door of the room you died in with the same amount of health and health packs as you entered. If you enter into a combat section with very little health and nothing to heal you, you are going to have to play that section until you can figure out how to get through with the minimal amount of life that you have left. Sections with puzzles or platforming elements in addition to the normal combat further compound the game’ s intricacy. You can fall through the floor and die. Alternatively, you could be completely blindsided by a sliding wall and die. Spend too much time on the puzzles or room hazards and you could easily become overwhelmed by enemies. Either way, you’ re probably going to die and you’ re probably going to die a lot.
One of the major complaints against the game is its difficulty. The problem is not games that are difficult. The problem is games that are punishing through bad design. If the difficulty comes from a flaw in the game, then that is just poor design, but if the difficulty is a core part of that game, lowering it would compromise a part of the experience. There is a strong sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with games that are challenging. Every battle has more meaning for me because I put in the time and effort to get through it. Now shortly after Hyper Light Drifter’ s release, Heart Machine added a patch called the invincibly patch.
One of the things that the patch did was add i-frames, or invincibility frames. Invincibility frames refer to a period of time, measured in frames, when a character is impervious to damage while performing a certain
action, specifically, dashing. Heart Machine decided to add i-frames because i-frames made combat smoother, allowing you to fully complete an action before the enemies killed you, making it easier to get into a flow state. With the i-frames, there were fewer deaths that felt unfair. Before, you could have dodged an enemy attack but still died. This off course makes the game more difficult because it decreases the margin of error when completing tasks, requiring greater precision from the player. After the patch, many players complained about the drop in difficulty while others rejoiced because the change made the game more accessible.
Many changes from the invincibility patch were later dropped like warp pads refilling health kits, but the added i-frames remained. Eventually, Heart Machine took the extra step and just made an easy mode. The easy mode makes the game more accessible for players who had been previously turned off by the high difficulty. For video games, publishers want as many people to pay for and play the game as possible. This is why games are released on multiple platforms and this is also why Hyper Light Drifter has an easy mode. There are better ways to go about fixing difficulty then adding an easy mode, however. Dark Souls 3 gives players ways to make their game easier, by choosing different items and upgrades, which means they can alleviate the difficult for certain sections they think are more difficult. An easy mode does not necessarily make a game easier because everyone perceives difficulty differently and what is easy for one might not be easy for others.