Chained Together

A climb out of Hell, four friends at a time

Chained Together's premise fits in one sentence: one to four players, physically linked by a chain, climb up out of Hell through a series of increasingly hostile environments, and if one player falls, the chain can drag every other player down with them. There's no combat, no story beyond the framing device, and barely any systems beyond mantling, jumping and swinging on the chain itself. Developed by Anegar Games and published by Secret Mode, it released on 19 June 2024 at a genuinely low NZ$7.39, and within hours of launch it had become one of the defining gaming moments of the year on Twitch -- roughly 233,000 peak concurrent viewers, 8.3 million hours watched in its first week, and adoption across more than 33,000 unique streaming channels, according to stream-tracking data from the period. It's frequently described as "Only Up meets Human: Fall Flat," and that comparison is exact: it borrows the punishing, no-checkpoints vertical climb of the former and the deliberately clumsy, physics-driven ragdoll comedy of the latter, then adds the specific, brutal twist of chaining that comedy directly to your friends' mistakes.

Rage as the actual product

What makes Chained Together worth writing about, beyond the raw viewership numbers, is how unusually the review section reads. Of the roughly 5,400 negative reviews on Steam, the large majority sampled here aren't complaints in any conventional sense -- they're jokes, delivered in exactly the voice you'd expect from an audience that discovered this game through unhinged Twitch clips. "If you want to feel pure pain and agony this is the game for you," reads one thumbs-down review, nearly word-for-word echoed by a separate reviewer elsewhere in the sample. "Ruined all my friendships," "please protect your sanity," "made me rethink my life choices" -- these read, and are clearly intended to read, as five-star praise wearing a thumbs-down icon, and the game's own Discord and Twitch culture treats that irony as part of the product. It's a genuinely unusual thing to see at this scale: a negative-review sample where distinguishing real complaints from bits requires reading past the first line of nearly every entry.

Underneath the performance of misery, the actual design holds up as a legitimately well-tuned rage-comedy premise. Being chained to teammates means every other player's mistake is mechanically, immediately your problem too -- a stumble twenty feet away can yank you clean off a ledge you were standing on safely -- and that shared vulnerability is what turns a fairly simple climbing platformer into something reviewers across the board describe as generating real, memorable moments with friends rather than generic co-op busywork. "This game proves the best way to bond is through mutual suffering," reads one representative five-star review, and a 176-hour player -- an outlier by a wide margin, but a genuine one -- calls it "an absolute blast" built specifically around "some of the funniest, most chaotic gaming moments" they've had with friends.

The complaints that are actually complaints

Read past the bit, and the same handful of specific, checkable issues turn up regardless of whether the review is thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Performance is the most consistent: "made me and my friends lose our minds. optimization not very good," reads one review, echoed by a separate positive review that specifically praises the game for still running "smooth" only after "lowering the graphics" on lower-end hardware -- implying the default settings don't run cleanly for a meaningful slice of the audience. A PS5-specific bug that reportedly takes hours to work around gets a direct, blunt callout in the sample as well.

The achievement data adds a second, more precise complaint that the reviews only gesture at. Steam's global achievement percentages track cleanly with each successive climbing area -- 94.3% of players clear the first section, dropping gradually through the high-80s, 70s, 60s and so on as the climb gets harder, exactly the shape you'd expect from an escalating platformer. Then it breaks: only 28.1% of players reach the garden area late in the game, and just 3.1% clear the section tied to the "wings" achievement immediately after it -- an order-of-magnitude cliff that lines up precisely with a negative review complaining specifically about "wings that dont let me fly" after eight wasted hours. That's a genuinely useful piece of evidence: it turns a single frustrated review into a confirmed, structural difficulty spike rather than one player's skill issue.

The other recurring, non-comedic complaint is about longevity. "Game is fun until you beat it and you will never touch it again," reads one blunt review, and it's hard to argue with given the design: there's no meaningful progression system, no unlockable content beyond cosmetic variations, and once a group has completed the climb together, the game has little left to offer that same group a second time. For a NZ$7.39 asking price that's a much smaller problem than it would be for a full-price release, but it's worth being upfront about: this is built to be consumed once, loudly, with the right people, rather than returned to.

Verdict

Chained Together earned its viral moment honestly. The core premise -- shared physical vulnerability turning a simple climbing platformer into a genuine comedy generator -- works exactly as well as the eight-figure viewership numbers suggest, and the review section's unusually large share of "negative" reviews that are actually five-star jokes is itself a kind of evidence for how well the game understands its own appeal. The real issues are narrower than the volume of complaints suggests: optimisation genuinely needs work, one specific late-game section is a confirmed outlier in difficulty rather than a fair escalation, and there's little reason to return once a group finishes the climb. At its price, none of that outweighs what it delivers for the one specific use case it was built for -- get two or three friends, set aside an evening, and expect the chain to test the friendship at least as hard as the climb does.