Yep, we’re going there.
Look, I love Dark Souls, and so do you. If you’re currently thinking, “I don’t love Dark Souls, what is this guy talking about?” then you just haven’t realised that you love it. It’ll happen. Trust me.
Unfortunately, a result of the world’s love for Dark Souls, everyone has now decided that games need to be tough as nails again. In theory, this isn’t that bad of an idea. After all, games used to be exclusively designed to challenge players, and it’s no secret that in the last decade or so, those games have been booted out in favour of safer, easier, and ultimately, more casual experiences. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be right up there on the roof trumpeting the importance of maintaining a level of challenge in games, to tide of the wave of casual players that threaten to dominate the attention of designers, but it’s really time for us to realise that not all games need to be Dark Souls.
Stop me if you’ve heard the term “Souls-Like” before. It’s an infuriating way of saying that a game has perceived elements in common with Dark Souls. Now, of course, there are games that are “Souls-Like,” such as Bloodborne, Nioh, and the Purge. The term “Souls-Like” can be used to describe these games, as they have taken clear and unashamed influence from the original beast, such as a high difficulty, a penalty for death, and a certain fetishistic attitude to player death. That doesn’t mean that every god damned hard game is “Souls-Like.” This problem really began to become apparent to me, and likely others, during the coverage of indie darling, Cuphead. No matter where you looked, it was “The Dark Souls of Platforming,” or “Cuphead does for sidescrollers what Dark Souls did for action games,” or “Cuphead is like Dark Souls meets Megaman.” Obviously, to avoid calling out any particular media outlet, I’ve altered these titles to change the exact wording, but I guarantee if you followed the release of the game, you know all about Cuphead and it’s apparent Souls influence.
This habit of saying that every difficult game is like “Souls-Like” really needs to stop. Not just because it’s kinda tiring to see every game put under the same umbrella of genre, but also because… well it’s kinda wrong. But that’s not the point of this post. Everyone knows that From-Software didn’t invent difficulty. But that kind of is the point, isn’t it. They didn’t invent difficulty. Obviously, they did novel and creative things with difficulty, but Dark Souls wasn’t the first game to say “let’s fuck our players.” Games have been giving it to us rough for decades.
But yeah, that is still kind of a tangent that I don’t want to get into right now, not the least because it’s been done to death in some circles. What I want to talk about is the wave of deliberately challenging games released in the last few years following the original release of Dark Souls. Games that put challenge into their games for no reason other than because hey, it worked for Dark Souls. If your feathers get rustled because of some of the games I mention, I encourage you to try your hardest to deal with it.
So, to annoy perhaps the most people, let’s return to Cuphead. Admittedly, I can see some of why this game is difficult. It’s trying to emulate older games, and even emulate what a really old game might have been (circa 1930). With that said, I dearly wish that the game would either have chosen to go the full difficulty path, or the full easy path. As it stands, it sits somewhere in between the two, with the benefits, but not the full potential of both. For example, small annoyances riddle the experience. Things like restarts requiring you to open the menu, go down to the restart button, then select it, before the game will restart a level. It’s such a small detail, but the game would be immeasurably improved (in my humble opinion) if restarting could be achieved by opening the menu, then hitting a single button. (not by selecting an item on a list but by hitting the “Y” button for example). It’s small things like that which would make the games trial and error gameplay be far more repayable. As it stands, I am constantly frustrated every time I want to quickly want to restart a level of my own accord, as there is a small delay each time. Talking about the required precision in selecting an item on a menu is a quick way to be ridiculed (and probably for good reason), but you can’t deny that it is simpler, quicker, and far better for the flow of the game, if there were a dedicated restart button, even if it required the menu to be open. That way, there’s a whole step of the process that can be removed. Yes, it’s a minuscule, almost entirely insignificant to most people, problem that I’m talking about, but it could go a long way in making me enjoy the game more.
Also (and this is a topic which I will likely discuss in posts to come), I think that it’s important for us to accept now that Cuphead’s hit boxes aren’t great. Ok, there not awful, but is it really that hard to have correct hit boxes in your 2D game? Obviously, it would be nice for every game to have accurate hit boxes (*cough* Dark Souls, *Cough*), but it can’t be that much to ask for defined hit boxes in 2D games. It’s something that has, laughably, become even more noticeable with the implementation of difficulty in most games. Because you die more to hard enemies (duh), the more you will notice inaccuracies in their hit boxes. In Cuphead, your bullets will pass through the tops of some bosses, and their attacks will sometimes clip you, even when they clearly missed. It’s errors like this that frustrate me, perhaps more than anything else in the game. If the game is difficult, it needs, NEEDS, to be fair, so it’s absolutely bewildering that Studio MDHR didn’t think that perfect hit boxes were necessary. I should clarify, this isn’t an issue strictly pertaining to them. Even the masterpiece Hollow Knight (which still isn’t out on Nintendo Switch for some reason) has hit box issues. I’ll admit, I love Hollow Knight, because it’s one of the few games that is branded with the “Souls-Like” moniker that I think might actually deserve it, but even I have to acknowledge that some of its hotboxes are a bit rubbish.
I don’t want to rub dirt in the eyes of these games developers, because in their own ways, both Cuphead and Hollow Knight are really quite good (one more so than the other IMO). I must, however, impress upon you the important for developers making hard games after seeing the success of Dark Souls, to ensure that they accept what that means (even if sometimes From Software doesn’t). If you want your game to be hard, that’s fine. But don’t make it hard because of Dark Souls. If your game is only hard because of Dark Souls, than perhaps you need to look at your game again. Is difficulty really what it needs? Is this the kind of game to benefit from difficulty? Should I leave the hit boxes the way they are?
P.s. I invite IGN to use a term other than “Souls-Like” to describe every game that’s difficult. It undersells the quality of the game in question. Might I recommencement describing a difficult game with the phrase “This game is difficult” (patent pending)
Super P.s. I love Breath of the Wild, but I still recognise that it too took influence from Dark Souls and kinda failed to do it well. I forgot to mention it in the post, but it works well as an added bit of evidence that you shouldn’t just blindly take influence from Souls. Auf Wiedersehen.
Y, Though? 