I’ve been playing video games since the 1970s. Now I’m just a poor old man. My legs are grey. My ears are gnarled. My eyes are old and bent.
These days I mostly play video games for the story and to relax so I usually play on easy. And I’m ok with that.
I’m not paying for a game that doesn’t allow changing difficulty if I want/need. I work two jobs and have to do most home cleaning and maintenance. I used to game competitively back in the early 2000s, but I don’t have time for that shit nor gatekeeping.
Yeah I wasted money on 2 soulslikes before I realized it. Now I avoid them like the plague.
Which 2?
Dark souls I and Elden Ring
With Elden Ring, were you expecting a more “living” open world, like The Witcher 3 or RDR2?
Basically I met the first advirsary and spent 2 hours falling to defeat him. I looked around for another couple hours for something to make defeating him possible. Encountered other creatures I couldn’t defeat. Never opened it again.
I’m a middle aged guy with a family. If Im gonna “git good” at something, it will be something useful I need in my life, not a soulslike. I play games to relax not to add to my very long list of problems in life.
This guy?
You’re not supposed to be able to defeat him until much later in the game. In the beginning, you just have to avoid him. He patrols a small area in your path, and there are easier enemies just beyond him.It was a guy in a kind of valley going into a cave. Regardless, if I can’t make something happen in the first 4 hours of a game, it ain’t for me.
Was it a big golden dude?
Good news: Dwarf fortress is free.
Is it still available for free? I kinda assumed once it went up on steam it wouldn’t be.
The steam version is the nice graphical one. The original is still free.
Oh that’s cool I didn’t know there was a difference between them
The original is capable of pretty nice graphics too.
Doesn’t the Steam version just give you different graphics?
It does add a lot of quality of life stuff you would have to mod the original to get access to, though as I understand it, the Lazy Newb Pack mods include most of those QoL changes. Though, them being integrated into the game itself will almost always be smoother than requiring the installation of a mod.
let’s be real here, the steam version is mostly a tax on people who find technology scary and can’t install a few things on their own
… or mostly a cool way to support two guys who have poured their LIFE into what has become one of the most notorious computer games of all time. Exhibited by museums, beloved by million, and distributed for free. Best 30 bucks spend I’ve spendt in a while. If anyone deserves that money, it’s the Adams brothers.
But sure think of it as a mean spirited idiot-tax if you want
It’s also a way to support two stellar devs
I suppose you could think of it that way, though buying it on Steam, even if you’re not going to play that version, does help support the continued development of the game overall. Their Patreon donation stream was apparently waning before the Steam version released, plus there was the family health scare Tarn revealed at the time of the announcement too. I’d prefer the entire project not get put on a long hiatus because the devs got unexpectedly bankrupted by the absurd healthcare costs prevalent here in the US. And the fact that they didn’t take down the free version after the Steam release on its own shows that they didn’t make that version for the sake of greed.
Strike the earth!
Game should only have 1 difficulty that the developer wants . Simple . Having different difficulty to cator weak is very weak . Same can be said for laws though otherwise it would be a primitive fight between 2 people and whoever wins , wins the freedom while other perish in fire
Ya no, some people do it for the story and choices, and maybe the gameplay is a chore to get through with their limited free time…
The Witcher is “meant to played” where you have to run fetch quests to build the right equipment and consumables for every monster contract you take. I’m sorry, but I play games to have fun and that is not fun for me, it’s a job.
What if the developer wants to have multiple difficulties? You know, like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake?
Are you fourteen?
Judging by the username… probably yes, lol.
Just tired of my life . Does anything matter when you will die one day . Does it matter if it has difficulty or not .
In my case a similar feeling was caused by depression. After several different drug combinations I finally found one that works for me. And life has become significantly better.
Difficulty settings are accessibility settings and anyone who disagrees can kiss my ass.
As long as the setting accommodates everyone, including people who want a difficult game
Yeah that’s the point at least in my eyes. I don’t see why it has to be one way or the other. You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain from difficulty accessibility options. If someone sees difficulty as some sort of status symbol… Well, don’t project that onto me.
This is why I didn’t finish CO:E33. I’m a from soft fanboy. I have beaten everything they made other than king’s field. I head into brick walled the first Claire obscura optional boss after the intro. But it got way too inconsistent about halfway through. So I switched it to easy and it was just incredibly too easy so I lost interest. Wish they had something in between.
But yeah, if a game is too easy it doesn’t captivate me.
