An update posted a few weeks back by the creative director of Soulslike The First Berserker: Khazan Junho Lee–spotted by Eurogamer today–reveals the astonishing fact that the action game’s players would rather give up and stop playing than switch to Easy mode. I am here today to address these people: Oh my goodness, pull yourself together.
The First Berserker: Khazan released in March 2025, and while it never took off in the way of some Soulslikes, it found its audience. Ethan had a decent time with its mix of Dark Souls and God of War, and at the time reported that its “easy” mode was a refreshing break during frustrating difficulty spikes. In fact, he went on to write another article describing the easy mode as “an excellent lifeline,” explaining that the option in no way spoiled the core of the game. “You will die less often on easy mode,” he noted, “but you will most definitely still die, and probably still a lot.” The mode doesn’t just turn the player into an attack sponge who can walk through the bosses, but instead tweaks health levels and stamina recovery, reducing the degree of difficulty when it comes to balancing your ability to attack against the need to stagger enemies. In other words, it allows a player who’s having a tough time to have a bit more room to play. “You get more chances to experiment, practice, and learn from your mistakes,” said Ethan at the time.
Sounds good, right? Except, no, because there’s a wretched virus out there that causes people to believe that being able to lower difficulty is worse than not being able to carry on playing the game they paid for.
According to Junho Lee’s update in late June, “We figured that if players found the game too difficult, they’d simply switch to Easy. But when we looked at the data, we saw that many players just quit the game without ever changing the difficulty.”
And why? “When we asked why, a lot of people said, “I’d rather quit with dignity than drop it down to Easy.”
What have we done? How badly screwed is our society that there are large numbers of people who, in the privacy of their own home with no one watching, would rather not play a game at all than make it easier? How fucked up are our perceptions of bravado that people pick total defeat over slightly altering a game to suit their own needs? Because if someone’s giving up, the game was too hard for them. How is abandoning it entirely perceived as somehow less of an emasculating failure? How do we fix this?
Soulslikes might not be for me, but I fully appreciate what an extraordinary and massively entertaining format they are. I love reading stories about those people who are somehow able to complete them using, I dunno, DK Bongos played with electric drills held in their feet. I look at those people with awe, fully aware they are enormously more skilled in this area than I could ever be, but with no compulsion to want to try. (I’m still feeling smug that I beat the final boss in Donkey Kong Bananza first time–that’s my level.) But at the same time, Soulslikes have also concentrated some of the very worst of gaming culture into the purest, titrated drip. It’s become “git gud” as a religion. So much so that even in complete privacy, people are unwilling to enjoy the game they spent their money on.
Junho Lee has the most pragmatic take on difficulty. “Difficulty is subjective,” he notes, “and each player experiences Khazan‘s challenges differently. That’s why we offered multiple difficulty options from the start.” Right? That makes sense, yes? I’m actually asking, because apparently the answer is “no” for an awful lot of people. Lee continues, “We wanted more people to enjoy Khazan, and we thought it would be better to let players freely adjust the challenge. We thought it was up to the player to lower it if it’s too hard, or raise it if it’s too easy.”
As if this situation weren’t already farcical, Khazan developers Neople addressed this issue by…changing the name of the “Easy” option to “Normal.” The previous “Normal” was upgraded to “Challenge.” And then they set the game to default to the new Normal. Problem solved.
This sense of pride, this notion that if you play a game on “Easy” you’re in some way inadequate, is insidious and desperately sad. As a games critic, I play all games I’m covering for work on their default setting, usually “Normal.” That seems reasonable, and if during the course of playing the game I discover it’s impossibly difficult, or far too easy, I’ll report this in my coverage. If it’s so hard I can’t get anywhere at all, I’ll report that too, but then switch the difficulty down so I can at least see the game. But in my own time, on my own clock, I’ll pick whatever feels right! Sometimes I love to return to a game I original played on Normal and see it through again on Easy, enjoying the atmosphere instead of the challenge. Other times I’ll push something up to a harder setting and see what I’m capable of. Most of the time, though, I’ll just set it to match what skill level feels comfortable, and feel no shame about whatever that may be. Not least because literally no one else will ever know. Nor indeed have any sensible reason to care!
It’s worth noting that at the same time as it implemented these changes in nomenclature, Neople also added a Beginner and a Hardcore mode, opening the game up to those who are new to Soulslikes and also don’t have an ego as fragile as an antique vase, as well as people who are super-good at this sort of game and want even more challenge. Fun fact: neither mode causes you to become a better person.
The topic of difficulty is obviously a fraught one, thanks to the most aggressive denizens of the online gaming world. Responses to articles suggesting that more options welcome in a wider audience tend to be deeply vitriolic as well as histrionic, furious attempts at gatekeeping disguised as nonsense arguments about “developer vision” and “harming games.” It seems that those behind such walls of noise would prefer to entirely give up on a game than question their beliefs.
Listen: if you’re playing a game and it’s far too hard and you can’t get anywhere, just turn the difficulty down. If the game’s well-designed, it’ll play a lot more satisfactorily now. Perhaps through playing this way, you’ll get the hang of the mechanics enough to put that difficulty back up again in a bit. Perhaps this mode, whatever its name might be, just happens to match your personal skill levels. Much like, say, if you wanted to have a game of basketball, you might not have a very enjoyable time being endlessly thrashed by members of your local college team. But you don’t respond to this by giving up on basketball as a concept–you just find people of a similar skill level to your own. It’s normal human behavior.
There’s something so unbearably tragic about a developer realizing its audience is so bruised and fragile that it needs to change “Easy” to “Normal” to have many of them play it. It speaks so poorly of gaming society at large, grimly describing a culture of toxicity and cruelty. If you’re surrounded by people who make you feel so bad about difficulty levels that you’d sooner give up on a thing you’ve bought out of misguided pride than make it more accessible for yourself, then perhaps the people surrounding you aren’t so great? Perhaps there are better, kinder people you could have in your life, who not only wouldn’t judge you for this, but wouldn’t even think to care about it at all.
