Difficulty as Narrative

Before I get into today’s topic, I want to stress something: I have no issue with games having an Easy mode. I have no judgement for people who prefer to play on Easy mode. These are completely legitimate choices and I have every respect for people who design and play games in this manner. Ok? Ok. Slight spoilers for Hollow Knight: Silksong ahead.

My favorite game of 2025 was Hollow Knight: Silksong. It had an engaging story, the combat was awesome, the character design was peak, and the movement and platforming was incredibly engaging and smooth (If you want to hear me talk more about movement in other games, look at last week's article). An excellent Metroidvania, it may not have been perfect but for me it was damn close. But then, that isn’t really a surprise. I loved playing the first Hollow Knight and at this point have determined I am a bit of a masochist when it comes to games. I have been directly quoted as saying “I want a game that punches me square in the face and says ‘be better at the video game’.” (If you’re wondering, this was about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, another one of my all time favorites).

Now, as you can imagine, this view is not exactly shared by everyone in the public. In fact, the difficulty of games like the Hollow Knight series or anything from Fromsoftware is just as likely to be praised as critiqued depending on who’s writing the review. Both Team Cherry and Fromsoftware generally take a similar approach to the difficulty of their games: we’ve made this game difficult. We will not make it easier. Have fun! 

As I stated before, I’m not going to make any value judgments here on the addition or removal of Easy Modes. Instead, I wanted to take a look at something that maybe isn’t talked about as much, at least not where I’ve looked: how difficulty in these games isn’t just about making the game harder, but also enhancing the narrative within them. 

Difficulty in games can take two primary forms in my experience: Difficulty due to poor game design, and difficulty due to designer intention. To illustrate this dichotomy we can look no further than my least favorite Silksong boss and one of my favorites: The Savage Beastfly and Skarrsinger Karmelita. 

If you have not played Silksong, then you are unfamiliar with the hellish pain in the ass that is The Savage Beastfly. First found in a temple by the Skarr tribe of ants, it is incredibly frustrating to fight. Its attacks are irritatingly irregular while not being particularly interesting to look at, and while it's fun baiting it into killing the summoned minions, that mechanic can be annoyingly imprecise. It is the only boss in the game where, rather than experiencing the exhilarating drive of trying again and again to overcome a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, I just got really fucking frustrated. The difficulty of the Savage Beastfly does not enhance the experience of the game, nor does it build on the world in any real way. Instead, it just ends up a dull and irritating boss fight, better forgotten to the halls of time (Until it comes back AGAIN! Why did we need it twice!?)

Skarrsinger Karmelita however, is sick as hell. A musically gifted Ant Queen whose fighting resembles dancing while she sings her own battle song, she is one of the hardest bosses in the game, and she rules. You fight her deep into Act 3, not as she is in the present, but as she was when she was in her prime. Her attacks, while hard to dodge, are readable and quite frankly, are aesthetically beautiful. Fighting her is a literal dance, knowing when to retreat, when to attack, when to hold position, and when to dodge across the arena. She’s the queen of a fierce warrior tribe being fought at the peak of her strength and she god damn feels like it. You’re not just told how powerful she is, you feel it in every strike, in every block, and in every death. Her difficulty, far from a result of poor design, tells you the story of who she is and reinforces just how powerful she once was. 

In this way, the difficulty of the game serves the narrative. Pharloom, the kingdom explored in Silksong, is a very dangerous place. Not only are you told this, you feel it. The enemies hit hard, they attack fast, and unless you’re in one of the few safe spots in the game, you’re always aware of the risk of death. It makes the danger of the adventure and the looming threat of Grand Mother Silk feel much more real than if it was an easier romp. It’s the same in Hollownest in Hollow Knight, the Lands Between in Elden Ring, the Kingdom of Lothric in Dark Souls 3, Yharnam in Bloodborne, or Ashina Province in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. 

All of these settings are meant to feel dangerous. You’re supposed to constantly be on the lookout for enemies because anyone could kill you. Not only that, but the difficulty reinforces who you are in the world. At the beginning of Silksong, Hornet is stripped of a great deal of her power. The Knight is a lost vessel borne of a dead god who only just escaped being abandoned forever in the void. The Tarnished, the Ashen One, and the Good Hunter all start as lowly individuals, thrown into an uncaring world with the vague hope that maybe they’ll be able to fix things. Even Sekiro, a trained shinobi, is fighting supernaturally enhanced threats across the entire province that outstrip anything he has fought before. You are not meant to feel overwhelmingly powerful in these games. You’re supposed to feel like the underdog, fighting against all hope to maybe secure a better future. 

But Difficulty as Narrative doesn’t just exist in these super difficult games. Jin Sakai from Ghost of Tsushima is arguably the most skilled swordsman on Tsushima and he feels like it, taking on hordes of Mongols with relative ease by the end of the game. Talion, the gravewalking ranger from Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War is a supernaturally gifted fighter, paired with the ghost of a powerful Elf Lord in Celebrimbor, and he can annihilate orcs like nobody's business. Hell, look at the amount of Titan enhanced thugs and super skilled martial artists Batman takes out in the Arkham series, or the sheer amount of angels Bayonetta destroys in Bayonetta. These are meant to be the most powerful person in the room no matter where they are, and they feel like it. You feel powerful controlling them, and it makes sense that you do, because you should! You are stronger, or at least as strong, as basically every enemy you fight, and the gameplay reflects that.

And look, not every difficult game is serving some high minded lore based purpose. Some games are just difficult due to poor game design choices or, in the case of quite a few older games, to pad out the runtime. Everyone has different wants from their games, and for every person like me that wants the game to square up and fight, there’s someone who wants to ease through a game and just enjoy the art, story, and music. Neither way is better or worse, they’re just different, and if Team Cherry put an optional easy mode in Silksong I wouldn’t mind one way or the other. But I do think it’s worth looking at why these games are as difficult as they are, and realizing that it’s usually not just because the game devs hate you personally.

The fact is, games, especially action focused games, are often a power fantasy. They let you do things you could never do and overcome obstacles that would be impossible in real life. I can’t go and kill -REDACTED- to solve all the world's problems in real life, but I can absolutely go wreck Helis’s shit in Horizon: Zero Dawn or slaughter Nazis in Wolfenstein. Yet, I would argue that games like Silksong are a bit of a power fantasy too. Not about being so powerful that you can destroy any enemy, but about having the relentless endurance to overcome a broken world. In a world that is, currently and actively, falling to shit in a myriad of ways, maybe instead of dreaming about being Kratos and just axing the evil people in the world with our Godlike strength, we can look to Hornet; a bug that reclaims her power that was stolen and, against immense difficulty and endless setbacks, is able to destroy a corrupt and abusive system for the hope of better future. Sounds like a pretty appropriate fantasy to me.