chapter 1
< 0. Dungeon of Infinity >
Roguelike deck building RPG game, ‘Dungeon of Infinity’.
An early access game that once became a hot topic on the Internet.
However, after 2 years and 4 months of updates, it was forgotten in people’s memories.
Except for Jung Hyun.
‘Dungeon of Infinity’
‘Play time: 5603.7 hours’
Jeong-hyeon played the game to the point of evaporating beyond stagnant and rotten water.
But one day, I entered the world inside the game.
It’s also the character with the most trashy performance.
[Name: Andrea]
[Class: None]
[Level: 1]
[Max Mana: 1]
[Strength: 1]
[mana: 2]
[Resistance: 1]
[Luck: 2]
[quirk: none]
A dungeon is a place where you will die if you are careless even for a moment.
Of course, the genre is roguelike, so once you die, there is no chance to start again.
A place where death, like reality, is the eternal end.
I had to do anything to survive.
‘If you die, it’s over. I have to use all the bugs, tricks, and tricks I know about.’
‘I’ll show you how the deceased person plays the game.’
< 0. Dungeon of Infinity > End
< 1. Yourself >
As soon as Jung-hyeon returned home, he put the beer bag on the table and lay down on the bed. Physical fatigue is also fatigue, but today was a day of severe mental fatigue.
‘A poor company. I want to hit it quickly.’
I didn’t apply thinking that I would be able to work comfortably. However, I believed that if I worked hard, someone would recognize me someday.
It was a very naive thought. The harder he worked, the more people treated him as a hodgepodge, and Jeong-hyeon felt like asking what he had done wrong.
‘Temporary workers aren’t even people, that’s it.’
Working hours were limited, and there were infinitely many things others pushed. Jeong-hyeon, who was handling both the preparation of the physical inventory table drawn up by the deputy manager and the arrangement of the expenditure statement drawn up by the deputy manager, ended up not being able to finish either of them properly.
Tomorrow is the weekend, but I had to go to work to finish work. This fleeting Friday evening was the only break given to Jung-hyeon.
‘I should play a game while drinking beer.’
Jung-hyeon poured beer into his glass and went to the desk to turn on the computer. When the desktop was opened, I pressed the icon of ‘Stem’, a game distribution platform.
There were quite a few games in his library, but most of them were not installed. The play time is also zero hours, and at most three or four hours. These were games that I bought because I was tempted during the sale period, but for some reason I didn’t get my hands on them, so I left them as they were.
‘I think I know what you mean when women open a closet full of clothes and say they have nothing to wear.’
Most of the time, after thinking about it, what I wear is the clothes I always wear. The case of Jung Hyun was not much different. The cursor, which wandered between installed games, eventually clicked on the one it always played.
‘Dungeon of Infinity’
‘Play time: 5603.7 hours’
‘Achievements: 285/287’
Dungeon of Infinity, the game that changed Jung Hyun’s life.
As the name suggests, this game that explores endless dungeons was a mix of roguelike, deck building, and RPG.
The game was a strange mix of turn-based and real-time, action RPG and card game. Even though it was a turn-based game, the turn did not pass when an action was taken, but only when the actual time of 30 seconds passed.
Every turn, you get a card and mana to use that card, and you can use the card as if you were using a skill in an RPG.
At the end of the turn, unused cards and mana are discarded, and new cards are drawn to replenish mana.
Of course, if you are confident in your control, you can catch monsters without using cards and using normal attacks. It was virtually impossible because of the difficulty.
The enemies also get stronger with each turn, so you have to use your cards as efficiently as possible to catch monsters quickly.
When ‘Dungeons of Infinity’ first came out as Early Access, it didn’t make a big impression. After the deck building roguelike game called ‘Slay the Fire’ in ‘Stem’ became an unprecedented hit, similar imitations were flooded.
Although it differentiated itself as an action RPG, the developer was not a famous place and the level of completion was not very high, so people predicted that it would be buried as one of the mediocre games.
However, this game has now become a famous game that everyone who plays games knows.
Except for the core system mentioned above, it is because the game has become a completely different game while updating.
The number of playable characters, which were only 2, increased to 10. Dot graphics, which were not very high in resolution, became 3D graphics comparable to most blockbuster games. Monsters that used to die with a single hit have improved AI enough to memorize the player’s attack patterns and deal with them.
Most of all, it was great that the roguelike element, which gave the feeling of spinning around because there was no difference, was greatly strengthened, allowing for an unimaginable experience every time.
People said, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that the history of how games evolved was all contained in this one game.
Given the situation, it was only natural that people would be curious about the developer. But there was nothing people could find out about the developer. No matter how many times I sent e-mails and left comments, the developer only silently updated and did not leave any replies.
Since nothing was revealed, interest quickly cooled, and eventually the atmosphere flowed toward just playing a game. Quarterly updates have not disappointed every time. People quickly waited for the official release of the game after the early access with a major update.
Years passed like that.
The last update was 2 years and 4 months ago. Rumors circulated that the developer went bankrupt and that the president was shot dead, but nothing was confirmed.
There was no doubt that ‘Dungeon of Infinity’ was a great game, but new games that attract people’s interest are constantly coming out every year. There are not many people left waiting for the official release of Omaebulmang while holding on to early access games that are not even updated.
Except for Jung Hyun.
Jung-hyeon could not forget the day he first encountered this game. A roguelike element that makes you experience a new experience every time with an exquisite balance that seems absurd. Everything was close to the game he had dreamed of.
He lost track of time and immersed himself in the game. Even though I was at work, on days off, I found new elements by playing the game all day long.
How to go to the next floor without encountering a boss, how to use a card known as a trash card, how to kill an NPC that is said to be unkillable. After hanging around all day, it’s hard to believe that it’s not being updated, so new things are discovered every time.
