I hate when people assume that not liking nerfs means I want to feel superior to others because I beat something “pre-nerf.” That’s not it at all. Some of us simply like being challenged. I don’t enjoy easy games, they bore me. When a game gets made easier, I lose one of the reasons I’d want to replay it.
People tell me “you just have a lot of time to play.” Brother, my job right now is basically applying for jobs in a garbage job market but I still like challenging games. It’s not about time, it’s about taste.
“This game is harder than the first.” Good! The first had most of its difficulty in the endgame. Silksong has a smoother difficulty curve and never spikes too much. You also get much stronger builds early and can break bosses without learning them.
“There’s not enough rosaries, everything costs too much.” I never farmed and always had enough to buy nearly everything, explore and do wishes. The game isn’t linear and 70% is completely optional. I didn’t even enter Hunter’s March until almost Act 2.
“The new pogo is awful.” There’s an option to use the old pogo, and I still prefer the new one. It’s more fun and makes platforming interesting, you just have to learn it.
“Why can’t people understand the game has problems and I’m entitled to criticize it?” For others, what you hate might be the best part. There’s no “problem,” there are different tastes.
If you don’t enjoy playing this game, stop. Not everything has to be for everyone just because it was hyped for years. Some games are supposed to be hard, and that’s okay.
It really boils down to two things:
Yes, you’re valid in your frustration. Complain all you want, give feedback, write long posts — that’s part of being a fan.
No, you’re not entitled to an easier game. Team Cherry doesn’t decide your opinion of the game, and you don’t get to decide what game they make.
Real Gamer™ ass post.
I hate when people assume that not liking nerfs means I want to feel superior to others because I beat something “pre-nerf.”
Some of us simply like being challenged.
I don’t enjoy easy games, they bore me.
I never farmed and always had enough to buy nearly everything
still caring about game difficulty in 2025
Any game can be the easiest experience in the world if you have enough cheat codes and console commands. Any game can be the hardest experience in the world if you have enough self-imposed restrictions.
What games used to have was the ability to make the game as easy as you want with cheat codes. What should have happened was for game devs to start coding in popular self-imposed restrictions and challenge runs (no healing, no inventory, no items, pacifist, cannot take damage, no saves) into the game itself as challenge modes. But instead we got the opposite: game devs took out cheat codes, so now there’s constant whining and circlejerking about the dev’s creative visionTM. Cheat codes are largely not a thing anymore, and challenge modes are only present in certain indie games,
And being able to mix and match cheat codes and challenge modes is chef’s kiss. Yes, I want to play the game with infinite ammo but no health bar. Yes, I want to play pacifist mode with clipping so I can pretend I’m a ghost or something in a game that is not remotely designed for that.
Ideally, games would have speedrunning mode as well. The minimum would be a timer, a means to record the run, and a leaderboard. Let’s see those any% times from g*mers who love playing hardTM games.
game devs took out cheat codes,
Some other things happened that caused that to happen. Like the proliferation of the internet, and nerds data mining the game files. Remember in order to know about cheat codes (or even unlock requirements) in a game back before the internet became a normal thing in everyone’s lives, you needed to essentially either have a subscription to a gaming magazine, buy a cheat code book, or be connected well enough with other kids to tell you these codes.
Ever since the internet became a permanent part of our lives, devs couldn’t really put secrets like that in games anymore without it ending up being shouted out to the world on day 1. So yeah, cheat codes were a relic of the time, and their time is long past.
I think it’s more to do with the development process. There used to be a development use case for cheat codes to easily enable or disable features or parameters of a game for testing purposes. And then you could leave them in the release build because why not, cool easter egg.
These days devs can easily just spin up whatever development environment needed for testing. There’s no need for such primitive methods like a special code, instead it’s now something that would require additional resources to implement.
Yes, this is the original reason why cheat codes were a thing. They were simply debugging tools that the devs left in the game. It’s very obvious for level warp cheats. The devs would just warp to whatever level they wanted to playtest instead of constantly playing through the game just to QA the second-to-last level.
dev time and money are limited, they should make the art they want to make, demanding they compromise on that is like demanding cubists draw some normal shit instead.
