We’re playing God of War again and have gotten Kratos killed, oh, at least fifty times now, by falling off the rafters that you have to thread your way through while avoiding the rotating knife arms. In the Challenge of Hades. If you’ve played the game I’m sure you know what I mean.Anyway, every time he dies we just restart from the convenient save point at the beginning of the room with the rafters. Often we think of save points are an entirely out-of-game-world mechanism for making death be a minor frustration (or a major one, as in this case) rather than end of story. In light of my previous rant about the inappropriateness of the send the hero off to the deathtrap of a temple strategy for saving Athens, though … what if we construe them as in-world? Every time Kratos dies, the gods restore him to life and dump him back at the most recent save point or checkpoint. (I guess they aren’t allowed to put him ahead of the trap that keeps killing him, for the same reason they can’t just teleport him to the room with the godslayer weapon…) There’s nothing overt in the game to indicate this, unlike some (e.g. Ultima, as madmanatw pointed out last time) but the save points do say Zeus offers you the opportunity to save your progress.If so, Athena’s strategy is less horrible than it seemed - Kratos will eventually, if only by sheer luck, get through the temple. Perhaps there won’t be any of the city left to save, but at least she can have her revenge on Ares. On the other hand, it’s a good thing Kratos is completely insane already, because otherwise he would be after a few dozen cycles of that treatment!

[EDIT: Ok, so now we hit a completely different headache: the minotaur boss. All the walkthroughs seem to assume that the O-button minigame is trivial; we are finding it impossible (well, we got it once but only by chance). I don’t have any idea how to integrate that into this theory.]

[SON OF EDIT: Pam, having gotten sick of it, informs me that she knows how to do the minigame now, but that you have to do it just exactly right or you fail. We do not approve.]