At the risk of burning my gamer credentials to the ground, I have to say that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the new FromSoftware game everyone is buzzing about, genuinely terrifies me. I have read a lot (a lot) about it to try and figure out if this is a rabbit hole I want to fling myself down and I’m just not sure.
It’s kind of a philosophical debate I’m having with myself, about why I play games and what I hope to get out of them.
I have never finished a Souls game, though I did claw my way through Bloodborne to try and prove a point to myself that at the very least, I could if I wanted to. And everything I’m reading is telling me that Sekiro is harder than either of those series, not just because of its combat, but also because you can no longer do things like grind out enemies to slowly increase your power to get a running start. You either can beat sections, or you can’t, and the only way to make progress is to (sigh) get good.
The problem, for me, is what a game like this will do to me. I’ve long made a joke (that I’m sure I didn’t invent) that it’s not video games that make you violent, it’s losing at video games that make you violent.
While people may react to failure in games in different ways, there’s something about it that can just…set me off at a certain point. Not making me literally violent, I’m not confessing to any crimes here, but it can severely alter my mood negatively, and impact me in a way that I really dislike for hours, days after.
I still remember my most frustrating video game encounters, like Shao Kahn fight in Mortal Kombat 9, which I never beat, or the final Valkyrie fight in God of War, which I did beat. I remember being incredibly tense and exhausted through all eighty hours of Bloodborne, not unhappy about it, but feeling like that was something I never wanted to do again.
Losing in games turns me sour at my core. That could be a losing streak in a PvP game, dying on a tough encounter over and over again. For me, it’s a fine line between feeling good when you overcome a challenge and having your mood ruined to such a degree than even when you do finally win, you simply feel like you’ve stopped beating your head against a wall. And a game like Sekiro feels designed to produce that feeling at almost every turn.
I am not saying this as a knock against Sekiro or people who like these types of games. I just think there are different types of gamers who play games for different reasons, and I think it’s a mistake to classify people who say, dive straight into 100 hours of Bloodborne or Sekiro as “hardcore” but a frustration-averse gamer like myself with 5,000 hours across my beloved (but often not-that-challenging) loot shooters as “casual.”
My favorite gaming memories are playing Halo or Call of Duty or Destiny with my friends, because the presence of friends often means it doesn’t matter whether or you’re winning or losing. My favorite solo gaming memories are of long-winded farming runs in Diablo or Borderlands where I wasn’t doing anything crazily difficult, but simply enjoying myself through loot acquisition and slow power gains. My favorite non-loot-based gaming moments all have to do with story, be they Mass Effect, The Last of Us, God of War and so on.
I don’t really remember most of the challenges I’ve overcome, and if I do, those aren’t really my fondest memories. Yes, I get some sort of gaming merit badge for beating Bloodborne, but I don’t exactly treasure that journey. Too often these kinds of brick wall challenges leave me with memories of the anger and frustration of wasted time trying to beat them, rather than the eight seconds of relief I felt when I finally did.
This is why I am scared of Sekiro, because I don’t know if I have the emotional capacity to handle a game this punishing. I am sure I could physically do it. My gaming “abilities” at this point are probably enough to get me past even the hardest of games with enough sheer force of will and fine motor control. But I’m asking if I want to do this to myself just to try to act like one of the cool kids in a genre I really don’t especially like because of how it treats failure and pain and death and frustration like virtues. Again, if you are the type of person that takes great joy in overcoming the seemingly impossible, this is probably great for you. But after playing games for twenty years, I know myself better than that, and that isn’t why I play.
But still.
I’m curious.
Ah screw it.
I’ll try.
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