In this week’s newsletter: the deliberately tough Sifu is about to revive the never-ending discourse about how difficult games should be
Last modified on Tue 8 Feb 2022 07.47 EST
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Welcome back to Pushing Buttons! First off, thank you very much to everyone who’s emailed me to ask a question, recommend a game or express their appreciation for the newsletter since it launched. This is fast becoming my favourite part of my job – and though I very passionately believe that video games ought to be taken seriously, I love that this newsletter provides a moment of enjoyable levity in the week for so many of you. That’s part of why games matter: they make us happy.
One such email came from reader Iain Noble, who got me thinking about difficulty in video games – a rolling debate that is about to become topical again thanks to Sifu, an unconventional and by all accounts ridiculously hard kung fu game, out today. Ian asks:
“As a ‘mature’ gamer aged 74, I find that my reflexes are not what they were. Increasingly I have to turn down the difficulty settings on games in order to play,” he says. “A recent example would be Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Much of the ‘debate’ on gamer forums centres on the difficulty of new games. Do you have any thoughts on this?”
Look: I love a difficult game. I grew up at a time when most games were difficult (usually because they were a bit broken, rather than because of their creative intent), and so I developed a high frustration tolerance that usually sees me through games such as Dark Souls and Returnal, where the difficulty is part of the point. I derive immense joy from slaying giant dragons in Monster Hunter and facing up to horrifying bosses in Bloodborne. I find competitive play too stressful – multiplayer shooters and sports games get me too agitated to be enjoyable. But when it’s just me versus the game, I’m all about a challenge.
I also think that barely any of these games would be adversely affected by offering some kind of easier mode for players who aren’t wired like I am. Some people derive absolutely no satisfaction from games that punish you for failure; others have disabilities that make games tough to play without adaptations. Also, plenty of players simply don’t have the time to master a game over the course of tens of hours, but might still like to experience its story. If you can offer players options, whether that’s an auto-aim, an easy mode or the ability to skip a scene if it’s too annoying, a la Grand Theft Auto 5, then why not?
This particular discourse has become very spicy on social media over the years, with those standing up in favour of difficult games being accused of gatekeeping, and those in favour of universal accessibility accused of undermining developers’ creative vision. Of course not every game has to cater to every player; there are entire genres that have thrown out the idea that something has to be challenging to be fun, including the thriving and diverse world of narrative games and so-called “visual novels”, which put few or no barriers in the way of telling their stories. Nintendo is superb at mitigating the difficulty of newer Mario games by offering optional superpowers: if you flub a level a few times, a magic suit will appear that makes Mario invincible and improves his jump. Nobody’s enjoyment of the game is ruined, and kids can finish the level without actually crying in frustration like I used to over Super Mario Bros 3.
I like to relate this to novels, largely because I once spent three painful months struggling through the over 1,000 pages and endless self-referential footnotes of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Was it difficult? Yes. Could I have given up if I’d wanted to? Yes. But I found the reward to be worth it, so I kept going. The difference between a book and a game is that a book doesn’t physically close itself if you’re struggling with a paragraph. Games can be as challenging as they like, but they should also try to offer players a way through, where possible.
Here’s a great illustration of this concept: a game often (wrongly) touted as one of the most difficult of all time, and one of my personal obsessions, Demon’s Souls (and the Dark Souls series that followed it). This game is hard, in that the combat is tough, you’re often sent a long way back when you die, and everything tries to kill you all the time. But it also mitigates that difficulty by letting you summon other players into your game to help you out. You need a certain amount of skill, but you don’t have to be amazing at the game to see it through. Greater challenges are there for those who seek them: people have played through Souls without taking a single hit, without levelling up, and using mad novelty controllers. But the game adapts to who’s playing it, as much as it can.
By contrast, I must admit that I found the rather less adaptable samurai action game Sekiro (from the same developer) so impossibly hard that I had to reluctantly give up. What I wouldn’t have given to be able to call someone in to help me with Genichiro Ashina, the boss fight that marks the frustrating end of a lot of players’ tether. I like to think I’ll see the rest of that game one day, but it’ll require time and determination that I currently do not have.
I have been very busy playing a certain very big, very expensive game for a review next week, but I’m not supposed to talk about that just yet, so I’m going to recommend the recently released Life Is Strange: Remastered Collection. These narrative games tell the stories of Max and Chloe, two teenage best friends, and an impending tragedy in their home town of Arcadia Bay. Max has a power that any teen would surely kill for: the ability to rewind time, redo conversations and try to undo her mistakes. Some of the dialogue is a bit corny and contrived, and this kind of game isn’t as unusual now as it was seven years ago when Life Is Strange was first released. But the complicated best-friend relationships between Max and Chloe and Chloe and Amber, the real heart of the game, still stand up so well. In 2015, this was only the second time I’d ever seen female friendship and relationships portrayed like this in a video game, the first being The Last of Us: Left Behind. It’s totally worth revisiting, especially if you missed it at the time.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox
Approximate playtime: 8-10 hours
In the wake of the seven-figure Wordle buyout, our games correspondent Keith Stuart interviewed the New York Times’ head of games about the plan for the viral word game going forward. I learned from this that the NYT is pretty serious about gaming, having hired someone who used to run studios for EA and Zynga to head up their games and puzzles. Overall a reassuring interview, I feel.
The Nintendo Switch console has now outsold the Wii, which dominated the 00s, at 103.5 million units. That’s a lot of people playing Mario Kart.
In news that should really surprise nobody, development on Grand Theft Auto 6 is “well underway” at Rockstar. Given that GTA V isn’t far from ten years old, I think we’re all ready for something new from one of gaming’s most profitable and infamous series.
OlliOlli World review – vibey skater game offers a meditative ride
Windjammers 2 review – resuscitated sports game brings back joy of the arcade
Dying Light 2: Stay Human review – as dead inside as the zombie hordes
I asked video game writer Alec Meer, who’s written on games for Creative Assembly, Devolver, Housemarque, Amplitude and more, to answer this week’s question: why do video game stories almost never work as films?
“The primary reason is that Hollywood screenwriters consider video game writers to be goblinoid nerd-scum who, by their very existence, pollute and debase the noble art of storytelling. As such, it is only right and proper that as many of the filthy, squalid little ideas born from game writers’ twisted, sub-sentient, desperately underpaid minds should be discarded, and replaced with the wondrous fruit of Proper Writers’ superhuman and highly remunerated minds. Hence, the original game’s story is replaced with an entirely different story, devised solely by these latter-day gods.
“Secondarily, it has long been perceived wisdom that a game story – which so often involves several hours of a man killing other men in corridors while those men repeatedly shout things like “die, you smelly rotter!” and “eat this extremely deadly grenade, my dude!” – is inherently incompatible with the three-act structure of a movie. This is, in fact, incorrect. Video game stories work brilliantly as films, but only if a) they’re not based on an actual video game and b) the film is called John Wick.”
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