Smart doesn't mean hard: five easy games that exercise your brain

One of the sadder outcomes is that designers are able to get away with cheap design decisions. Games are strung out simply by choke-pointing progress, adding an extra few hours by obliging the player to live and relive the same stretch of terrain. World exploration is funnelled by depositing over-powered monsters in areas you don't want people to experience first. Supposedly interactive dialogue is flattened by making every bad choice a suicide pill.

How refreshing to see this in a mainstream publication, unlike in OPM where its editor recently waxed lyrical about how we "needed" poor design and sadistic design choices in games or risk them becoming a "press X to win" scenario. He even used the blade tower in God of War as an example, even though that section of the game is, in fact, notoriously glitchy as opposed to simply providing a difficult challenge. The worst thing is that this is the same type of person who would (and did) defend poor or confusing writing in videogames by saying that it's 'art' and therefore is up to the gamer to interpret for themselves. This of course is total rubbish - it's not my job to tell the story, and if it is, I should damn well be getting paid for it - but it also completely betrays this idea that games need to have hair-tearing levels of difficulty in order to complete, because if they're also supposed to be artistic then why should some players be excluded from the experience by giving them impossible (sometimes literally) tasks in order to witness it all? You can't have it both ways on this.

Glitchy or imprecise controls causing you to die all the time is not good game design. Inconsistent, unfair checkpoint placement forcing you to replay large sections you've already completed in order to get a second attempt at a section that you didn't even manage five seconds with due to low health is not reasonable challenge. The challenge must come from simply playing the game naturally, and there is nothing natural about having the camera throw you into a pit or from seeing five minutes of progress pissed up the wall because some level designer was too lazy to space the respawn points appropriately. Many of the most challenging games don't kill you or make you fail at all, such as Travellers Tales point and click games. Other games, such as Limbo and Braid, are based around trial and error by design, not by consequence of poor development choices. They in turn have fair checkpoint placement and progressive difficulty curves. And don't even get me started on the rubbish line about how survival horror games are only scary if you move like a tank and can only save manually once every half an hour with no second chance if you mess up. There's so much evidence disproving it that it ranks alongside "Andy Murray said he hates England" as one of the most vapid, over-repeated house-of-cards myths you can ever hear. Sit these self-righteous 'hardcore gamers' in front of a Gamecube with Eternal Darkness playing and you'll soon show them just how little they know. Fluent control, fair challenge, consistent checkpoints, and it remains both fun and terrifying in almost equal measure.

It is nothing more than a delusion that gamers who hate poor mechanics and having to retrace their steps for no apparent benefit are somehow not real gamers. Far from it - we're the ones who actually understand what the nature of a game is supposed to be, and it certainly isn't about tying your hands behind your back.

Portal 2, the puzzles are pure logic and extremely rewarding when you finally figure out what to do. I loved every minute.

One of the sadder outcomes is that designers are able to get away with cheap design decisions. Games are strung out simply by choke-pointing progress, adding an extra few hours by obliging the player to live and relive the same stretch of terrain. World exploration is funnelled by depositing over-powered monsters in areas you don't want people to experience first. Supposedly interactive dialogue is flattened by making every bad choice a suicide pill.

How refreshing to see this in a mainstream publication, unlike in OPM where its editor recently waxed lyrical about how we "needed" poor design and sadistic design choices in games or risk them becoming a "press X to win" scenario. He even used the blade tower in God of War as an example, even though that section of the game is, in fact, notoriously glitchy as opposed to simply providing a difficult challenge. The worst thing is that this is the same type of person who would (and did) defend poor or confusing writing in videogames by saying that it's 'art' and therefore is up to the gamer to interpret for themselves. This of course is total rubbish - it's not my job to tell the story, and if it is, I should damn well be getting paid for it - but it also completely betrays this idea that games need to have hair-tearing levels of difficulty in order to complete, because if they're also supposed to be artistic then why should some players be excluded from the experience by giving them impossible (sometimes literally) tasks in order to witness it all? You can't have it both ways on this.

Glitchy or imprecise controls causing you to die all the time is not good game design. Inconsistent, unfair checkpoint placement forcing you to replay large sections you've already completed in order to get a second attempt at a section that you didn't even manage five seconds with due to low health is not reasonable challenge. The challenge must come from simply playing the game naturally, and there is nothing natural about having the camera throw you into a pit or from seeing five minutes of progress pissed up the wall because some level designer was too lazy to space the respawn points appropriately. Many of the most challenging games don't kill you or make you fail at all, such as Travellers Tales point and click games. Other games, such as Limbo and Braid, are based around trial and error by design, not by consequence of poor development choices. They in turn have fair checkpoint placement and progressive difficulty curves. And don't even get me started on the rubbish line about how survival horror games are only scary if you move like a tank and can only save manually once every half an hour with no second chance if you mess up. There's so much evidence disproving it that it ranks alongside "Andy Murray said he hates England" as one of the most vapid, over-repeated house-of-cards myths you can ever hear. Sit these self-righteous 'hardcore gamers' in front of a Gamecube with Eternal Darkness playing and you'll soon show them just how little they know. Fluent control, fair challenge, consistent checkpoints, and it remains both fun and terrifying in almost equal measure.

It is nothing more than a delusion that gamers who hate poor mechanics and having to retrace their steps for no apparent benefit are somehow not real gamers. Far from it - we're the ones who actually understand what the nature of a game is supposed to be, and it certainly isn't about tying your hands behind your back.

I agree with EVERYTHING said in this comment!! Ha!