Welcome, thanks for joining.
Yes this is definitely not centralizing on the idea of difficult games per se. The best easy games are conceived as such in their core-design, so nothing is really lost. The problem is bypassing the core-design for trivialization purposes, which doesn't differentiate between the initial difficulty design.

So we're rather against the postmodern (and sometimes intersectional) mentality that the player is entitled to control the game however they wish for, as this leads only to a decline of potential valuable videogame experiences.

Thanks for letting me know this group exists! Glad I'm not alone in seeing through the veil and there are other like minded gamers out there that understand why some form of challenge within a game is important. By no means am I suggesting every game needs to be "hard" but making them nearly impossible to lose imho is nothing more than a cash grab move by devs and invalidates the efforts of every other player who earned their way through the story.

My counter argument is what are you learning from using assist mode? The game themes about struggling, the platforming is like a manifestation of the protagonist struggling.

Hey there, thanks for taking interest and commenting I open up a discussion thread as it's easier to navigate discussion not being limited by characters. There are some points I can adress.

celeste, again, is primarily intended to share a story and a moral. although the game is renowned for its challenging platforming, and the moral is partially about overcoming challenge, to claim that is all it is meant to be is totally reductive. it does not, in my opinion, take away from the game to offer the assist modes that it does, and i do not feel that the game must be unrelentingly challenging for its message to work.



basically, this group appears to be totally against assist modes and features as a blanket opinion, which i feel is rather unfair to the games you are reviewing and harming your credibility as a curator.
i'll stay in here for now, because it would be nice to see this group develop into something with a bit more nuance, but currently i offer no support.

(3/3)

another crab's treasure prioritises it's message over all else; this is particularly clear in the very mediocre ending which sacrifices the experience and the story to promote the message. in a game like that, i have no qualms with the difficulty options, because the point of the game is NOT to be dark souls. in this way, labelling it as a soulslike is actually quite detrimental to the game, and i take major issue with the existence of the soulslike genre as a whole (it is a terrible genre that doesn't actually have any practical use as a game category), but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

(2/3)

hello! i was invited by your administrator to this group in response to a post on a eurogamer article about silksong and the 'difficulty = accessibility' discussion. i was initially excited by a group that shared my opinions, but i must say, i'm rather disappointed; your reviews hold absolutely no nuance in this topic.

silksong is a game that has challenge fundamentally baked into its design. it was never meant to have an easy mode; the metroidvania genre as a whole is all about encountering walls, figurative or literal, and exploring elsewhere to find a way past them. so, i do have a big issue with the masses of people acting so very entitled to an 'easy mode' under the guise of an accessibility feature, as difficulty levels are NOT accessibility features.

however, looking at a game such as celeste or another crab's treasure, this simply isn't the case. though these games CAN be quite hard, that is not a primary intention of the developers.

(1/3)