Coelacanth

Let’s hope so, because this sounds like it could be pretty disastrous doesn’t it? But who’s gonna afford challenging Nintendo?

I imagine a non-insignificant portion of Silksong players never played HK and just jumped on the hype bandwagon. Which makes sense considering it was built up like it would literally pay off your mortgage and reunite you with your high school sweetheart.

To be fair Ninja Gaiden Black did also have boss runbacks. It’s one of a handful of small complaints I have about what is otherwise a very close to perfect game (Chapter 9 in the military base being one of the others).

But NG2 did have boss checkpoints, yes, and was much better for it. Even the notoriously player-challenging Itagaki realised after one game that boss runbacks sucked, and this was in 2008 - Demon Souls wasn’t even out.

To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.

And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.

Yes indeed, when arcade games were the norm devs specifically designed for absurd difficulty ramp ups and cheap deaths to finagle another quarter out of you.

Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.

Damn they sold out huh.

Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.

Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring. Hell, even Ninja Gaiden went away from boss runbacks starting from the second game, and that came out in 2008!

I have no idea what people were expecting to be honest. Hollow Knight was already known for being an extremely difficult game with punishing anti-fun elements like runbacks and corpse runs. Which game had everyone played that got them so hyped for Silksong?

There’s a reason I stayed away from HK, and I will be staying away from Silksong too. Game looks great but I won’t be able to beat it and I won’t have any fun failing to do so.

I’m thirding Alien: Isolation, one of the best horror games ever made and a really loving tribute to the movies as well. On console they even had a feature where the alien listened in on you through the microphone and would hear if you made a noise. Not sure how it played out in practice as I didn’t play it on console but sounds rad.

The Outlast games are also frequently brought up as great horror games. I haven’t played them myself but have seen them played by others. Look pretty good, though a little more jumpscare heavy. Still atmospheric though.

You can also do the 2.5D style of like Trine or Mandragora.

Well, I was merely speaking in general, I didn’t actually buy Silksong! 😅 The combination of being prohibitively difficult and having tons of tricky platforming (I hate platforming) means I’m just doing like with Hollow Knight and staying away to save myself the frustration.

I’ll take a look at it, but like I said above I don’t let myself play FM anymore and this sounds equally dangerous. Do you need a PES install to play or is it fully standalone?

To each their own, but when I played through Blasphemous just recently it felt like the game had tons of design elements intended to either piss you off or deliberately waste your time or both.

I have not. How does it compare to FM?

An upside of SI tending to have very minor year-on-year upgrades between FM editions is that most people don’t buy it every year. It’s common to buy every two or three years, unless a momentous change is implemented. The sortitoutsi.net site has squad updates among its mods that let you play older games for longer.

Not that I want to be encouraging you to take it up, the game is literally like crack and I don’t let myself play it anymore.

Bloodlines 2 should be in the crew as well, though it is also actually coming out now.

The 2D sidescroller base that’s at the foundation of Metroidvanias is quite a bit older than that, though, so I think it’s fair to call it an older genre. Even though it is fairly evergreen.

Buying on GOG is always the play whenever the option is available.

Football Manager.