Just saw this, i instantly thought about this when I was playing yesterday.
Part of it is refreshing, being that, so many games highlight paths, give you health regen, ample supplies, instant retries etc.
So the game is refreshing in that regard but still, I can only take so much of that in one go.
I think there’s a psychological aspect to it. Like I’ve seen people go into it really thinking it’s tougher than it is and play it scared and just try and button mash.
To put it another way, I’ve felt like I’ve quickly lost interest in some recent games because of how easy they are. Recently I played Miles Morales, and something about it really annoyed me about it. Like i would be trying to figure out a puzzle and miles whiny ass voice be like, “i think you gotta connect the webs to the nodes conduct the electricity to the generator!” I’m like bro, this is a simple ass puzzle, respect me.
To me, souls games have the feeling of 8 bit-32 bit era games that were challenging but still fair. Like, mario 3 wasn’t hard to be hard but it still felt like you accomplished something by getting through world 3. Same with something like punch-out that felt good when you knocked out soda popinski.
Games over the last 10 years with auto saves/checkpoints, long ass tutorials, UI prompts everywhere, regenerating health just make games so brain dead easy. If I’m gonna play a single player games where there’s no competitive aspect to it I need to feel challenged to be other ways or I feel like I’d just be better off watching a movie. It’s like playing street fighter arcade mode on very easy, no point. I never played games on hard growing up but now a days i find that i default to hard and if it’s actually hard I’ll put it down to normal but that rarely happens.
Anyways, I still like AAA easy games but I’m happy games like dark souls, nioh, Cuphead, and hollow knight exist to restore the feeling of being a kid and not feeling like a god in a game 2 hours in.