Living your life from day-to-day isn’t exactly a cyclic existence for most, as one day you may feel you have a sunny life, whilst other days render the complete opposite and leave you with the miserable image of a black cloud hanging over your head. In a way it’s the same with videogames, living a carefree existence at one instant and fuming at the screen in the next.
We’re talking about difficulty spikes of course, a sudden obstacle thrown out in front of you that hits you like a Ivan Drago punch. If a game is easy to begin with, and remains like that throughout, then surely a sudden increase in difficulty is unnecessary and - not forgetting to mention - rather cruel.
Picture the scene you’re enjoying your virtual existence in the latest Japanese RPG, partly because you are free to explore without being too threatened by the inhabiting goblins, wizards and other nasty monsters. But suddenly you near the end of the game and the difficulty rises like a hot air balloon, which inevitably results in forbidden words escaping from your mouth.
At least there’s some games that remain challenging throughout, and even those with a difficulty level that stays neither easy or hard are more acceptable than what we’ve mentioned above.
Don’t get us wrong, challenge is good, difficulty levels are good, what isn’t so good is having to suffer the consequences of a difficulty spike, especially if it comes near the dying moments in your quest for completion. If you sail through a game with a nice breeze behind you, and then realise that you aren’t going to be able to witness the ending because of a nasty difficulty leap, you’ll surely become rightfully angry at the development team for trying to deny you of some deserved closure for both you and the game.
Basically we’ve got to question a developers decision as to why they do this, as it’s wrong, cruel, and maddening, with not an ounce of logic. It has been happening for too long now with too many games, and we fear that this is something that is never going to change. We’d start a petition, but rarely do they work.
