Has this happened to you? You’re slowly making your way throughBloodborne’s Forbidden Woods, carefully rolling to take out that sniper who loves to shoot you from the other side of the bridge, slicing your Saw Cleaver through his guts, then cautiously moving on. You softly step out along the forest trail, only to hear a mechanical clank as a spiked log falls loose and swings down from the trees into your Hunter. It kills you instantly. As you lie there dying, your Echoes pooling on the cobblestone, you see two words appear on the screen in blood red: You Died.
In the ever-raging debate about whetherFromSoftwaregames are too difficult and/or whether they should have an easy mode, a more important question is being overlooked. Namely: should these games hurt my feelings?
You Died… And That’s Okay
I thought about this a lot last year when I played throughSilent Hill 2. I tackled Bloober Team’s remake in one of the two ways you’re legally required to play it: early enough in the morning that it was still dark outside.
The other option, obviously, is late at night, but I love the grind.
Those bleary-eyed sessions led to me dying more than I probably would have if I was properly caffeinated, which means Silent Hill 2’s ‘You Died’ screen is burned into my brain. I tried to keep James stocked up on his special juice and dirty needles, but it wasn’t always easy to find healing items in the game’s hellacious apartments and apocalyptic streets. The puker be pukin', the grabber be grabbin', and James has gotta run.
When you get to a particularly tricky part of any game, you get well acquainted with the game over screen. You know it’s coming, and it’s usually accompanied by an ominous sound effect to really drive home your failure. When you’re taking on a FromSoft boss over and over, you get used to hammering on the X button, trying to push through this acknowledgment of your failure, and getting back to the game as soon as possible to do the whole humiliating ritual all over again.
Unfortunately, the truth is that FromSoftware games aren’t actually being mean. Well, the log trap is mean, but in a funny way. You can easily imagine Hidetaka Miyazaki and the team laughing at each new player who falls for it, like the Jackass crewduring the High Five prank. The game over screen isn’t particularly nasty. Saying ‘You Died’ isn’t unkind, per se – it’s just truthful and blunt. It kind of reminds me of playing a tough game with an annoying friend on the couch next to you. ‘You’re dying a lot.’ Yeah, thanks for your input, Anthony.
Nobody wants to be confronted with their failure. So, when a game mocks us, or even just plainly states the facts of our performance, it can be difficult to hear.
It’s Fine To Play On Easy
Games haveactuallybeen mean for decades, and realistically, we’re probably at an all-time high for niceness. The original Wolfenstein games famously showed B.J. Blazkowicz sucking a binky in a baby bonnet if you set the game to easy mode (which was called ‘Can I Play, Daddy?’). That trend continued through the most recent entry,Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, but that mocking attitude is an outlier in the modern gaming landscape (and, frankly, kind of at odds with the tone of the newer games). There’s no real shame in knocking a game down to easy in 2024, except for the shameyoubring to the experience.
The thing is, games being nice doesn’t actually ease the frustration. When you lose a ton of progress in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, it doesn’t help that Foddy (in voice-over) reads a quote about success requiring repeated failure in dulcet tones.
Similarly, I found myself annoyed whenever I died in this week’sRevenge of the Savage Planet, but not because the game wasn’t nice. No, it was because each death sent me back to my home base on the starting world, even if I died on a completely different planet. I’d rather a game call me a ‘full-diaper baby who will die alone’ when I die than make me do something repetitive for no good reason.
These games can’t take the sting out of failure because the sting is something we bring with us. The tenor of gaming culture’s discussions around difficulty and ‘getting good’ can increase or decrease the amount of shame we feel when we’re bad at a game, sure, but, failure only hurts if you let it.
Still, I wouldn’t mind if a game started calling me handsome and smart. Would the Dark Souls game over screen saying ‘You Have Not Yet Won, You Special Boy, But You Will Soon, Surely,' really be so much to ask?
