What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

The discourse around video game difficulty never seems to die. It’s been raging for decades, but lately, every new release reignites the fire. One side argues that games should be more accessible—through adjustable difficulty, simplified mechanics, or more forgiving systems. The other insists that players should adapt to whatever the developers intended, difficulty and all.

The latest flashpoint is Hollow Knight: Silksong, but this debate has existed long before the buzz around that long-awaited sequel. Today, I want to look at several games and explore what they get right—and wrong—about difficulty.

Difficulty as Dialogue Between Player and Creator

The most common tool for managing difficulty in modern games is the trusty slider. Fallout, for instance, lets you tweak how much damage you deal and take, how much XP you earn, and more. It’s a flexible system—players can tailor the challenge to their taste and skill level.

But this flexibility comes with a cost. The more control you give the player, the more artificial the experience can feel. The tension of being a lone vault dweller in a hostile wasteland fades when you know the Deathclaw in front of you is secretly on a leash because you slid a bar to the left. The illusion cracks. Difficulty sliders empower players, but they also remind them that they’re just adjusting variables in a system, not surviving in a world.

Sports games have taken that customization even further. Sure, you can pick Rookie, Pro, or All-Star—but you can also dive into a menu of granular sliders to fine-tune everything. If defenders react too quickly, you can lower their awareness a notch instead of changing the whole difficulty mode. Modern sports titles don’t get a lot right these days, but this system works. It lets players shape the experience to their liking without breaking immersion.

Contrast that with something like Doom Eternal or Wolfenstein II, where you’re forced to choose from a handful of discrete options. If “Hurt Me Plenty” is too easy and “Ultra-Violence” is too punishing, too bad—you’re stuck jumping between extremes.

Then there are games that tweak difficulty invisibly, like the Resident Evil remakes or Left 4 Dead. These titles monitor how well you’re doing and adjust enemy aggression, item drops, and damage output dynamically. It’s a clever trick, but it’s also a double-edged sword. Players lose agency over how challenging their game is. If the system doesn’t adapt quickly enough—or overcorrects—it can feel like you’re fighting an unseen puppet master rather than mastering the game itself.

Difficulty as Dialogue Between Player and Screen

Now let’s talk about the raw, unfiltered kind of difficulty—the kind that feels like the game itself is glaring back at you.

When I was younger, I decided to play Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 on Veteran difficulty. Why? I have no idea. Probably a mix of teenage hubris and a desperate hunger for Xbox achievements. On Veteran, even breathing wrong gets you killed. Every step between cover is a gamble. Every reload feels like a prayer. After countless retries, I finally earned those trophies—and immediately realized it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t feel triumphant; I felt exhausted.

This is the kind of difficulty that punishes rather than teaches. It’s not about skill development—it’s about endurance. Compare that to Dark Souls, Celeste, or Hollow Knight, where every death is a lesson. These games are honest. They don’t cheap-shot you with unfair AI or random headshots. They challenge you to understand their systems, internalize their rhythms, and improve.

That’s where difficulty becomes something special: a conversation between player and design. When you lose in Dark Souls, it’s because you mistimed a roll or got greedy. When you finally win, it’s earned. The game hasn’t cheated you—it’s made you better.

Of course, that purity comes at a cost. Games without difficulty options naturally create a divide between players. Some have the time, focus, and patience to “git gud.” Others don’t. That tension fuels the endless online war between the “just get better” crowd and the players asking for accessibility options.

Personally, I’ve grown tired of the gatekeeping. There’s value in preserving artistic intent, but there’s also value in letting people enjoy themselves. FromSoftware has quietly acknowledged this with features like summoning in Dark Souls or spirit ashes in Elden Ring. These systems offer help without changing the fundamental design. You can use them or not—it’s your call.

But the community can be merciless. Use a summon? “Scrub.” Use the Mimic Tear? “Weak.” Play offline? “Not a real run.” Somehow, the way you choose to have fun became a moral failing. The older I get, the less patience I have for that nonsense.

Difficulty as a Matter of Context

At the end of the day, games are entertainment—tools to help us unwind from the daily grind. When I was a kid, a “hard” game meant you’d spend an afternoon figuring it out. Now, as an adult juggling work, family, and the general chaos of existence, a “hard” game sometimes just means I don’t have the time for it.

Games have evolved from a handful of friends huddled around GoldenEye to massive communities connected across the world. Some players can sink dozens of hours a week mastering boss patterns; others get a single evening to decompress. Both are valid. Not everyone has the luxury—or the desire—to dedicate themselves to suffering for the sake of artistic purity.

That’s not to say challenge should disappear. Challenge is what gives games their flavor. It’s what makes victory satisfying. But the idea that only a certain type of difficulty produces “real” fun is absurd. Fun is subjective. It’s personal. For some, it’s beating Sekiro without taking a hit. For others, it’s melting through enemies in Halo 2 on Easy and feeling like a god.

Video Games as the Great Equalizer

We live in a strange paradox. We have more comfort, technology, and entertainment than any generation before us—and also more chaos, burnout, and anxiety. Games exist as both a distraction from and a reflection of that tension.

That’s why the “difficulty wars” feel so silly to me now. Games are supposed to bring people joy. If that joy comes from challenge, great. If it comes from accessibility, also great. The fact that a medium can cater to both ends of the spectrum is what makes it special.

So let people play how they want. Let them use summons in Elden Ring. Let them lower the sliders in Fallout. Let them run Hollow Knight: Silksong with a Guitar Hero controller if that’s what makes them smile.

Because at the end of the day, games aren’t tests of moral strength or litmus papers for skill—they’re little windows of escape in an increasingly difficult world. And if that world’s already hard enough, maybe it’s okay for our games not to be.