They say if you want to improve, you’ve got to go right outside of your comfort zone in order to continue to refine yourself. If your comfort zone is your bed…well, I guess leaving your bedroom can be counted as progress.

I mean, the logic is a little schmucky, but much in the same way a cannibal can improve on a month to month basis if he goes from eating two people to only one person a month: that’s technically better, and progress is progress

It’s definitely one of those days where there’s a whole lot of time to spare, and an absolutely abysmal lack of desire to do anything with it; a stark contrast to my normal everyday. I think it’s one of life’s cruel ironies that the moments we seem to have the most energy, we neither have the time to do anything with it, or the means. There’s that infamous 2 AM energy that comes out of nowhere, when it feels like you can conquer the world, only for all of the positivity to completely evaporate by sunrise. Similarly, so many weeks I cry out with appeal to imagined gods and goddesses to grant me some temporal power, with which I am able better to take advantage of my talents, only to be met with an uneasy silence that seems to generate new atmospheric levels of disappointment.

In spite of being positively bereft of care and concern involving what I get done today, I still have my heart set on keeping to my writing schedule, which means I sat down for another session of Mina The Hollower, to see what kind of adventures awaited me. Approaching the back half of the game did not have me at any level of concern, as even though the title tends to stick to its design guns, by oppressing the player as much as possible due to its Soulslike tendencies, it does seem as if I’ve stayed on top of both keeping a decent pace with my leveling and battle strats, so I was confident in dealing with what was next, which turned out to be quite a good thing indeed, as the next area of my adventure, Bone Beach, ended up being one big, sandy mound of obnoxious bullshit to deal with.

Full disclosure: just because something is obnoxious or bullshit, doesn’t necessarily mean I despise it, it usually just means that whatever is involved with said obnoxious bullshit, knows very well it’s being obnoxious bullshit, in this case, trolling the players in all of the ways the game can muster, and really pushing the boundaries for what is acceptable in terms of spiking the difficulty for all involved. The two big ways Bone Beach (BB) accomplishes its impressive level of petty annoyances, is by making the terrain as unfriendly as possible, as there are bottomless pits and moving chunks of geometry every which way. Meaning the player will have to contend with not only constantly moving platforms (which usually tend to be small in stature), but also completely surrounded by massive chasms one can fall down, with not only the detrimental cost of lost life, but also being reset a ways back in the current area, and depending on how big that area is, you’re going to want to avoid pits at all costs if you’re going to keep your sanity.

There are also other environmental difficulties to deal with, like crushers and spikes, for example, and the main dungeon you’ll have to fight through, has a whole lot of intricate design to it, with rooms connecting with each other in multiple ways, so one might have to go up a floor to actually make it just slightly to the right of where they previously were in the lower floor. Combine that with plenty of adjacently annoying enemies of ire’s desire, like fast moving flying enemies, and mofos with projectiles, and you have yourself a big old mound of obnoxious bullshit to deal with.

Now, interestingly, while I do acknowledge that I think this area is going to test the patience of some players, with what I’m imagining will end up being a decent portion of the player base having to shelf Mina for a bit, in a fit of anger induced hysteria due to death count, I don’t think BB is a bridge too far, in challenging the player. If this was one of the first areas the players had to deal with, I’d call bullshit in a New York minute, but considering this area will be tackled in the latter part of the game, falling somewhere between the half way point and three quarters the way through, you’ve had ample time to learn the ropes, level up, and find a metric shit ton of gear to help you with. I think the game telling you to take the training wheels off cause it’s big boy time is more than reasonable.

I bring up Silksong a fair a bit here on ATE, and I think thats mostly due to the fact that the game pushed me in ways other titles hadn’t in a little while, and not just from a difficulty stand point, but an intellectual one as well, as I had a bunch of fantastic insights while enjoying the experience, and got a lot of great articles out of my time with the game as a result. Though Mina and Silksong are technically different styles of games, there is some space on the Venn Diagram they share, and it’s within the perspective of challenging the player that I think is worth a mention, as the more I pour mental energy into understanding where developers and players clash, more so likely than anywhere else, is difficulty in general, and the progressive escalation of difficulty over time following right on its heels.

I just think a majority of players don’t really want to “practice” playing the game, in order to reach the end, as practice almost always equals some form of work, and people don’t generally enjoy working. At the very least, when most people play a video game, they don’t want the video game to be “work”, they want it to be fun, and rarely do those coincide. (I’m actually of a totally different mindset personally, but that’s a different article.) This whole avoidance of work and resistance to practice ends up being a massive issue for any game that does advertise its difficulty as one of the main ingredients of its metaphysics on offer, as the only way to truly ramp up the challenge level, is to start pushing people outside their comfort zones, push them to thinking differently, move differently, and ultimately apply themselves with the tools they’ve spent time with, combined with their familiarity with the title, to push themselves to new heights and what is possible in terms of the variability of game design that can go along with it.

Ironically, on the flipside, I’ve read about (and even seen first hand) what can happen when you invert the scenario: when a developer attempts to spare some pity, and have some level of “get out of jail free card”, if things get too dicey, and a lot of players pride will get in the way, feeling insulted or belittled in the process.

Often times, there really is no winning, a concept we can explore in more detail next time.

-Pashford