Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 8: Chapter #8: Dead Cells

You really couldn’t underestimate the investigative power of the internet.

After a few days of wild speculation and connecting the dots, the gaming community felt like they had uncovered the absolute truth.

[GamerGuy99: My cousin works over at Nexus. He told me they tried to buy out the dev’s IP to monetize it, but the dev basically told them to screw off.]

[IndieFanatic: A certain platform getting petty and abusing their TOS? Isn’t that just standard operating procedure at this point?]

[LeaksAndNews: I’m hearing rumors that a clone called ’Ascent’ is already in production and dropping soon.]

[flabberthegasted: what in tarnation?]

[NoScopePro: Yeah, hard pass. Even my dog wouldn’t play that garbage.]

Some viewers who had closely followed the streams felt genuinely outraged by the game’s sudden removal, but for the average casual player, the emotional impact was minimal.

To them, ’Getting Over It’ was just a viral rage game that had a great, terrifying reputation.

Like most internet trends, it burned bright and faded fast.

Since they already had a fully functioning template to rip off, Nexus moved with terrifying speed.

It took them barely a week to push a fully playable clone onto their storefront.

The title? ’Ascent’.

The base game was priced at $1.99, and the core mechanics looked functionally identical to Ethan’s original.

The main difference was the monetization.

The naked man in the cauldron was replaced by a roster of varied characters, and instead of a standard sledgehammer, they wielded an assortment of flashy tools—shovels, sickles, and even rakes.

Different tools provided different gameplay buffs, of course.

And naturally, unlocking these premium tools required heavy microtransactions.

For example, the premium rake offered vastly superior grip stability on the rocks compared to the starting shovel.

Reading through the patch notes online, Ethan Vale couldn’t help but let out a cold sneer.

The entire charm of ’Getting Over it’ was never about buying an extra life or swiping a credit card to get a better weapon.

It’s a game that only has its magic if every inch of progress was to be paid for in blood, sweat, and repeated failure.

The core of getting better at the game was supposed to be the player’s own gaming skill, not swiping a card for a bigger hitbox.

Predictably, the moment ’Ascent’ went live on the Nexus store, a massive wave of curious players flocked to download it.

Players who had already bought ’Getting Over It’ before the ban could still launch it from their libraries, but new players were completely out of luck.

Nexus claimed they had only banned the live broadcasting of the game, not the act of playing it, but by quietly delisting it from the storefront, it was functionally dead for any new buyers.

Even so, all the top gaming clip channels and social media feeds were still completely dominated by ’Getting Over It’ content.

Viewers watching the viral rage compilations would inevitably find out it was delisted, leaving them with an unresolved itch.

"Man, I really wanted to try it for myself," became the most common sentiment across the web.

That collective itch continued to fester right up until ’Ascent’ hit the market.

It featured the exact same core mechanics, nearly identical level geometry, and even a perfectly replicated version of the dead tree at the starting zone.

The only real difference was the art style; where Ethan’s original used gritty, disjointed asset-flip textures, the corporate clone used polished, hyper-clean vector art.

"Tch. Let’s see if they ban me for streaming this one," Silver scoffed, immediately buying the clone and booting it up on stream.

He glanced over at his chat, his expression dripping with sarcasm. "I guarantee nobody’s gonna call me mid-run to warn me about ’violent tendencies’ today."

He activated a temporary "Premium Rake Trial" item the game handed out in the tutorial, and proceeded to effortlessly scale the cliffside.

By the time he reached the Orange Mountain zone, the trial timer expired, and his premium tool reverted to the standard shovel.

Even then, he could just casually hook the corners of the shovel onto the most obvious, forgiving ledges.

The game was vastly, insultingly easier than ’Getting Over It’.

A sudden wave of disappointment washed over the viewers.

There was no tension anymore.

The gnawing anxiety of having to calculate the exact arc and momentum of every single hammer swing was completely gone.

Silver only played for ten minutes before he violently hit alt-F4, uninstalled the game, and requested a refund at the speed of light.

