I know it’s dangerous to say these days, but I pride myself on being part of the silent majority. I mean this, of course, in the same sense that everybody means it: I play video games on normal difficulty. Where others ascend the internet’s sheerest cliffs and flaunt their hard, impossible, or nightmare mode accomplishments for all to see, I quietly plug away at the developers’ intended vision;or at least, the one they figure the greatest number of people will interact with. But for the past few weeks, I’ve been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on “story” mode, a rung down from normal. It’s taken some getting used to.
I’m fine with a decently difficult experience every once in a while, but that’s not typically what I want out of story-driven role-playing games. I’m there for grand narratives about love that transcend time and space and/or killing god, not a series of encounters that test my will and reflexes. Clair Obscur offers both, and I admire it for that. The bones of its dodge-and-parry-packed turn-based combat are very good; indeed, I would call them one of the main draws of the game. But taken as I immediately was by Clair Obscur’s world and story, my trance was broken the moment I caused Gustave to pirouette into a series of closed fists during a tutorial encounter. I immediately realized that on normal difficulty, I was going to die a lot, and that was going to repeatedly yank me out of the experience.
So I opened the settings menu and switched over to story mode, a less punishing option born of a request from Maelle’s voice actor, Jennifer English. This made my characters tankier and widened dodge and parry windows ever so slightly. The cumulative effect was a weight off my shoulders; I am by nature a bundle of nerves, but with the looming specter of death removed from many encounters, I was able to calmly – rather than anxiously – find a flow state. I’d get bopped at first, sure, but it was no big deal. I would still have plenty of time to learn the rhythm of different enemy types’ attack patterns.
However, this gave way to another problem: My relatively worry-free traipse through Clair Obscur’s opening hours felt out of sync with the story it was trying to tell. Gustave, Maelle, and Lune’s journey is one of desperation; a scratching, clawing climb up a mountain of corpses left behind by generations of previous expeditioners just like themselves. By all rights, they should have been emerging from each battle bloodied and afraid. This same world, after all, had chewed up and spat out their forebears, not to mention their childhood friends. Soon, a new voice wormed its way into my head: “You’re playing the game wrong. You’re not experiencing the developers’ intended vision.”
This really bothered me for my first ten or so hours with Clair Obscur. I couldn’t decide what I wanted: a friction-free tale that I’d probably enjoy more on the whole or an exercise in frustration that would, in some ways, better serve that story. But as I peeled back more and more of Clair Obscur’s layers, I found that story mode is more than a rebranded easy mode. You can’t just stand still in battle; you won’t instantly die if you fail a few dodgies or parries, but you will die if you fail a few more. Some bosses – especially optional ones – will still one-shot you if you’re not careful. You still need to put some effort into your character builds. In other words, you can’t just turn off your brain. Clair Obscur, even on story mode, demands that you play the video game. Having seen a number of people weigh in on this week’s Great Parry Debate to voice their misgivings with Clair Obscur in particular, I can now say with certainty: Turn on story mode. You’ll have a better time.
This got me thinking about difficulty as it pertains to games in general, and what I get out of it. I think there’s a meaningful distinction to be made between true, tear-your-hair-out-but-feel-like-you-just-tamed-Moby-Dick difficulty and more illusory, dramatic difficulty. These days, I tend to prefer the latter. I want there to be palpable tension, an implicit understanding that I could lose – even if I probably won’t. I want highs and lows; I just don’t want the lows to come so regularly as to be craterous or all-consuming. Many games, especially single-player ones, try to provide this. Hit boxes are wider or more variable than they might seem. Enemies are designed not to outflank and corner you, but to do interesting things before they ultimately die by your hand.
Even members of the fabled hard game pantheon, like FromSoftware’s entire Souls/Sekiro/Elden Ring oeuvre, trade in the illusion of difficulty just as much as they do the reality of it. There are means by which to grind or create OP builds to get around tough bosses. You can summon help. There’s a reason, after all, that these singularly challenging experiences have been conquered not just by a small handful of individuals, but instead millions.
Difficulty is an agent of drama, and at the end of the day, what matters is that you’re getting a level of drama that serves your sensibilities. If you need to get your ass kicked for things to stay interesting, cool! But if, as I’ve learned, all you really want is to see your health meter flash red once every couple hours, that’s fine too. You don’t need to overthink it. Especially in a world as well-realized as Clair Obscur’s, you’re better off just losing yourself in the ride. Because in truth, it’s impossible to know exactly what the developers intended, but a) if they were that precious about it, they’d probably be making movies instead of games, and b) they certainly didn’t intend for you (me) to be in your head the whole time.
