Among the many horrors I continue to confront during ‘spoopy season, one of the greatest of the bunch is low key just how fast the passage of time seems to be moving to me now a days.

Is this somehow Covid’s fault on some level? Let’s just blame Covid and call it a day

One of the delightful knock on effects of making Active Time Event more episodic as of late, is building upon an idea that immediately came before it. Definitely ideal, in keeping both the articles more on the digestible side for you lot (the readers), but also in constructing far greater critiques for the games in general, in further considering new concepts, and having more time on evaluating would be creative concepts.

With that setup fully elaborated upon (and in mind), I continue to scrutinize upon my observations from yesterday, involving grappling with the puzzle elements in the Silent Hill 2 Remake (SH2R), and lamenting there was no proper way to know how many people truly struggled with solving any single one of them, as we will just never know how many people could have just looked up the solutions on their phone. This is in direct contrast to how I was able to cite the overall player percentage of people who had made progress in Silksong when I was playing it last month, as even with guides or watching videos related to tough combat encounters, you either have the skills to pay the bills, or you don’t….which is not quite as easily bypassed as say, looking up eventual solutions to a puzzle that has easily distinguishable elements with which to plug into the system.

While I do enjoy enjoy having access to provably sourced data (I am a man of science, after all) , not having hard numbers with which to reference the genuine difficulty the masses had in solving any of SH2R puzzles is ultimately whatever, I’ll live not knowing conclusively the number of cryhards that exists in the numbers they happen to. However, it did lead me to ponder an interesting aside in terms of difficulty that I thought was worth shining some light on today, as there initially seemed to be a discrepancy in my own standards involving customization options within the gaming realm.

While I was bemusing the notion of puzzling elements within SH2R, I had first mistakenly thought one could manipulate both the puzzle difficulty and the combat difficulty on the fly at any given moment throughout a playthrough of the game. In double checking this notion, I realized it was only the difficulty level that was changeable, which made sense on some level, as that does just equate to some changed number values in terms of damage given/taken etc, where as the puzzles are more hardwired into any given playthrough; changing the pretense of them via altering difficulty levels would be like messing with the spacetime continuum they operate within, reality in the game world would have to be reorganized entirely, thusly leading to likely issues with save files for a number of reasons. Fair enough, I thought…I didn’t need to tweak the puzzle difficulty for any reason, I was just crossing my I’s and dotting my T’s for accuracies sake in making sure the details were correct.

All well and good, except for one little detail…and that was my comfort level in being agreeable to a changeable difficulty in SH2R on the fly. While this seems like a nothing burger of a detail, it runs in hypocritical contrary to my stance I defended during my Silksong playthrough, as many complained about the difficulty level the game possessed, and the lack of an easier one to choose, thusly railroading players into coping with the singular mode of challenge that they had to contend with.

So, why the inconsistency then? Why am I okay with this game over here having multiple levels of difficulty…full stop I might add, but also in terms of being able to tweak it on the fly, vs this other title over here, which I maintained didn’t need options in that same regard, and held my principled ground of saying the singular level of difficulty involved with Silksong was fair game. What is the difference? Upon further reflection, and acknowledging I do prefer games having customization options to make themselves more player friendly *overall*…however, in doing so across the board would fundamentally break a game, probably in more ways than I realize, but we remain focused on the difference between SH2R and Silksong, and the kinds of games they are, especially in honing in on their identity, and the fundamental building blocks that create their core concepts.

In essence, I think the inconsistency relates to the identity of the two games, in that the difficulty related to SH2R, doesn’t fundamentally alter how the game operates, as the game is first and foremost suppose to be scary, which is relative of course, but doesn’t necessarily change this element by making it slightly easier over here, or slightly harder over there. Silksong though? I would argue that the difficulty level is not just physically encoded into the game, it is metaphysically encoded into the game, with one of the driving factors that defines the title in its entirety being that it is challenging, and an alteration of that would essentially ruin the value of the experience as a result. Taking the same semantics, one involving the essence of the identity of the game in question, and applying it to SH2R, it would be like trying to turn down the “scary” in that game, like changing the in-game atmosphere so it was more comforting, or by negating the horror elements, making the monsters more cute, warning you of the jump scares, that kind of thing. Turning the difficulty down in Silksong essentially robs the game of its core identity, akin to “turning the scary down” on SH2R, which is why my inconsistency, the one where changing the difficulty down on one is okay but not the other, remains cogent, in some regard.

This conclusion does open up a whole Pandora’s Box of issues involving the semantics of “what a game is suppose to be”, and elements involving its identity, how much control a player should have in the games identity, etc, which I don’t have time to get in to today, and perhaps leads to topics of conversations which will forever remain subjective, but most certainly more complex in nature. In terms of investigating my own inconsistency related to difficulty tweaking between SH2R and Silksong, I think I reached a safe conclusion, though this feels as if a much more important issue I’ve stumbled upon, and I may yet get a lot more mileage out of this concept in the future.

A lot more thinking on the subject will definitely be required in the meantime, however.

-Pashford