When You Try So Hard, And Get So Far In Games, But In The End It Doesn’t Even Matter

Thumper is a fantastic game. It’s a rhythm game if rhythm games could be possessed by demons, Guitar Hero if Guitar Hero was a literal highway to hell. The soundtrack has no licensed poppy hits, instead, its music is one long vocal-free grind, intense metallic beats that are still surprisingly catchy. It’s both deeply disturbing and hypnotically calming.

I love Thumper. There’s only one problem: I’m really bad at it.

I first encountered Thumper through its announcement trailer, the hypnotising beats and visuals promising that this game was made for me. I picked it up on Steam on release a few months later, stretched my fingers and immediately prepared to enjoy the literal hell out of this game.

The first few levels are easy enough, introducing you to the game mechanics with a handful of almost agonisingly slow levels, single beats spaced far apart. Once this part is finally out of the way, you’re rewarded with a series of levels that immerse you into Thumper‘s beautiful and disturbing game world. It’s a cleverly designed game: each upcoming beat is forecasted both visually and audibly. If you hit each of them properly, it sounds out a perfect call-and-response.

Soon, harder levels required running through a couple of times to get the hang of each section’s rhythms and handling, but I was still flying through the game with great success. Sadly, that success didn’t last.

Thumper‘s difficulty quickly ramps up to a level that my poor little brain just couldn’t handle. No matter how many times I ran through the newly nightmarish level, I died again and again. I reached a point where the sequences and movements required just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t get my eyes, brain and fingers to move in the ways I need to progress in the game. I failed.

After waiting for so long to play the game, I had to face the sad truth: I just wasn’t good enough at this game to experience any more of it.

That’s the most heartbreaking thing about being bad at your favourite games: it can and will stop you from completing them. With Thumper and other rhythm games, you’re mainly deprived of that sweet, sweet dopamine hit that comes from perfectly completing a level with no dissonant beats. With more story-heavy games, however, you could be missing out on the ending to a narrative you’re already deeply invested in.

You Can’t Fail A Movie You Love

With many modern video games packing in as much plot, romance, and character development as your average Hollywood movie — or perhaps more — being unable to complete one can be incredibly unsatisfying.

Video games are unique in this way. You can’t fail to finish a movie unless you physically stop watching it. You’re unlikely to give up on a book unless you’re already bored with what’s in it. But games? Hey, you might just be bad at this one. Tough luck.

Missing endings can always be filled in by a quick Google search, of course, but reading a synopsis off Wikipedia can never quite compare to experiencing the game for yourself. And that’s the other part of this equation — the experience of playing a game is just as important as the dialogue or characters. Sometimes even when an easier route through a game is available, it just feels wrong to take it.

With the difficulty dilemma in mind, a lot of story-heavy games have begun including easier-than-easy game modes to get less experienced players through the story. Mass Effect 3, for example, has a “narrative” game mode, while Witcher 3 lets you choose “Just the Story” over “Blood and Broken Bones”.

Choosing those modes can sometimes feel like you’re sacrificing something, however. Do you really feel like a badass monster-hunting witcher if you’re just a fumbling swordsman whose lucky hits happen to be overpowered? Does it break your immersion when one of Commander Shepard’s squadmates yells “there’s too many of them!” upon seeing a single enemy soldier firing with all the prowess of a drunk Stormtrooper?

That being said, these difficulty settings are of course vital for accessibility, letting players who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience a game see it to completion, but for many, the idea of bumping the difficulty down feels like a failure of a different kind.

Though I’m not a difficulty masochist myself, I’m still not immune to the guilty feeling that says you haven’t really played a game if you play on the easiest setting. Take Alien: Isolation, for example.

Alien: Isolation was designed to be a punishing game — just like in the movie, it takes a mammoth effort to survive, let alone triumph against the titular creature. The game has five difficulty levels, casual, easy, medium, hard and nightmare, but hard is listed as “the recommended way to experience the game”.

Even with this recommendation, I chose medium as my fate: not too challenging, but not too much of a hit to my pride. Even on that difficulty, I struggled through the many, many hours I put into it, and ultimately never finished the game.

Alien: Isolation was another one of those dream games I had been looking forward to since before it even existed. It was the game Alien fans had been waiting for with even greater anticipation since Colonial Marines bombed, and for a survival horror fan like myself, it was basically the Holy Grail. Pre-release, it felt like someone had designed this game just for me. How wrong I was.

Unlike other survival horror games, Alien requires you to be skilled at more than just hiding and running. You need to be clever with your stealth, master multiple different types of combat strategies, manage your limited ammo just right and have a good deal of luck on your side to boot.

These many elements help Alien: Isolation stay fantastically faithful to the atmosphere of the original film, at least until the immersion is broken by the protagonist dying horrifically, over and over and over, before she finally figures out how to survive. Compared to my struggles, Sigourney Weaver was playing on casual.

Parts of that game are still etched in my memory, sections where the margin for error was so slim I had to run it countless times just to progress:

For people who have the time to, as they say, ‘git gud’ at the many skills difficult games demand from them, I’m sure it’s a great feeling when they finally do.

Sneak around the corner. Use no more than two pistol bullets to kill the facehugger before it gets to you. Run to the end of the corridor. Hide behind the cabinet. Use the flamethrower to distract the alien, but no more than 20 units of fuel. Run to the tunnel at the end and for God’s sake don’t forget about the second facehugger that’s about to jump out of it. You’d better hit it with one of your last two bullets.

The experience of playing this incredible game turned from nervous excitement to frustration to resentment so smoothly that I barely even noticed the transition. One day, I just stopped playing it and never picked it up again.

For people who have the time to, as they say, ‘git gud’ at the many skills difficult games demand from them, I’m sure it’s a great feeling when they finally do. But many like myself who work full time, or have other things in their time that demand time and attention, just have to face a sad truth: no matter how much you love this game, you’re bad at it, and you probably always will be.