You’re not supposed to be able to beat every optional boss you find the first time you see it, unless you really are a parry God. The game allows you to circle back to optional bosses at later opportunities quite regularly.
Yeah, this was the first optional boss. I had such difficulty with the mandatory ones mid game is when I set the difficulty to easy.
Difficulty options aren’t there to offer different experiences with a game, they’re there to offer the same experience to players of different skill levels. People who are better at Dark Souls are playing it and its clones at a reduced difficulty compared to people who are worse at it.
But the more you play the better you get…
Like hell. I hit my skill ceiling in these games a long time ago, and I’m not getting any younger.
Maybe, but that’s okay. Not every game needs to be for every player. I used to be very much into action heavy games, even did a big Nintendo Blockbuster tournament back when I was a kid and placed 4th regionally. And I was really big into the 2D fighting scene, particularly Street Fighter 3 and Guilty Gear series.
I’m in my 40s now, and I don’t really play those kinds of games much anymore. Action heavy games are fun from time to time, but they make my hands hurt. Also, I just don’t have the time to learn the meta, pokes, skills and strategies for fighting games anymore. And button mashing (like Mortal Kombat’s “test your might” sections) is right out. I don’t see the issue. Time marches on and we enjoy the things we can.
These days I’m more likely to play RPGs, indie, and retro games, with occasional dips into modern games, and while I still like fighting games, I’m more inclined to play ones that have a single player campaign and lower skill ceiling, like Soul Calibur 6. Anything with tons of button mashing or joystick waggling for range setting will have my hands hurting over time if I keep at it.
🤷. I’m old.
Contra?
Both are perfectly acceptable philosophies, but many Souls players need to learn that losing at a game for 150 hours is not what other people find fun.
Why? Do Souls players not accept others not liking the games? Thats not my experience but maybe many are like that?
Also, usually Souls players dont lose for 150 hours straight. Most of the time its winning, but sometimes youre set back a bit and sometimes youre stuck. Some people like earning their wins. Some cant handle the difficulty and get frustrated, I get thats not fun for them. To each their own.
Yeah, the position of most FromSoft players in my experience is: “You don’t have to like the games, but you can’t just demand that they change for you.”
Some people need to understand that not all games are for all people. I don’t like RTS games, and so I don’t play them! What I don’t do is demand that they all add a turn-based option that would destroy game balance just because that’s what I prefer to play.
Like, what an insanely entitled thing to demand. And for some reason it’s only Soulslikes that have to deal with this craziness. There are thousands of other games out there for you to play, people.
The difficulty slider in Souls games is how many levels you’ve invested into health
You often can’t do that until you’ve made a little bit of progress. The real difficulty curve early on is knowing that picking the heavy armour class will make things much harder for yourself, that the real progression is knowledge of enemy attacks and opening shortcuts, and that losing your currency when you don’t have enough points to reach the next level isn’t really a big deal.
And the janky camera controls. Those, sadly, can’t be mitigated much.
That and some very strange ideas about where the jump button should be.
The difficulty slider is intrinsic to the system and the world. The whole point is that you have to make it easier by engaging with it on its own terms, rather than by forcing a change upon the world to make it suit you. This is never made explicit; the creator just wants you to either dig deep or bounce off it because struggle is the whole point or something, which is why we have to talk about it forever. Blah
That’s just forcing the player to play the way the creator wants. Which is some arrogant and oppressive fun-destroying gatekeeping bullshit.
Soulslikes always feel like a chore that requires a ton of homework (that you have to find yourself with no hints) to make the setting not feel empty and lifeless.
I get that some people don’t want any hand holding or coddling, but some of us already have to play real life on hard mode and just want to play games for fun, escapism, and wish fulfillment.
Diagetic difficulty is specifically not forcing play the way the creator wants. Its using lack of balance and making it part of the experience.
Then why did they nerf my boy the Mimic Tear.
You can just play a different game. It’s a toy. This shit doesn’t matter.
Most of us get that, but non souls player must also understand that dark souls on easy mode is just a bad game. There are no big cinematics, the story is scarce, there are only a few npcs. Those are games that puts you on your toes, you must be wary at all times, and learn to master the game bit by bit. It’s not for everyone, or everytime (I think everyone can play souls game but they need to be in the right mindset) but they are my favorite games. But yeah gatekeepers suck
Gatekeepers make things good by keeping those who aren’t serious out.
games
mumble about keeping non-serious people out
(You can just ignore non-serious people as they don’t affect you btw)
If non-serious people are the reason a game series I love gets worse, then they have affected me. It happened to Monster Hunter, and I don’t want it to happen to FromSoft games too.
