The difficulties in Juke’s Towers of Hell are interesting because they’re incredibly informative and surprisingly useful, but are engaging enough as their own concept to have an entire fan community of their own on top of the already existing obby fanbase, so I always like to explain them in a fun way to people I’m telling about obbies for the first time. The difficulty system in JToH spans across seven difficulties, each with their own name, but also with a granular numerical system within the tier to determine exactly how hard a given tower is.

Easy, Medium, and Hard are pretty self-explanatory; they’re similar concepts across games like Geometry Dash, rhythm games, and pretty much anything that uses standard difficulty names. I can still fall on these towers due to my cockiness and inconsistency, but for the most part, Easy and Medium are pushovers for me, while Hard is pretty easy as well, though not trivial. These three difficulties are signified by green, yellow, and orange squares.

Difficult is where things start to get interesting; right now, they’re what I tend to hunt when I find them due to my confidence at this level compared to what it is at higher levels. Though you do see some pretty interesting tech in later Hard and even Medium towers, Difficult is where this starts to get put to the test. Challenging is even harder than Difficult, with a lot of the hard jumps you’ll start to see as the difficulty gets higher, and is where two of my best tower completions lie on the difficulty chart. These two difficulties are signified by a bright red and dark red square, respectively.

Intense, the black square difficulty, is what I consider the true “skill barrier” for much of what the game has to offer. Many of JToH’s most ambitious mainline challenges are Intense difficulty, and these towers expect a lot of game knowledge out of anyone skilled enough to brave their challenges, tossing things at the player they might not expect and expecting them to adapt. Remorseless, signified by a pink square, is the hardest difficulty in the game, featuring many challenges that put all of the player’s skills to the test. To beat a Remorseless difficulty tower is a grand achievement for many, even the most experienced obby players who can dispose of most of the rest of the game with little overhead.

…Sorry, did I say seven difficulties? I meant eleven.

Above the already absurd difficulty of the pink square exists four difficulties known as the Soul Crushing difficulties. These towers are so difficult that most players are not expected to complete them, with even completing one being a crowning achievement for many players; on top of this, these towers are incredibly out of the way to the point where even stepping into them requires a special knowledge that most players don’t have. It’s because of all of this that Soul Crushing clears are broadcasted globally instead of per-server due to their extreme rarity. The first of these is Insane, signified by a blue square, which puts players through a gauntlet of stressful jumps; I’ve completed one, but only a low Insane tower in an unofficial game with an infinite amount of checkpoints in what is known as an “All Jumps” run. Extreme is more challenging than even that and is signified by a lighter blue square.

Past this point, you begin to enter the territory of the hardest obbies of all time. Terrifying, a difficulty indicated by a neon blue square, denotes some of the hardest obbies out there, with high level obby players barely clinging onto these at top players; while some can still speed through even these, it takes an almost superhuman amount of will and skill to actually make the feat land. Then, on top of this, is the white square: Catastrophic, the true endgame of JToH. These are the hardest towers anyone is expected to beat and exist practically on the line that denotes what is humanly impossible, with few players even dreaming of completing these.

…Sorry, did I say eleven difficulties? I meant fourteen.

Hidden away in an area adjacent to Zone 3 in JToH with an extremely specific unlock condition is the Pit of Misery, the home of the most difficult towers that are in JToH at present, and likely will ever be; in fact, save for the one Easy tower featured in the sub-area as a joke, all of the towers there offer no progress to the game and exist only as tests of skill, with the easiest tower in the zone already being at Terrifying difficulty. After passing by the Catastrophic portals, you are then greeted by a unique sight: Two sets of difficulties, one signified by a black square with a light purple outline and the other signified by a black square with a vivid purple outline. These are Horrific and Unreal, the two hardest humanly possible difficulties in JToH that exclusively exist in this zone and are considered the active peak of obby skill. Horrific towers are infamous for their absurd difficulty and feature completion accounts barely above the single digits, while Unreal towers have clear counts in the single digits, with some only having a single clear to their credit by a name that permanently etches itself in Roblox history afterwards. Any legit Catastrophic, Horrific, or Unreal clear is an achievement that is celebrated by the community at large.

That brings us to the final difficulty, nil. No tower of this difficulty is officially included in JToH, or any self-respecting tower game, due to towers in this difficulty range being humanly impossible. It is possible to all jump these or TAS them, but it is incredibly unlikely that any single run of these towers will ever be completed due to this. These towers are denoted with a black square surrounded by a grey outline and, save for the towers considered TooHard that are literally impossible, or otherwise much harder than it, make for the hardest towers in all of JToH.

I feel like my tone changed a lot throughout this one. Good.