shattered completely.

He had been a top-tier gamer for years, and his legendary composure had just been systematically dismantled by a naked man in a cast-iron pot.

He glared at the three rating options on the Nexus platform.

[Very Easy] [Very Average] [Super Difficult]

’Fuck!’ he roared in his head. ’Is this even a game designed for humans?!’

With a trembling hand, Silver dragged his cursor upward and stubbornly clicked the [Very Easy] option.

"Your game! It is very easy!" Silver yelled at his webcam.

Not only did he lock in the rating, but he immediately began typing out a glowing, wildly misleading review to trap his viewers.

The moment he posted it, the upvotes surged into the thousands.

[SilverShot: This is an incredibly simple, relaxing game that is absolutely worth your time. It might have some jump-scare physics, so if you have a weak heart, be careful. Overall, the climbing mechanics are very decompressing, and I felt nothing but happiness during my playthrough. This is a masterpiece. Everyone needs to buy this!]

Watching him type out the review live, the stream chat lost their minds. They couldn’t believe the sheer malice.

The game was obviously psychological torture designed to make players crash out, and Silver was shamelessly dragging everyone else down with him.

Did the streamer have zero conscience?!

Without another word, Silver hit Alt-F4 and instantly ended the broadcast.

Staring at the black offline screen, the chat continued to scroll at lightspeed.

[RogueKnight_99: you’re evil for that review man]

[GlitchWizard_33: honestly I agree, game looks very easy, you just need hands]

[ByteSizedChaos: fine I’ll buy it and try]

Just as Ethan was scrolling through coding forums on his phone, the door to the dorm room slammed open.

Marcus rushed in from the hallway, looking completely frantic.

"Dude, you’re blowing up! You’re viral! Like, literally breaking the internet right now!" Marcus shouted.

He grabbed Ethan by the shoulders, shaking him so hard his teeth rattled.

Marcus was prone to exaggeration, but in this case, he was entirely correct.

Across the entire streaming ecosystem, it seemed like every major content creator was suddenly booting up Getting Over It.

"What are you talking about?" Ethan asked, batting Marcus’s hands away.

He hadn’t checked the internet since dinner.

He assumed his game was still sitting at zero views, especially since his System interface currently showed a grand total of zero ’Super Difficult’ points.

Marcus quickly gave him a breathless recap of Silver’s four-hour meltdown on stream. Ethan blinked, slightly stunned.

He pulled up his Nexus developer account and refreshed the dashboard.

Sure enough, the game had crossed 10,000 downloads in a matter of hours, with user reviews pouring in by the thousands.

But as he scrolled through the review section, his eye twitched.

Every single one of the thousands of reviews had selected the exact same rating: [Very Easy].

’What the hell?’ Ethan thought. ’Didn’t this game just break your favorite streamer’s mind? I don’t believe this.’

He had been sitting here, happily waiting to harvest a massive wave of Super Difficult points so he could upgrade his dev tools and build something even better.

Who could have predicted that the gaming community was this incredibly stubborn?

Ethan pulled up the VOD of Silver’s broadcast.

The streamer was clearly delirious by the end of the run, utterly traumatized by the physics engine, yet he still spitefully locked in the ’Very Easy’ rating just to bait his viewers.

Now, it wasn’t just the players’ mentalities that were collapsing. Ethan’s own sanity was taking a hit.

"So you haven’t suffered enough, huh?" Ethan muttered, closing his browser window.

He really hadn’t expected to get completely stonewalled on his first System progression objective.

’You really have the nerve to call my game very easy?’ Ethan let out a slow, heavy breath.

It seemed that Getting Over It was just too raw, too obviously a troll game.

If he wanted to break their pride, he couldn’t just give them a janky physics simulator.

He needed to give them a real game. A fully realized, hyper-polished masterpiece that would tear them apart from the inside.

A new title instantly surfaced in Ethan’s mind...

It was universally acclaimed in his past life, beloved for its pixel art and flawless combat loop.

But beneath the incredibly smooth controls and the satisfying, visceral combat beats, lay endless death, endless grinding, and pure, concentrated pain.

’Let’s see if you can call this one very easy,’ Ethan thought, a cold smile touching his lips.

— — — — —

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