Why would have an option for easy mode make it worse for you?
Because it doesn’t just end with an easy mode. It ends with Monster Hunter Rise and Wilds, and an entire series losing everything that made it unique all so it can keep chasing the lowest common denominator, who always start their erosion of a once-great series with “it’s too hard. :( Why are the devs so mean to the twelve people born without thumbs?!? Also you should totally remove all of the hunting aspects from the game because it’s super unfair to make me use my brain for more than half a second.”
So I’d rather keep the dwindling number of games I enjoy as they are, and y’all can go play something else, thank you very much.
Top 10 things that never happened*
*in my experience at least, if this alresdy happened make some examples please
You’re making the game on easy sound pretty good to me.
Idk if soul players need to learn anything. Not your style of game thats fine, but all fights in souls games are fair in the sense that anyone can eventually beat it with practice, or overleveling, or innate skill (those who have, ahem, gotten good), and any combination of the three.
Have known a lot of people who played dark souls at a time in their life where they needed the lesson of getting up after getting knocked down.
I have that shit in real life. (Being taken down and having to get back up)
I work. I have to take care of the house/family. I had a leukemia…and I DID fucking rise up again from the dead…literally. With 3 prosthesis after, but hey, its just means im in a different game now (cyberpunk)
But we are talking about fucking games.
I am not a teenager with the time. Or patience. Those are both used on real life…you know…the bigger game. The real game.
I’m Not saying you can’t have the difficulty in your…playthings.
I am saying that there are people who want to play the games you like, they are great fucking games, but we just don’t have the time and energy to waste a few hours in the same fucking level/battle.
And that’s the conversation: Having the possibility to change difficulty. That exists. It’s not impossible.
You do you. No one is robing you of your experience.
Its just a shame…the gatekeeping.
Hey sorry you had cancer; glad you survived.
I mean that, but you are bringing some weird antagonist monologue energy to this thread.
Difficult sliders are simply bad for certain games, soulsborne games are one of them.
You are also robbing your own experience BTW. Give yourself a fair shot at beating these games without taking the easy route.
I’ve never picked up a Souls game myself, because that kind of challenge isn’t what I play video games for. But I’ve also never felt like I was being cheated out of an experience, there are plenty of other games out there for me.
I think if a developer doesn’t want to add an easy mode because they feel like that would be an inferior version of their game, it’s their prerogative not to do it. When an author writes an intellectually challenging book, nobody serious complains that the author refused to include cliff notes or explanations. Why don’t we treat video game designers the same?
And lots of people want to go to hawaii but it’s a long flight and people with jobs might not have the time to go. Welcome to real life!
Play something else. (I don’t play games at all anymore but the last thing people want is a square coming into the circles room to complain there’s too many rounded edges.)
Why does everyone think every game has to be made for the lowest common denominator? If you don’t like a game, don’t play it. Besides, souls games can actually be quite forgiving, the difficulty adjustments just isnt in sliders. Especially in elden ring, you can beat every fight in a pretty brainless (i mean like not needing to dodge almost at all) way if you take the time to set up for it.
I tried Dark Souls and I tried Demon Souls.
It’s not my thing, but I’m glad they are a lot of other people’s cup of tea
Gamers are so entitled they will argue with other gamers on matters of taste. “That game is not to my specifications! Instead of finding one that is I’ll complain until the game is changed! People that like it the old way need to know i have a job!”
A lot of people in this thread don’t seem to have gotten the subtle meme post in this image. Itagaki was the dude who made the Modern Ninja Gaiden titles and the Dead or Alive franchise. The dude was always a massive troll to both the media and players but was very dedicated to the vision he had for the games he wanted to make. He also had a very close friendship/rivalry with Katsuhiro Harada, the main dev for the Tekken franchise starting at Tekken 3 and recently cutting ties with Namco to found a new company that is, unfortunately, owned by SNK. Itagaki sadly passed away last year and a lot of old school devs mourned for his loss, but probably none harder than Harada given just how long they had been actual irl friends.
Celeste did it perfectly imho with their Assist Mode. Just add those difficulty options in for accessibility, with a statement that it is not how the developers intend for it to be played, but still to use it freely if need be.
“Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode.”
