The discourse surrounding the supposed difficulty of FromSoftware's games is so continual, tedious and toxic that I don't even like to think about it, let alone talk about it, let alone write about it on a website where people can message me after reading it to tell me how wrong I am.
And yet: is backing away from this discourse the same as backing away from a Souls game itself? Is Souls game difficulty discourse the Souls game of discourse?
Perhaps. If it is, let me talk to you about something that actually has both nothing and everything to do with FromSoftware: a game I call in my head The Crab Game, and which every time I talk about it have to go look up its actual name when the person I'm talking to about says please, Luke, that's not its actual name, I need to know what it's called.
(It's called Another Crab's Treasure.)
Developed by Aggro Crab, Another Crab's Treasure is, like (for example) Star Wars: Jedi Survivor, essentially someone else's take on a Souls game. The map, the focus on precise combat for each and every enemy, the loot, the skills, the resting–this is very much a Souls-like. And as far as Souls-likes go, I think it's pretty good!
I say that, though, as someone who hates the actual Souls games, and yet really enjoyed Jedi Survivor (and now this) because they have the interesting bones of one (open world traversal, campfires) without the stuff I don't like (all the hard shit). To be clear, the main thing I don't enjoy in Souls games isn't the difficulty itself--I can play video games, thank you very much--but what it asks of me in order to do it.
I'm a solitary gamer who usually likes to play to unwind, to lose myself in a world, partake in a little downtime after a long day as a worker and a parent. Souls games require a level of concentration, effort and intensity that I'm just not interested in investing. The last thing I want to do at 11pm on a Wednesday night is sit hunched over a controller perfecting timing patterns and learning weaknesses over repeated trial, error and death. No thank you!
Maybe that is difficulty discourse; maybe it's just my own private expression of it and how it directly relates to my own habits and preferences. Whatever. The point is that ACT bypasses the discourse entirely by giving the crab a gun.
Buried in the options of ACT (which, admittedly, also have some more traditional difficulty concessions) is a check box. Tick it and suddenly your crab has a gun. A huge gun, a novelty cheque-sized gun, a gun so big it dwarfs the character and kinda breaks some of the game's animation. More importantly, this gun can instakill anything you point it at. This makes the game easier, I will grant it that, but that's not really the point. The point is, like we saw with Control--which also has a similar option, albeit without the comedic absurdity--using it bypasses the idea of difficulty entirely.
ACT is a very funny game! It's gorgeous, it's very well-written, the voice acting is outstanding, and it's a joy to simply wander its underseas vistas and meet everyone it has to offer. With the gun, even if it's late at night and I've had a shit day at work and my kids have been loud and I just want to relax for an hour, I can do that! Sometimes I don't want a challenge, I just want to get away from the challenges I'm already facing. This gun doesn't make the game easy, it simply removes all difficulty whatsoever.
If you don't want to use the gun, and play the game as its developers, Miyazaki, Twitter, Reddit and God intended, you can just not tick it. Pretend it's not even there. You will be fine, you can go about your life happy in the knowledge that nobody changed the game or its design, or undermined the skills you're very proud of in beating it.
If you're like me and you do want to use it, though, it's nice that it's there! I got to experience a world and some writing and some very funny characters that a devoted team spent years making and pouring their hearts into, and I would never have got to experience them if I'd died repeatedly at the first boss I ran into because I can't be arsed concentrating late on a school night.
