By the time he reached the Palace of the Fates, the game was held together by duct tape and prayers. Enemies spawned inside walls. Doors required you to press R2 for thirty seconds before they registered. And yet, the core loop remained: Kratos fought, killed, and persisted.

“It boots.”

The final Sister of Fate, Lahkesis, was a nightmare. Her model failed to load, so Kratos was punching and kicking a floating health bar attached to a single, rotating eyeball texture. The QTE prompts appeared as garbled ASCII code: “Press [] to ████ the ████.”

And somehow, impossibly, the ending played.