It is 2026. Gamers should be able to enjoy any game they want at any difficulty they want without judgement, as long as it does not affect anyone else.
Exactly. I love Souls games but I think having an option somewhere for people that need it wouldn’t ruin the intended experience. Especially if there’s a disclaimer before you choose it.
I’m not mad they don’t have it or anything. But like, shouldn’t there be a way to play if you literally can’t otherwise?
I think it would be a pretty good joke if they made the combat of the next souls game turn based. Still monstrously difficult, release the game on an April 1st and have the entire gaming subset of players switch their stances
As someone who’s done Video game QA, working with Tomonobu Itagaki doesn’t sound pleasant. Those campaign sprints are hard enough as is
Itagaki was a pretty big bastard if I remember right, or was that someone else I’m thinking of.
Kojima:
We added Very Easy Mode
Also Kojima:
Get good or wear the chicken hat
Match the type of a game, sheesh.
Bethesda like open world? Gimmie difficulty levels - nothing will change with them except that people will be able to tailor the experience more.
Narrative and/or choice heavy game? Leave difficulty choice off to let the original vision of the author speak for itself - havimg parts too easy or hard due to watered down or pumped up difficulty can ruin the story.
Arcade/Dark Souls games? I…don’t really see reasons for difficulty settings here except for harder than baselines ones? Like new game +. In these games, learning patterns and gettimg good is the game, there is no way around it.
All in all - not every game is for everyone, we have genres for a reason. Having difficulty tailored for arcades in open world exploration game makes no sense just as much as having watered down difficulty levels in narrative heavy games.
Some have limited time and want to enjoy a good game without being one-shot or learning patterns for 5 hours to beat a single boss.
learning patterns and gettimg good is the game
Otherwise it’s fruit ninja lmao which is a fun game you should get if you want an easy sword slashing experience
This is really such an weird argument. Like arguing that you want to be able to drive a nail with any tool you find, so no matter if these are scissors, a spoon or an actual hammer, all need to be usable as a hammer.
We have genres for a reason. If you do not like soulslikes, pick another game. If you have no time to play arcade style games, pick another genre. There are thousands of games available, and genre overlap is huge - don’t play games that aren’t meant to align with your requirements and then complain they don’t.
Like, this is borderline egoistical of you.
I think it’s a valid argument. For example, if someone wants to read Shakespeare but they aren’t a strong reader, you could provide a simpler version, while acknowledging it isn’t as originally intended. It allows for accessibility for a larger audience while not changing the experience for others. You wouldn’t tell someone to read a different story genre instead. This isn’t tools, where we have to bend the laws of physics, it’s changing some numbers in a database, and something already done for higher level difficulty settings, so just allow a version that is easier. No one is forcing anyone to play it that way.
So…. Play a different game? Not everything is for you? Does this actually need to be said?
Lol yes, I dropped High On Life at the first boss because after trying to pass it ten times, I just couldn’t be bothered.
That’s just not a game to me. It’s just packaged frustration, and I’d rather do something else. So that got uninstalled rather fast.You’re way overblowing the difficulty of the Souls games.
I’ve beaten most of them, and my reactions are shit. 90% of the difficulty is from not knowing how it differs from other games.
Some
I never said all, have I?
Sounds like you’ll need to play a different game then.
Sounds like you need to learn to respect the boundaries of others.
Can’t be real.
What? I am not interacting with your boundaries at all. I’m not forcing you to play anything that doesn’t suit you. You are complaining that you want to play a game that doesn’t suit you. Maybe you’ll just have to get over the fact that it doesn’t suit you and play something else?
Sounds like you’ll need to play a different game then.
Sounds like you are telling me what my taste is supposed to be
Maybe you’ll just have to get over the fact that it doesn’t suit you and play something else?
I am aware of it and have already decided it not being my cup of tea.
I am talking about those that like a moderate challenge but do not enjoy being stuck for 10hours at a stage without any meaningful progress to achieve.You: “I don’t like the characteristic elements of Souls games.”
Them: “You may want to play a different game then.”
You: “Stop telling me my taste!”
I am talking about those that like a moderate challenge but do not enjoy being stuck for 10hours at a stage without any meaningful progress to achieve.
Maybe they should pick a game that provides a moderate challenge and not one that provides “being stuck for 10h at a stage without any meaningful progress”?
Personally, I gave up at the first fight in Bloodborne (I have 40 min of gameplay). Never touched a souls game ever again.
