The creator of a game about eternal punishment and frustration is tired of playtesting it

rockpapershotgun.com:

The thing everybody forgets about Sisyphus is that he was an absolutely awful bastard who deserved everything he got. Prior to being the guy who has to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, Sisyphus was a crafty Ephyran tyrant who used to murder his guests for kicks, and who once fathered children with his own niece in a bid to depose his own brother. Charming! The Ancient Greek gods were outraged both by the king's violation of the norms of hospitality, and by his general insistence on being too clever by half - and I feel a similar way reading the Xitter feed of Bashir "ManliestDev" Kashalo, who is making a game in which you play as Sisyphus after his eventual demotion to the rank of underworld's chief rock-pusher.

Kashalo has come to "hate" playtesting the game, jovially titled Pushing It! With Sisyphus, whose Steam page promises "levels of frustration not previously thought possible". He's just really sick of that boulder. Waiter! Please fetch me the world's smallest violin, grind it to a paste and gently spoonfeed it to the developer who is weary of the game he consciously and deliberately decided to make about the experience of infinite failure. I'm sure no other video game developers can relate.

Kashalo is, of course, not being serious and neither am I. I think Pushing It! With Sisyphus looks hilarious. I also think it's hilarious that it's not even the only Sisyphus sim on the store. The others include 2D precision platformer SISYPHUS, in which Sisyphus is a low-key ninja with the power of time manipulation, and The Game Of Sisyphus, perhaps the most polished of the currently available Sisyph 'em ups, which which, when I discovered it, had a "mostly positive" rating on Steam.

You might think that "overwhelmingly positive" would be funnier, but the thing I love about "mostly positive", without reading the individual reviews, is that it implies a level of good-humoured debate and some carefully considered reservations at the level of both premise