It's 2026 and Sony just fixed a co-op controversy with a cheat code. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, L1, R1, Touchpad, enter that on the start menu of God of War: Sons of Sparta and you'll unlock The Pit of Agonies, the game's roguelike challenge mode, without having to finish the main story first.
The whole situation traces back to launch day. Sons of Sparta, the 2D side-scrolling spinoff developed by Mega Cat Studios alongside Sony Santa Monica, dropped earlier this month with a PlayStation Store listing that read "1-2 players." Fans saw Kratos and his brother Deimos together in the State of Play footage, read that listing, and assumed the whole game was co-op. It isn't. The main campaign is single-player only, roughly 20 hours long, and the two-player content is a separate endgame mode that was gated behind credits. Comments calling it "legit false advertising" spread quickly across Sony Santa Monica and Mega Cat Studios' social media, and some players went hunting for refunds.
What The Pit Actually Is
Santa Monica's explanation, posted to the PlayStation Blog, is that The Pit was locked because the team wanted players to be comfortable with Kratos' move set and the enemy roster before diving in. That's a reasonable design decision on paper. The problem is nobody communicated it before launch, and "1-2 players" on a store page carries a specific implication that the team apparently didn't think through.
The mode itself looks worth your time once you get in. Each run starts with you picking an Agony, a global modifier that reshapes how a run plays out. One Agony spawns healing vessels that enemies use to regenerate health, forcing you to prioritize targets. Another makes defeated enemies explode in fire. You stack Agonies as you progress, earn a currency called Ashes of Agony for permanent upgrades between runs, and can bring a second player in for local couch co-op as Deimos. Check out the trailer if you want a sense of what the mode looks like in motion.
The co-op unlock is genuinely a good call from the team, but the method is strange. A cheat code is a nostalgic touch that fits the game's retro DNA, sure, but it also means most players will never find it without reading about it. The PlayStation Store page still doesn't surface any of this clearly. If Sony wanted to actually repair the perception problem, making The Pit accessible from the main menu by default would have done it cleaner. Hiding the fix behind a Konami-style sequence is a curious choice for a studio trying to demonstrate it heard the feedback.
Sons of Sparta is currently sitting at a 65 on Metacritic, the lowest score in the God of War franchise by a significant margin. God of War's original creator David Jaffe told fans to avoid it outright. Whether The Pit changes any minds depends entirely on whether players who bounced off the main campaign care enough to punch in a button code and give it another shot. PlayStation buttons attribution: VictorPines, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Greek saga remakes Sony announced earlier this month will need a much cleaner rollout than this one got.
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