Souls have pretty hard bosses… but mostly, they are just optional content. Main story isn’t that difficult in my experience.
For real, I’ve got shit to do. Old-school boss fights requiring a ridiculous degree of flawless repetition was an expression of hardware limitations at the time, not a fun feature to get nostalgic about. People can spend their time as they wish, but for my money the artificially ramped-up difficulty for its own sake is a cancer on game design, not something to develop a sense of elitism about.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate a challenge. I used to love difficult games. I grew up in the NES era when difficulty was the only thing that kept games from being completed in 30 minutes.
But life moves on and we get busy. If I get 2-3 hours in a week to game it’s a miracle. I am not going to spend that time grinding a boss for hours.
But other difficult games may be fine. Specifically, rogelikes. Slay the Spire and Dead Cells are games that can be very difficult, but the games are designed to be taken on in short chunks with an entire run taking under an hour, whereas Souls-Like games expect a lot more time commitment.
I really enjoyed the Respawn Jedi games. They’re Souls-likes with difficulty sliders that should appease anyone.
I play both of these and loved em. I also poured 50 hours into beating cuphead. Difficulty isn’t a problem if the depth of the game is a pool instead of a sea.
The Souls games actually do have difficulty settings; they’re just a bit esoteric. I think of it like the Mario games: almost anyone can “beat” a Mario, but there are secrets and collectibles all over those games that are only pursued by players who want more of a challenge. It’s the same game, but the player is opting to increase difficulty.
Souls games start at a higher skill floor than the average Mario, but you can unlock tools to make the game easier if you choose. There’s co-op summons, overpowered weapons and equipment, places to easily farm huge numbers of levels. Plus plenty of cheesy strategies for most of the toughest bosses. It’s all optional in-game choices you can make to tweak the difficulty to your taste without the devs putting in a menu slider that just gives every enemy double-HP or something. And they’ve gotten better at implementing these tools every time they’ve iterated. The few people who dunked on Elden Ring often criticized how easy it was relative to earlier FromSoft games. It’s not inherently easier, there are just many more ways to scale down the challenge if you want.
Not the original commenter but I do feel the same. I dislike souls games. Although I did enjoy sekiro and made it to the stupid lightning samurai guy.
The problem with souls-like games for me is the combat doesn’t feel good for the challenge and I believe you can see this in high tier players lazily dodging attacks.
The game isn’t about skill and strategy. It’s timing and flat experience to kill some bosses you just gotta fight them 600 times and learn the attacks patterns which to me feels mentally exhausting and frustrating. It’s like a glorified DDR game with swords. I have to do the right combos to win, some strategies exist sure but at the end of the day it’s DDR.
The big argument everyone has is “mechanics vs numbers” thinking mechanics is the true skill side but mechanics isn’t just what you do with a controller, it’s also what the game allows you to do.
Too many games equate difficulty with time sink. I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both. Souls games don’t offer that, they’re peg legged
I want a game that I can be smart and play the numbers OR be skilled and play the mechanics or both
That’s how every DS game except Sekiro works. There’s absolutely broken PvE builds for each game you can discover. There’s people who challenge themselves by coming up with builds capable of 1-hitting every boss in the game.
People come up with all sorts of broken or just extremely novel builds for PvP too, “bad numbers, no mechanical skill, but the enemy isn’t ready for what you’re about to do to them” is a perfectly effective strategy.
That usually requires you to play the game in a traditional way first to learn/acquire that information and/or bang your skull repeatedly against a boss that feels like bullshit because you failed to dodge one single ability. It’s just not my schtick.
That usually requires you to play the game in a traditional way first
Not really, I guess the first boss of DS3 requires you to beat traditionally, but after that everything opens up and you have access to various levels of cheese. Information like what boss is weak to what type of weapon and where to find such weapons requires exploration, looking for clues, and sometimes just trying different things. A lot of players don’t change their approach at all, just bang their head into a brick wall for 4 hours, and conclude the problem is the game, not their unwillingness to try alternatives.
That’s also the third game. I tried Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 and they both felt pretty much roll, jump and smack em with a stick.
I’m thinking Nioh, Bloodborne, Sekiro, stuff like that.
I also think the genre itself has become sort of weird where people will describe everything from Shovel Knight to Titan Souls to Jedi Fallen Order as soulslike which is insane in my opinion. I guess because you fight bosses in them or roll in some of them? I dunno. It has somehow absorbed all hack and slash, boss rush, metroidvania games to be labeled “soulslike”. Which is insane to me.