"You know, before I booted this up, I was actually a little worried," Silver said, his tone unusually serious for a live broadcast. "I was worried they might have actually polished the formula, surpassed the original dev, and buried ’Getting Over It’ for good."

He let out a dry, dismissive laugh.

"But this? This is a joke. It can’t even make me rage. I guess the admins were right—this version really doesn’t contain any violent tendencies."

After trying the corporate clone for themselves, the curious gamers couldn’t help but flood the internet with pure venom.

[mr.nbdy: Wait, THIS is the game that made everyone smash their desks? It’s so easy lmao]

[wachow!: I thought it was supposed to be hard? I literally got to the snow mountain in ten minutes. Yawn.]

[boredasf: Just another overhyped trend game. Boring as hell.]

[levixme: Thank god I kept my playtime under two hours. Got my $1.99 back smooth and easy.]

[LoreMaster: Bro it hurts my brain watching people who never played the original use this garbage pay-to-win clone to talk trash about the real thing.]

Back at the dorm, Marcus was scrolling through the threads. He had been sulking for days ever since ’Getting Over It’ got pulled from the store.

He just couldn’t stomach the injustice of Ethan getting buried by corporate sabotage.

"Look at the forums, man, this is amazing! Let them take it down, let them copy it! They’re getting absolutely roasted by the community!" Marcus pumped his fist in the air, a wide grin breaking across his face.

"Serves them right!"

When his roommate didn’t react, Marcus frowned. "Hey, did you hear me?"

He walked over to Ethan’s desk and shoved his phone screen in his face.

Ethan glanced at the user reviews for ’Ascent’ on the Nexus platform.

Looking at the aggregated rating score, a bizarre sense of jealousy actually washed over him.

Every single review left by the angry players was tagged with the platform’s "Super Difficult" negative rating.

On this storefront, generating enough emotional response to get players to brigade a game with "Super Difficult" tags was its own kind of twisted validation.

It was the highest backhanded compliment a gaming community could give.

[Rating: Super Difficult] - "This game is impossibly hard, lmao. Because it’s literally unplayable unless you swipe your credit card. I’m broke, I’d rather play the cheap one they delisted."

[Rating: Super Difficult] - "Yeah, totally super difficult. So difficult to find my wallet to buy the premium rake. Trash clone."

[Rating: Super Difficult] - "I just wanted to climb a mountain, why is there a premium currency shop in a single-player game?!"

[Rating: Super Difficult] - "Playing that ’game-that-must-not-be-named’ gave me actual cardiac arrest, but even so, I’d gladly give the original a ’Very Easy’ rating over this soulless corporate garbage any day!"

Ethan read through the reviews and fell completely silent. He couldn’t help but sigh inwardly.

The system really had to suffer through a lot of irony following him around.

"So... are we still going to publish the next game on Nexus?" Marcus asked, looking back down at his monitor where their current project was half-rendered.

Ethan was carrying the vast majority of the development workload for this new title; Marcus was only responsible for about a fifth of the asset integration, and even that was pushing his skills to the limit.

The new game had a brilliantly cryptic lore setting, procedurally generated levels that shifted constantly, a deep and varied weapon economy, and incredibly tight, fast-paced action combat.

At first, Marcus thought it was just a standard action-platformer where collecting little glowing cells simply bumped up your stats.

But after reading Ethan’s entire design document, he realized the terrifying truth: the cells themselves were a beautiful scam.

Every death sent you back to the start, but every permanent upgrade you unlocked fueled the addiction to push just a little further next time.

The gameplay loop was like a snowball rolling down a mountain—gathering mass and momentum until the player felt like an unstoppable force of nature.

Marcus firmly believed that once they finished this game, it was going to set the indie scene on fire all over again.

"No," Ethan replied, not even looking up from his code editor.

He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.

He wasn’t an idiot.

Marcus watched Ethan’s fingers fly across the keyboard, building out the architecture for Dead Cells.

The snowball was already rolling down the mountain.

— — — — —

If you liked the story, feel free to add it to your library! Also, what do you think about the cover? AI really is efficient.