Remedy's Games Are Harder Than They Should Be

High videogame difficulty typically arrives in a couple of recognised flavours. You have your hard by design games — looking at you DARK SOULS series — which have a baked-in toughness afforded by their unforgiving, less hand-holdy approach. And then, you have the modern-ish standard, which settles for offering a set of difficulty options for the player to choose from.

Concerning difficulty, I like to play games on whatever their normal setting is because I like to experience them just how the developer intended; difficulties either side of that are reserved for repeat playthroughs. However, that ideology falls apart when I boot up a Remedy title because their games are far harder than they should be!

Now, I think that my gripe can be chalked up to expectation: to me, a Remedy game's truest and most enjoyable challenge is always overcoming the struggle of piecing it all together. Trying to understand the lore of the world, and then working out how that connects with the story (and wider Remedy shared universe) is, without fail, a guaranteed treat! As such, the difficult gameplay as standard feels at odds with what Remedy is trying to do.

This always leads me to dropping the difficulty to something akin to “easy” mode. My recent first-time runs through both Alan Wake titles and Control were all whacked down to something a little simpler, near the ends of their respective stories. I would always make solid progress, but eventually grow tired of having to scrape by the games’ tougher fights.

Honestly, I don't have much more to add to this little rant of mine; the Finnish lads and lasses over at Remedy do, indeed, produce works of art that thoroughly tickle my pickle, and I always want more from them! I have just always found that the design choices surrounding challenge to be a slight misstep (that I can understand most will not agree with) on their part.

Does anyone else out there feel this?