Someone told me they didn’t like the Soulslike aspects of Expedition 33. I was baffled, could not understand what they meant. The entirety of E33’s gameplay is practically stolen wholesale from Super Mario RPG.
Thank you, now I think I’ll have to try sekiro. For Elden Ring there is a way out of the “learn timings” chore: go hard into defence, and there will only be a couple of boss strikes that can take you down, or go into insane damage increase and just evaporate everything (counter points to this: neither is to my liking and also neither is going to happen on first play-through for most people), but that is supposed to be the “best as of now” iteration. Need to see what was before it
I think they’d benefit taking a note from the witcher but not as linear.
For instance spirit/ghost creatures have them be susceptible to salt, silver, iron, holy water and a specific wood like holly. None are required to kill it, some have advantages over others or affect certain spirits more.
Maybe then I could be sneaky and have rare wood arrows with silver tips and eliminate from afar, I could be full rogue and sneak attack with blessed iron daggers, or just a big man with a plain sword and brute force my way through.
I think if you slapped Hatsune Miku on a dark souls screen and have her dancing going “jump!, roll!, duck!” People would realize it’s not as much of a skill game as they thought.
I heard this being the case. Its very good game design.
Making a game hard for the sake of making it hard is a cheap way to increase difficulty.
The challenge shouldn’t come from enemies being damage sponges or the AI having superhuman reaction times. It should come from player skill.
Balatro is one of the best examples of this. The game naturally gets easier as the player learns its systems and gains experience through playing.
Destiny 2 also had excellent skill progression. Say what you want about the game as a whole, but the core gunplay and the mechanics of its three classes rewarded players for improving their own abilities.
Even games like Madden and NBA 2K have, to a lesser extent, systems that reward player skill rather than simply inflating difficulty.
Many older games were made extremely difficult because they were relatively short. The increased difficulty extended playtime and made players feel they were getting more value for the price. That’s one of the reasons games like Ninja Gaiden on the NES earned their reputation for being brutally hard.
As for Soulslike games, they’re simply not my cup of tea. I fully acknowledge that they’re well-made games, and if you enjoy them, that’s great. They’re intentionally designed to be challenging. While the original Dark Souls was developed under a tight schedule and has some rough edges, its high level of difficulty was a deliberate design choice rather than the result of bugs or glitches.
Making enemies soak up more damage and deal more damage is lazy difficulty. Giving enemies more tools to use against the player is the better way to handle game difficulty IMO
Sekiro was my first Souls-like and honestly, it’s way too hard. There are moments in the game that lock you out UNTIL you defeat a boss. I even got the mod where it makes you near invincible, and I still struggled to fight bosses. Delivery and world was awesome, gameplay was impossible for people like me.
Then I played Elden Ring where you can literally be over-level. I was getting beat up in one zone, then moved to another area. When I returned, I was better equipped/more powerful/better as a player.
That to me is the perfect balance. Lemme go wander and git gud (by overleveling or finding useful items that make the bosses easier). Every game should allow the player to beat a boss with skill, or plow through them through cheesing/overleveling.
Sekiro bothered me, too, and I played all the Souls games. I got to the boss that wants you to jump and redirect lightning, and I stopped. I understand the philosophy behind making bosses unique, but it’s basically a QTE without the button prompt on the screen, and that’s not what I wanted from From. Also that weird fog that wants you to use consumables. I don’t do consumables.
I like to tell people that Sekiro is a rhythm game disguised as a Soulslike. It’s not bad, it’s just… different. Fully understand how it would be a turn-off for many.
Balatro is one of the best examples of this. The game naturally gets easier as the player learns its systems and gains experience through playing.
Isn’t this the case for most Roguelites? It’s not even necessarily player skill, so much as unlocking permanent upgrades (Jokers in Balatro, abilities/cards in Across the Obelisk or Slay the Spire, stat boosts and weapon modifiers in Hades, etc.).
Rogue like or did you mean rogue lite?
I meant rogue-lite. They’re technically different genres. Rogue-lites allow for permanent bonuses/boosts over time like the games I mentioned. Roguelikes do not (old school games like Rogue and Nethack, for example) and every game is a fully fresh start.
fully fresh start.
Technically, Nethack will let you encounter your own graves from previous runs, so you can pick up your gear from last time (although usually it’s mostly cursed).




















