What is Harcore, sometimes it’s this, sometimes
it’s this, and sometimes it’s even this.
It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot,
and video games are no exception.in fact,
we’ve seen the rise of this weird little
microgenre that’s evolved to isolate and
exploit some of our worst masochistic impulses.
But that’s not all there is to it, right?
There seems to be this reeeeaaaallly specific
design aesthetic that we associate with stuff
like dark souls, super meat boy, cuphead,
darkest dungeon and games like that.
But, what if I told you, that despite their
reputation, these games are not the daunting
challenge they present themselves as, if fact
there’s only one obstacle in the way of
your total dominion over Inkwell Isle, Lordran
or.. Whatever this place is. You.
For a case study let’s use Cuphead as an
example of this Hardcore genre, why? Well
it came out recently and I have lots of footage
for it that’s why. But it also does some
things well or badly which are a useful commentary
on this microgenre as a whole.
Also, it wouldbe impossible to talk about
hardcore games without talking about- of course-
dark souls. It’s really the dark souls of
hardcore games I find.
The first thing we think of when we talk about
these kinds of games is, you guessed it, difficulty,
and lots of it. These games are infamous for
their punishing and demanding gameplay that
tests even the most skilled of players. Now
unlike other kinds of games, the hardcore
genre shoots for a certain kind of difficulty.
Stuff like strategy and puzzle games require
an understanding of the game’s systems and
how to manipulate them and most platformers
need you to have quick reflexes in order to
get through a level unscathed.
This hardcore genre though doesn’t really
promote that, it’s much more focused on
call and response memorisation. One of the
earliest fights in dark souls 1 is the Taurus
demon, a huge minotaur man. When you first
walk into his arena, he’ll do this, and
probably get the jump on you if you’ve not
faced him before, and will probably smush
you into a delicious chosen undead jam.
But next time you come back you’ll know
this is coming and will be able to mentally
prepare accordingly. In these “harcore”
games you’re all but expected to fail the
first one, two three four five…. Eughhh,
you get the picture the first few times. Rather
than the game being a test of mastering the
intricacies of mechanical interactions or
a deep and involved moveset, these games focus
on perfecting a comparatively simple and intuitive.
Here’s a boss that gave me trouble in Cuphead,
look at this early attempt versus my final
one. The trick to beating him wasn’t changing
up my strategy or figuring out how everything
worked, it was just executing the “correct”
way to win.
I’m sure you’re all familiar with that
cycle, and the relationship between the player
and the enemies in the game. but what you
may not have considered is how skewed this
relationship is in favour of one side. Yeah,
Dark Souls, Cuphead, super meat boy and all
of these games are skewed massively in the
player’s favour. You get infinite tries
and are pretty much not punished at all for
actually dying which means that any sufficiently
determined player can bruteorce their way
through any level, any encounter and still
come out victorious eventually. The only limiting
factor is your own patience- a fact circumvented
in cuphead by the look-how-close-you-were
level progression gauge when you die.
This is actually a really important, underrepresented
part of the hardcore genre. In nearly all
other games, dying means at best having to
go back to your last autosave and at worst,
as is the case with some strategy games, having
to do EVERYTHING again. In Cuphead, you lose…
maybe 2 mins of progress max whenever you
die, and even the longest of dark souls boss
runs cap out at under 5 mins once you’ve
got them down.
Remember those even more retro-styled bits
in super meat boy where you have lives instead
of your usual infinite tries? Remember how
terrible they were? When you ran out of lives
you had to do the whole level chain again,
totally breaking the muscle memory rhythm
that the game instils in you as you repeat
a single level.
Whiiich brings me onto an interesting point,
the GIT GUD mentality. The idea that beating
dark souls, or in fact any game is simply
matter of gitting gud enough to triumph over
any challenge the game presents. Now, the
internet being the internet, this is pretty
much exclusively used to make people who are
struggling with whatever game feel bad, but
there is a kernel of truth nestled away within
the toxicity. Bear with me.
When you’re facing down a particularly challenging
bit in… any of these hardcore games, there’s
a certain knack to observing what’s going
on and learning from your mistakes, and bit
by bit and you try again and again, each of
your attempts flow into each other as early
parts become routine. Bit by bit you get better
and better, more and more efficient. You start
noticing and memorising the patterns and flow
of gameplay until… it’s over, you won.
If you ask me, it’s being able to get into
that zen-like ‘zone’ where it’s just
you and the game that’s the key to… well…
getting good at games like this.
Of course, getting players into this zone
isn’t quite as simple as setting up a big
mean boss and making players fight it over
and over again.
Psychologists call this state ‘Flow’ and
the term was coined by … oh god. Where do
I even start with this name. * difficulty
pronouncing Mihály Csíkszentmihályi*
He defines flow state as when “a person
performing an activity is fully immersed in
a feeling of energized focus, full involvement,
and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
Flow state is dependant on keeping your brain
occupied but not exceeding a level of competence
that you can maintain. Too much stress leads
to panicking and too little challenge means
that you’ll get bored.
This is a critical error a lot of ‘hardcore’
games make, they equate difficulty with challenge.
If you dump a player in at the deep end and
mercilessly kill them over and over again
like a lot of oldschool arcade games did,
then you’re not going to keep players around
long enough to get them to master the game
and start having fun.
Dark souls is really good at this… for the
first half of the game at least. Going along
the default path of undead burg, up to the
top bell, and then down through the depths
to the bottom bell before heading to anor
londo means that each new area and boss keeps
you riiiight on the edge of your competance,
slowly ratcheting things up until you’re
left with the final, big challenge of Big
boy and pointyface.
Once the game opens up this nice curve kind
of goes a bit all over the place and it's
much harder to maintain that cool flowstate
as a result. All of the best super hard games
work like this, they’re hard but always
within reach.
