I was stuck in elo hell for a good four years, then I entered elo purgatory for another five years, and now I’m apparently in elo heaven, but for some reason it still feels like elo hell. I guess that’s just part and parcel of playing online competitive multiplayer games.

While I’d never want to relive the pain of climbing from Bronze to GM, I am morbidly intrigued in whether I still have that fight in me. So I’ve found a happy medium, playing a strategy roguelike that provides players with “all the satisfaction of reaching rank 1, none of the toxic teammates or 40-minute hostage games”.

In Escape from EloHell, you’re set the task of collecting MMR as you climb the ladder from Iron 4 to Challenger, rank 1 in just 60 matches, before the season resets and you have to start again. The only way to gain MMR is to win matches, but unlike an ordinary competitive multiplayer, Escape from EloHell is a roguelike in which you have to gamble on your ability to win matches to gain effects which will help you in the long run.

It was all going pretty well at first, I managed to report P1mple Guy which got me 14 MMR and I proved that I can indeed gank, and finally I 1v1’d a job application and actually got it, no points for realism though, that was far too easy. But I will give points for realism in that almost every time I was about to rank up I’d be hit with a curve ball that’d see my MMR fall a couple of spaces, now that’s what it’s like to try and get out of elo hell.

In the end I was only able to climb to Bronze 3 in my first season, with 48 wins and 12 losses. It simply isn’t good enough. On my second round I got to Bronze 2. Then Bronze 1. Then back to Bronze 3. And then all the way up to Silver 1. Yeah, this is almost too realistic.