Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
i’m not underselling celeste, i think there’s a big difference between granular easy/challenge modes and accessibility features.
if something is challenging, anyone can try and be bad at it. if something is inaccessible, some people physically can’t participate at all.
having sound design so immaculate that a blind person can play street fighter is accessibility, the simplified control options are some other thing we should have a different word for because it’s not about mitigating disability.
Celeste’s wealth of settings are interesting but they abdicate the work of designing the learning curve onto the people least able to make informed decisions about it and that has downsides on their experience too. Games are unlike other media because you have to learn a whole new set of rules and mechanics every time and it’s completely unreasonable to put all those decisions on people who have no idea what they’re getting into.