Maybe Sekiro Should Be Hard, I Dunno

So there’s a new game that I’m currently flinging myself until my nose turns to bloody mush, and that game is called Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It is from the infamously taxing game developer From Software, which made Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

These games are difficult to beat, and Sekiro in particular is uncompromising. The designers looked at their past games to learn all the ways that people faked their way past difficult bosses, and put in workarounds. Yes, maybe players used to dodge around bosses in Dark Souls, or they just attacked blindly until they got lucky in Bloodborne. But Sekiro says, “Parrying blows is important, even if it’s hard to do. You learn to block incoming attacks or you die.”

And you do die. Over and over again. Until eventually you get the timing right and you win.

Or, you know, you quit the game.

And “accessibility” is a major concern in gaming these days, and should be. Not only are gamers getting older, and as such suffering from poorer vision and arthritis, but there have always been gamers who don’t have the fine motor controls to be able to defeat a game – or, in fact, all the limbs or fingers to do so.

So the saying goes that games like Sekiro should have an easy mode – or at least fine-tunable controls like the game Celeste, a platform game which is also extremely hard but has a set of “assist” controls that extends your jump time or automatically clings to walls and so forth. Celeste has been hailed because it lets gamers who can’t physically match the speed or finesse of the game still experience it.

“It doesn’t take away from your experience of the game to have an easy mode,” the saying goes. “So put one in! It’s as simple as that.”

It kinda isn’t, though.

Now, in 99% of all games, I would absolutely agree with you. Someone wants to play Doom Eternal on one-shot-one-kill mode? Doesn’t bother me, I’m here churning through it on medium. Someone wants to play the new Dragon Age (oh God let there be a new Dragon Age) on story mode, where it skips all the battles? Great. Someone needs a slower timing to master the jumps on Mario? Awesome. People of all sorts should be able to play, and win, videogames!

There’s a bullshit idea carried over from the quarter-guzzling roots of arcades that videogames should be experienced as pure challenge – and frankly, that’s a ridiculously reductionistic take on the medium. Videogames are art, and art takes on many forms, and if you’re playing videogames for the story or the pretty art or even a mild challenge, they’re still videogames.

You should be having fun.

But the thing is, most people will agree that they don’t want changes that take away the fun of the core game play experience.

I’d argue that the core game play experience of Sekiro or Bloodborne or Dark Souls is despair.

I’ll be honest: there was a boss in Bloodborne that literally killed me fifty times, and that’s not counting the times I died trying to fight my way to his lair. I spent probably about four hours convinced I couldn’t beat him, losing over and over again…

And part of that gaming experience was knowing there was no other way. Bloodborne had one difficulty setting, and it was alike for everyone who’d just installed the game. If it had an easier difficulty mode, I would have stepped down like I have before when I felt a game got too bullshit – I loved Dragon Age: Origins, but the final battle was too hard so I stepped down. I feel no guilt for this. I wanted to see what happened.

But with Bloodborne…. I couldn’t.

So I had to keep pounding my head against the same boss, with friends telling me how I could do it, getting incrementally better each time and learning new strategies until eventually, with a mixture of skill and luck, I beat the Blood-Starved Beast.

That game experience would not have happened if I’d had any other option. I absolutely would have changed the settings just for this one dude.

As a result, the triumph when I’d mastered it was fiercer than other games.

And that’s the gameplay loop of the From Software games: I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t do this oh wait oh hell I might no I lost again I can’t I can’t I DID.

For the full experience, you need to a) have no other choices, and b) give into that despair.

Same with Sekiro. It’s actually not as hard as it sounds thus far, though it is hard: there are strategies you can use to counter the hard once. I met a frail old dude who was way too fast for me to block, but I could poison him. I met an enraged ogre who had too much health, but I could set him on fire. In truth, it sounds like there are walls, but you just have to get sneaky.

But it is hard. Very hard. And that style of challenge is not fun for everybody, nor even necessarily fun for us all the time. And while yes, you can make any game into a grim lesson in “Git gud” by playing, I dunno, Rock Band with an angry cat tied to a stick, most games are designed to have a fairly straightforward (and shallow) difficulty curve, and that is a good thing because that’s what most people enjoy. Too many gamers want every game to be a gruelling slog because that’s the way they personally relax, but I like to think that “controller-flinging difficulty” should not be the only metric for enjoyment.

The Dark Souls genre of games is a goddamned difficulty cliff, however, and what fun there is to be had lies is in discovering that hey, you can climb Mount Everest.

Which is why when people go, “Games should be accessible to anybody!” I agree heartily, then think, “…but the whole point of this genre of games is to push you beyond what you believe you can accomplish, and if you can reset the difficulty, that experience doesn’t happen.”

I don’t know. It wouldn’t hurt me per se to have an Easy mode on Sekiro; I don’t wrap my pride up in my gaming, and if I can’t beat Sekiro I won’t be overly fussed. Maybe I’m not that good at games, and that’s fine; I save my fierce indomitability for my writing, which is why I wrote eight terrible novels before I finally published my first one.

But though it wouldn’t hurt me, it would change the experience of those games, and those games only. Because for me, I am not strong enough to resist the allure of the easy mode. Making the game more accessible would give me an out, which I would take, and then it would be the same as every other game not in the genre of “Play my way or die.”

And I don’t know. I like accessibility. But some games aren’t about being accessible – and I say this as a person who may not be able to get the full experience out of a game I sunk $60 into. I’ve seen videos of the final boss. I may not have the reflexes to beat the guy.

Not knowing whether I can do it is a large part of why I’m playing. And I don’t know if anything else would fill that same, unique, urge.