I have been enjoying Deadlight on the PC. It’s a beautiful little action platformer with relatively simple mechanics, albeit with a frustrating mechanism when shooting and loading a pistol. It’s simple to shoot, but difficult to get the aim right. Luckily, most targets are large and relatively easy to hit. I hope there isn’t an upcoming situation where I need to shoot something in a hurry…

While reading some comments about the game the other day, it seems a lot of people had difficulty around the helicopter scene. Based on the comments, they seemed to found the difficulty spike to be out of the blue, to the point where the shock of it caused many of them to stop playing the game cold turkey. They just aborted it, claiming the scenario was unreasonably challenging. The thing is, I found it tricky too, but only for a short while. I needed to try it several times before I finished it. The point is that I did get through it, even when I screwed up one section royally and thought for sure I was a goner. Just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, I tried it again and completed it with no issues.

The comments in the thread seem a little too caustic, given the games average difficulty level. I am left wondering about the psychology at play here. If a game has established an easy to moderate level of difficulty, and then it bumps the difficulty up a few notches out of the blue, what does that do to the player’s opinion of the game? Are they statistically more likely to drop the game at this point? Do the majority push through these hiccups? Are players nowadays just a tad spoiled in our expectations around the difficulty of a game, once our notions about a title have been established?

Categories: PC, Reflections, Steam
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