As a one-armed orphan – a disability that you might think would disqualify him from the opportunity to work as a lone assassin in 16th-century Japan – Sekiro is well acquainted with disadvantage. Still, a smooth sea never made a skilful mariner, as they used to say, and these physical and psychological handicaps have only served to strengthen this shinobi, who, with a variety of terrifying prosthetics, must now avenge his fallen master by taking down the Ashina clan. Up close, this is grindcore game-making, in which you are forced to watch the lolling of your victims’ astonished mouths as you trace a katana across their necks. This world of blood, fire and pitter-patter footsteps across bamboo rooftops calls to mind Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood or Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro in both theme and body count. But in its moments of exquisite pause, it’s also a game of refined cinematic style, the traumatised ninja silhouetted against a flaring sunset, while the reeds rustle and soothe.
A purging influence, Sekiro must rid this sickly world of its cruel men and monsters. Stealth is the dominant mode; you crouch in tall grass, duck under the floor beams, and, with your grappling hook, perch silently on rooftops. It’s possible to strike decisively at grunts from the shadows, but sooner or later you face one of the Goliath-esque named foes that punctuate this world, roadblocks that will only topple in open combat. Without a shield behind which to cringe and circle, you are forced to trade explosive blows, timing your feints, parries and counterattacks with a maestro’s precision. There are few shortcuts to progress; only rote learning and practice will yield results, and anyone lacking the requisite tenacity must walk away from a game that withholds its treasures from all but the most grimly determined player.
The scale of Sekiro’s challenge has ignited an oddly charged debate about difficulty in video games. In the medium’s formative, arcade-based years, a game’s challenge was an economic concern. Too easy and players would hog the machine without spending extra credits, making the game a poor earner; too difficult and no one would bother to play. When video games moved into our homes, the pay-per-play model disappeared; now designers could make a game as forgiving or brutal as they liked. Most tried to accommodate varying levels of player ability or physical capacity by offering multiple difficulty settings. In recent years, however, there has been a trend for games that, like Sekiro or Sudoku, demand players rise to an unmodifiable challenge.
Some progressives believe that games should be accessible to allcomers, offering in-built concessions to those unable, for whatever reason, to progress. Difficulty, they argue, is a weapon used to exclude – an issue for an industry that has, in the past, harmfully cultivated an audience of near-fanatical young men. Others counter that the calibration of difficulty is, in essence, an artistic choice. To demand a designer “dumb down” their game is akin to asking for a monosyllabic edition of the works of Proust. You might gain readers in doing so, but at what cost?
Games developed by Japanese company Software have become synonymous with a design approach that requires the player to, through repeated failure, acquire highly tuned muscle memory and eventually the required skill to achieve success. The studio’s head, the lovable Hidetaka Miyazaki, has said that his games are intended for players who want to persevere in search of “a feeling of accomplishment that may be relatively rare among other games”, a point of view that carries the implicit suggestion that not every game need cater to every person.
It’s a position shared by Baba Is You, an indie game made by the Finnish designer Arvi Teikari, and developed at the opposite end of the budgetary spectrum to Sekiro. It’s a puzzle title in which you manoeuvre your character toward a flag that, when touched, completes the challenge. The flag, invariably, sits out of reach. Each level is filled with blocks containing verbs and nouns, which are arranged in logical sentences that set the rules of the puzzle. One string of blocks might read “wall”, “is” and “stop”. Break the sentence by shunting “stop” away from the other blocks and you break the rule; now you are able to pass freely through walls and reach the flag.
From this simple premise, Teikari spins dozens of ingenious challenges, many of which have more than one solution. Game worlds, like ours, are made up of thousands of tiny strings of logic and Baba Is You is an invitation to play the role of a chaotic god, rewriting the rules of the universe. Unlike Sekiro, however, which presents new challenges that build upon the lessons of the old, Baba Is You often discards that which you learn from level to level, undermining what might otherwise be a delightful arc of educational progress. Neither game is wrong or right in its challenging approach; both ignite fraught discussion about who games are for, and the tension between artistic intent and audience gatekeeping.
Also recommended this month
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
(Massive Entertainment/Ubisoft; PC, PS4, Xbox One)
The latest military-skinned game in the Clancy-industrial complex is set in a Washington DC that has descended into anarchy. The military have moved into the White House, and you play as a sleeper agent, padding the glass-strewn streets with unrestricted authority to kill any American, all while taking orders from an AI. Frustratingly, this political frisson is mere window-dressing; the scriptwriters neglect to address the implications of the aesthetic choice. The game remains, however, compelling. This is a wide and enjoyable playpen, filled with exhilarating street combat and endless incremental upgrades to your weaponry to keep you invested. A shame that the chance to say something interesting with all this technological opulence has been squandered.
