ChrisJeff's deliberately heinously challenging arcade game series is the sort of thing that should be hard to sell to people. "Hey, play this game! It'll make you want to hurl your computer into the fires of Mount Doom! It's super fun!" And yet we keep coming back for more, and so for those of us with finely tuned reflexes, the arrival of Space is Key Hell is good news indeed. The premise? Just hit the [spacebar] at the right moment to make your constantly moving square leap over any obstacles. Hit anything and explode into a shower of pixels, booting you back to the start of the tier (each level has three) you're trying to tackle.

As you might surmise from the title, ChrisJeff has taken an already almost maliciously difficult game and ramped it up to something that has even stricter pixel-perfect requirements for success. It's only fifteen levels long (or 45 if you consider each individual tier its own level), but for most people this is not going to be something they fly through... especially once a new wrinkle is introduced. Even that new mechanic doesn't really change the formula, however, and it's hard to objectively judge whether this really is more difficult than the others, though the difficulty does spike much more quickly. Still as ever a game for the truly patient and determined, Space is Key Hell won't be for everyone, but is still as compulsively playable and sleekly designed as fans could ever wish. (Doesn't the text in that title banner make you think the game is being narrated by Austin Powers?)

Play Space is Key Hell