This soulslike dating sim's best-kept secret - an "invisible grilled cheese" - should have taken players "weeks" to find, but instead they found it in barely 8 hours with no hints: "This sucks man"

The indie developer behind "a soulslike platonic dating simulator" was shocked to discover that the secret achievement he hoped would keep players hunting "for weeks" was discovered just eight hours after launch.

Athenian Rhapsody combines tricky bosses with battle mechanics inspired by the ever-changing systems of games like WarioWare and Cooking Mama. With a top-down pixel style reminiscent of Undertale, it launched last week to a pretty positive reception. Unfortunately for developer Nico Papalia, however, the community seemed a little too invested in everything the game had to offer.

Athenian Rhapsody shipped with a locked achievement, which players would need an "invisible grilled cheese" to unlock. In a video posted on Twitter, Papalia cried that "I thought this would keep you busy for weeks," but it turns out that intrepid players had found the cheese, unlocked the achievement, and even verified it with the developer within hours of launch.

"Less than eight hours? To find an invisible grilled cheese with literally zero hints or indicators?" Papalia complained. "I threw an actual fit." In his video, he goes on to say "that was the one thing I thought that they wouldn't find. Yo, this sucks man."

Papalia does actually appear to be in far better spirits about this whole thing than he might suggest - if I were releasing a debut indie game, I'd be pretty happy if players were interested enough to break it wide open as soon as they could. Nevertheless, it's a pretty useful rule of thumb to assume that in this world of hyper-dedicated players, datamining, and more, that even the best-planned secret is unlikely to stay secret for all that long.

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