Jeong-hyeon organized new facts he found out every week and posted them on the Internet. Not too long after the last update, people responded enthusiastically and commented to find out what else.
However, there were no comments on Janghyun’s post last week. ‘Dungeon of Infinity’ was a game that was already forgotten in people’s minds.
Still, Jung-hyeon continued playing the game. After doing it for so long, now I have formed a habit that I can’t stop doing rather than doing it for fun.
At some point, I heard the fun of breaking the challenge. There were a whopping 287 challenges, which was too many for an Early Access game.
At first, even Jeong-hyeon thought it would be impossible to break all of them. However, as he tried to break them one by one, before he knew it, Jung-hyeon had almost completed all of the 287 challenges.
There were only two challenges left that Jung-hyeon could not overcome. ‘Adept Challenger, Andrea’ and ‘End of All Journeys’.
As the name suggests, ‘The End of All Journeys’ is a challenge that can only be overcome by seeing the ending. Of course, the developer did not give any hints about the conditions of the ending, so it was a challenge that I did not even know if it was possible to beat.
So, Jeong-hyeon was engrossed in beating the ‘skilled challenger, Andrea’. This challenge is a challenge that can be broken by breaking through the 100th floor of the dungeon in the 25th stage of the ordeal with the character Andrea. The conditions are too simple, but the character ‘Andrea’ was the problem.
For the deceased who have mastered all the characters, games usually prepare two types of hidden characters. One is a cheating character with ridiculous performance provided at the service level, and the other is a garbage character for old people who have all the bad conditions called bad conditions.
Andrea was the latter.
“Today I will break only this one.”
With 10 playable characters, there were only 5 save slots. In order to play Andrea, Jung-hyeon deleted one of the characters he had saved.
A savage warrior character with a large body entered the white incinerator next to the waiting room and began to burn. A short scream followed, then quickly disappeared.
As soon as Jeonghyeon saw Andrea in the character creation window, he laughed out loud.
A skinny body, a gloomy impression, and ultramarine blue hair that grew haphazardly. Low-quality stats that are far more horrifying than they look.
‘Andrea is very reserved about his past and not much is known about him. However, judging from the brand on the nape of his neck, everyone cautiously speculates that he might have been a slave. What is clear is that Andrea lacks the qualifications to explore the Infinite Dungeon more than anyone else here.’
Character descriptions that make you sigh. Andrea didn’t look like a body type at first glance, but all of her exclusive cards were for close combat.
Moreover, even those are much less powerful than the barbarian character that was deleted earlier. For Andrea, going to the 10th floor, let alone the 100th floor, was easy.
As expected, Jaehyun couldn’t get past the 8th floor. I tried to overcome it with control while using even basic garbage cards, but it was a big mistake that I couldn’t avoid Mandragora’s scream.
Mandragora wasn’t even a monster, it was just a terrain feature. All it does is scream and intermittently fire the crowd control that doesn’t show the range. Since it is a low-level feature, it is only a feature that causes other characters to faint for a very short time.
However, Andrea’s status ailment resistance was frustratingly low, and she suffered damage in addition to being stunned for a very long time.
Andrea swayed back and forth, coughing up blood in her stunned state. In the meantime, the goblins came and applied a poultice with a club.
If it were another character, she would have survived without blood, but Andrea soon lay down on the floor because of the damage she suffered while fainting.
‘Such a f*cking game.’
Without hesitation, Jeong-hyeon pressed Esc and ended the game.
I kept thinking that if it was a different character, I wouldn’t have died. If it was Greg who did speedruns to the 100th floor whenever he was bored, or Anna who had been to more than 300 floors…
Andrea was stressed out every time he said it was such a f*cking performance. This was the reason Jung-hyeon postponed the challenge of breaking the 100th floor with Andrea until the end.
Still, I would have expected to do that normally, but today I had a lot of repressed anger inside, so it was hard to endure. He took a sip of his beer in a mixed mood.
However, a new notice was posted in the update history, which had not been posted for over two years.
‘Dungeon of Infinity, Version 1.0 Release soon!’
Jeonghyun was shocked and spewed out the beer he was drinking. The hem of my clothes was all damp, but I clicked on the notice straight away without caring.
There was nothing written in the notice. It had only the title, but the content was empty.
Jung-hyeon suspected that the developer was making an outdated April Fool’s Day joke. But it wasn’t just announcements. There was also a reply to the message Jung Hyun left with the developer a year ago, asking when the official release would be.
‘hahahaha, You’ve been waiting for a long time. You can experience it for yourself soon! We will proceed with the update at 6:00 AM Korean time.’
My hands and feet trembled with excitement. After stuttering the interpretation, it seemed to be a story that said that you would be able to experience it yourself soon, and that an update would be made at 6:00 a.m. Korean time.
A number of questions remained unanswered. Why is there no news for 2 years and 4 months, and then the official release suddenly? And why did the developer, who was notorious for not replying, suddenly give such a kind reply? And why is the update history so small?
However, the anticipation and excitement were greater enough to cover all those questions.
It was already midnight. It was absurd to stay up all night, and since I had to go to work at 8 o’clock, I had to get up as early as possible to try it for a while as soon as I came out.
Junghyun quickly set the alarm and lay down on the bed. Like the day before the picnic, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep easily.
However, there was one fact that bothered me. The word ‘yourself’ in the developer’s reply… Why did I say that I would be able to experience the game ‘directly’?
‘No, then a user who is so good at the official release does not play the game directly, but indirectly by looking at the You Tube Edition…’
However, Jeong-hyeon soon dismissed it as a useless thought and tossed and turned and fell asleep.
The next day, Jeong-hyeon woke up in a completely different place, not in bed. And I found out why the developer used the word ‘yourself’.
< 1. Yourself > end