A passionate UK gamer has declared they are finished with punishingly difficult video games, arguing that modern developers have lost the crucial art of crafting a well-balanced challenge. The reader's feature, published by GameCentral on December 7, 2025, vents frustration at a polarised landscape where titles seem to be either frustratingly hard or disappointingly easy, with little satisfying middle ground.
The Last Straw: Hollow Knight: Silksong
The final breaking point, according to the reader, was Hollow Knight: Silksong. While acknowledging the game's praised design and aesthetic, they found its difficulty utterly ruined the experience. The specific grievance centred on having to replay lengthy sections after a single mistake far from the restart point, which they labelled as "irritating" and disrespectful of players' time. "I just decided then and there it would be my last artificially difficult game," they wrote, emphasising that enjoyment should be the primary goal of gaming.
A Legacy of Extremes: From Dark Souls to Donkey Kong
The reader traces the current problem back to the enduring influence of Dark Souls, a title now 14 years old. While respecting its original impact, they now resent how its philosophy has led to a binary situation. On one extreme are brutally hard games like the Souls series that refuse to offer an easy mode. On the other are titles like Donkey Kong Bananza, Death Stranding 2, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows which they found "pointlessly easy" on normal difficulty, often without a proper hard mode to compensate.
They highlighted the recent case of Metroid Prime 4, whose reviews mentioned a normal mode with "almost no challenge," yet requiring a playthrough to unlock a hard mode described as "stupidly hard." This, to the reader, exemplifies the lost art of gradual, intelligent difficulty scaling where normal provides a fair challenge, easy is accessible, and hard tests mastery without "kneecapping you with contrived limitations."
A Plea for Balance and Better Options
The core complaint is not about difficulty itself, but the lack of meaningful choice. "Easy games never have a hard mode and hard games never have an easy mode. Again, why?" they ask. They suggest an over-reliance on granular player options has made developers lazy, outsourcing balance tuning to the audience. "That’s not my job, that’s theirs!" they state.
The reader's solution is clear: developers should focus on creating "a sensible middle ground that pleases most people," supported by simple easy and hard modes, both available from the very start. They yearn for the classic structure of a game that starts easy, gradually escalates, and provides a tough but fair finale—a design philosophy they believe has become a "lost art" in today's gaming industry.
