Hollow Knight I tried several times and couldn't even kill one enemy. I hated it and it made me feel stupid.
Same!
Nothing wrong with you not liking SF, but that is franchise you can't button mash. I do recommend you go with Modern Controls, if you ever decide to give VI a roll. They use directional inputs, so it makes playing easier.
OG Doom does have some puzzles, but they're nothing special by today's standards or those from the early 2000s. Doom 64 does have honest to god difficult puzzles/traps you're not going to know your first time playing. It has the most puzzles out of any Doom game in the franchise.
I have a deep and abiding problem with the conflation of "bullshit" with "challenge". A lot of what goes on in Soulslike games is bullshit, where you're expected to figure out the one way the developers intended you to handle the situation, and if you can't copy that perfectly then you're just an idiot who needs to "git gud". If I want pointless frustration borne of other peoples' smug unrealistic expectations, I can get plenty of that from real life.
To be fair, a lot of what I love about souls games is that you can just let your brain do it. If you throw yourself at the same boss over and over your brain will just figure it out without much in the way of conscious input, then suddenly you hit that one run where you're just gliding through everything effortlessly like Tom Cruise in that one movie where he dies a lot. When that happens, it's one of the most wonderful feelings I think a video game can produce, and it is necessarily very hard to convey to someone how to get there beyond just telling them to smash their head into a brick wall until they break through.
I would very much disagree. The gargoyles, at the point you fight them, are hard. In fact, I think they're a good example of bullshit difficulty because they're basically a DPS gate. If you go in overlevelled or with good weapons you will absolutely smash their shit in. If you're underlevelled or haven't got those good weapons yet, it can be pretty obnoxious.
Yeah, that's the thing. When I finish smashing my head into that brick wall, I don't feel wonderful. I feel tired and left wondering why I put myself through that.
I did a complete emotional 180 with that. When the soulsborne games clicked with me I did have that ecstatic feeling of joy when beating a boss. I was starting to feel the opposite with Sekiro until I fell in love with the combat, but with Elden Ring I just got tired of it all. So yeah it's largely me- I was burnt out. But I do also think the the mechanics got more annoying because in between Sekiro and Elden Ring I played and enjoyed Demons Souls.
See, I think it's even weirder than that, because I don't think it's about winning and feeling accomplished so much as the feeling of effortlessness. Like, the first time you fight a boss it feels impossible, but after a while your brain just kind of adapts and you don't even need to think about it any more. You're not even sure how you got there but you intuitively understand how to do it.
What I've found enjoyable about it and what, for me, distinguishes it from all the other D&D based CRPGs is all the immersive sim elements. Any game using the system is always going to have the fundamental issue that just rolling attack dice and trading hit points is boring when you don't have the built-in tension of doing it in a real group with real dice, but if you focus on being the stinkiest little dickhead it becomes very entertaining.
That's because fighting a Boss should feel engaging on its own regardless of whether you'll beat it or not. And with Soulsborne Bosses it appears the purveying feeling is 'please don't let me die, let me finally kill this guy', which without enjoyable combat mechanics just becomes soul sucking and frustrating. I've beaten a good chunk of the Soulsborne games, and never (apart from maybe the first couple of Bosses in Demon's Souls) did I feel a sense of satisfaction or elation at beating a Boss, because I knew another Boss would be waiting around the corner anyway.
No point in suffering through games if they’re not enjoyable. I used to do that but now don’t have the patience or time to waste. It’s pretty much why my new game selection is so limited.
I've embraced my lizard brain in the last 3 years - you entertain me, or you can get the fuck out.
That got turned on its head in Security Breach, where a prepubescent boy wrecks three nine-foot-tall animatronics.
