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Me doing the Courier's Rasher quest 17 times and getting my ass kicked over and over again by Lace:
Bullshit game, fake difficulty, sadistic devs, pls nerf
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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I don't want to complain too much about how other people enjoy single player video games, but it also creates the necessity of the compass always on mod since you're exploring the map quite a bit less lol
yeah that's a great example of there being purpose to some game mechanic that somebody might not like and by rounding one edge you (general) make a second-order thing worse for yourself. another part of the checkpoint system and the map exploration is so you can go do something else if you're banging your head against something for a while, but maybe removing that aspect doesn't matter for a player who was going to stubbornly try to do one thing at a time.
Yeah you're spot on!
My general experience with Silksong so far:
I notice I keep losing earlier and earlier to a boss because I'm stuck in a rut and am actually practicing losing. I need a break. But I can't make myself stop.
"I got to his 2nd phase on my 5th try, why can't I do it again? The runback sucks but I'll give it just one more run! Maybe if I spam my poison kunai I can brute force through the 2nd phase!" (Spoiler, there's a third phase I didn't know about)
repeat step 2 til I'm out of bug shards
give up and go farm shards
quick detour to a vendor to bank the rosaries I got while farming shards, and buy more shard bundles
oh hey, while backtracking I met NPC who wasn't there before but has moved here now! Taking a break wasn't bad, it was good!
oh snap I accidentally stumbled onto a new area! Taking a break was actually great!
15 hours of exploration and gameplay later, multiple damage upgrades, new tools and abilities found: "I should try that boss again"
discover a shortcut yo the boas that makes the run back easier too, which I'd missed before because I was too tunnel-visioned.
beat them in under 5 tries with my new tools and skills and greater fluency of the game.
Yes, but I'm going to say they're playing the game wrong and if they want to suffer extra then they can pay the price of that. Let them opt in to that. If the devs responded to gripes by making tools/shards/rosaries infinite and putting stakes of Marika everywhere, they'd be encouraging the "beat your head against the wall forever" approach. Which would make sense in a game that's very linear with a level progression, but would conflict with the design of these kinds of exploration games.
Sometimes walls are there to encourage you to do something different. Sometimes they're there for pacing. If you brute force the graveyard in Dark Souls 1 right odd the bat you'll pay for it and that's part of the game's charm. It was trying to tell you to explore somewhere else and learn how to handle the graveyard.
In Demon Souls, the run to the boss was basically part of the boss's design. Putting in stakes of Marika would have been bad.
Cool and fun though it was, I actually feel Elden Ring was a step backward in FromSoft's game design, lore, and worldbuilding, and I think it's too bad this was the game that really blew up and did the best of their catalogue.
I feel like Lies of P having adjustable difficulty is one of the better ways to open these difficult action games to broader audiences. I didn't use it much, but there were a couple of bosses I got tired of slamming my head against the wall for in that one lol
I agree, though I didn't end up using those features in retrospect I should have. And I think Lies of P is the best soulslike I've ever played. (Apparently it's also easier if you play anything other than the build I chose, oops).
Another Crab's Treasure does it well too with a lot of different accessibility settings! It also is more linear so you can get really really roadblocked with nowhere else to go and nothing to do except best your head against the wall. I did resort to the Glock accessibility setting in Another Crab's Treasure for one boss.
Let me guess - you did a strength build on that little guy
Some of the bosses seem like a huge pain in the ass if you have a slower weapon
I struggled with the final boss of the expansion enough to
the difficulty button. There were a handful of the bosses I found annoying enough in NG+ that I did it too lol.
I still need to check out Another Crab's Treasure - it looks super cute.
Dex build actually, because I thought a strength build on the little guy would just look too silly. I loved the moveset of the starting rapier so much I stuck with it for the entire game, occasionally swapping to the tyrant slayer's dagger for boss fights or really big and tough enemies because I liked the drip of taking down bosses with a weapon named that.
I also didn't bother with swapping weapon handles because it would mess with the moveset and therefore the aesthetics, and this game is heavy on aesthetics and style. I kind of Fashion Souls'd myself out of a core mechanic of the game. I tried, mind you, like when I was struggling with one boss in particular I looked for advice on how to fight her and "longspear handle + acid spear tip" was the consistent answer. I tried, but the moveset was not aesthetic, so I went back to ol' (un)reliable
I gifted a friend the game, he went with an arcane build because he likes magic stuff, and he breezed through it. I felt a little bad for him that he found it so easy actually. Part of the joy of these games is the struggle.
You missed out on combining the Wintry Rapier blade with the Tyrant Murder's Dagger handle lol. I think the lack of weapon experimentation is where you got the added difficulty. I had a handful of weapon combos for a Dex build (lots of the Booster Glaive handle), and ended up using the katana
in the end of the game, but didn't struggle too much.