All of this is usually reinforced at the end
of a level segment with a huge dopamine-releasing
fanfare. Super meat boy is fantastic at this,
these little end of level bits where you see
all of your past lives all running through
the level at the same time is super cathartic.
Meatboy’s near instant respawns and short
levels are also great for ensuring you never
leave the flowstate due to frustration by
putting you straight back into the action,
which dark souls especially struggles with.
You might be thinking, “well duh! Everyone
knows about the relationship between difficulty
and flow, Adam, you god damn hack!” and
you’d be correct, so how’s this for a
hot take?
Think of your favourite game that is really
good at inducing this state of flow, it might
be dark souls, or cuphead, or even a game
that’s not part of the hardcore group like,
say, Thoth. What’s one thing that all of
these games have in common? A super distinctive
art style. Dark souls has this neat lovecraftian
neo-gothic thing going on, Cuphead is a cool
throwback to the dawn of animation back in
the long long ago before disney had taken
over everything and Thoth has a minimalist
geometric style.
In order to stay in the flow state, you’ve
got to be concentrating and engaged, not just
the bits of your brain in charge of not getting
squished, but also your senses. A visually
appealing aesthetic serves to keep your brain
ticking over looking at all the pretty colours
whilst the rest of your effort is focused
on actually playing the game.
The same goes for how the game actually controls.
Try this. I want you to grab your interface
device of choice, controler, keyboard, plumbus
it doesn’t matter. When I show you this
Stop!
If you’ve got any experience with these
sorts of games, you will have developed the
instinctive “oh shit” reflex to hammer
the dodge button in order to get out of trouble.
Which usually looks and sounds a little something
like this: *AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH*
That’s because stuff like dark souls has
intuitive controls. Now intuitive is a word
that gets used by lazy game reviewers in place
of the words “good” or “nice” a lot,
but what does it actually mean?
Well intuitive means, simply, an action that
is instinctual and doesn’t need you to consciously
think about it in order for you to do it.
A real life example would be the way we can
catch and grasp objects without really seeming
to think about it. Even if you couldn’t
tell me the actual buttons you’d need to
press to block, jump, attack or dodge, I bet
you can still subconsciously remember the
muscle movements required to do those things.
This is a big area where Cuphead actually
fails. Using the default controller control
scheme, Jump, shoot, ,dash and secondary fire
are all assigned to face buttons which means
that you’ve got to perform these horrible
feats of finger acrobatics that are totally
distracting and usually get you killed as
well as dragging you out of that nice flowstate.
Switching the controls to something designed
for human hands and not the zargons from quagulon
9 improves the play experience dramatically.
Try it for yourself sometime, the best controls
are often the ones you think about the least,
not just the most simple ones.
Compare the new XCOM games to the oldschool
dos ones. Yes I will use any available opportunity
to talk about XCOM thank you for asking. The
new ones, despite having complex controls,
are highly intuitive, with actions flowing
seamlessly into one another and everything
having that nice feel-good level of polish.
The old XCOM on the other hand has a lot of…
well mucking about in menus. It’s hard to
really get immersed in the chump slaughter
experience when I’ve got to spend 10 mins
fiddling around in menus before every mission.
The clunk and fiddliness of this older system
does allow for some cool emergent gameplay
though- but more on that in a future video!
So, with that knowledge in hand, what’s
the deal with the seeming disparity between
people who, quite rightfully say Cuphead is
really hard, and the people who say that cuphead
is actually really easy?
Well. I’d say that it comes down to the
flow state and how it can be used to master
the challenges these games present.
Initially, as we’ve already seen, a given
level or boss in cuphead is super intimidating
to start off with but by getting into the
flow state, the moves the boss uses become
second nature to avoid and predict instinctively-
and because of how difficult the boss is,
they have to be.
Learned muscle memory is hard to forget and
because of how a lot of these games work,
it’s often the only factor that determines
whether you can beat an encounter or not.
Once you internalise the idea that mr flameyface
doing this means he’s going to do this a
few seconds later, then you’re not going
to have much trouble dodging the attack.
You might wonder why I’ve chosen the title
“The Hollow Hardcore” for this video,
well that’s because it’s a fantastic pun
and it explains what I’ve been talking about
this whole time.
Hardcore games seem daunting and difficult-
that’s because they are, like, seriously,
were you expecting me to not say that? Seriously,
the game deserves its reputation. I’m pretty
good at dark souls and I die all the time
because the game punishes mistakes brutally
and there’s a lot of opportunities to make
one. However, after several attempts or several
days depending on skill level of trying to
beat a part of a hardcore game and memorising
all of its intricacies, stuff that would urderize
a new player becomes a cinch to deal with.
You’ve broken through the hardcore wall,
revealing the hollow inside, and sadly, it’s
impossible to fix that wall once broken. A
dark souls boss mastered is probably always
going to be easy, it’s why people can beat
it with the DK BONGOS!? REALLY???
That’s the disconnect between people who
say these hardcore games are easy and those
who say they’re hard. They’re on either
side of the hardcore difficulty wall.
Hardcore game design isn’t for everyone,
but the lessons it teaches are universal.
By making gameplay segments easy to memorise,
and engaging to the senses, especially if
the player is expected to encounter it multiple
times, you can make otherwise routine parts
of your game fun and engaging.
Sonic the hedgehog does this really well,
I’m sure green hill zone and its millions
of derivatives have been burned into the minds
of anyone who owned a sega genesis. Cuphead’s
run and gun levels on the other hand are filled
with random fiddly bits that aren’t intuitive
or predictable are really hard to beat smoothly-
which is in total contrast to most of the
bosses.
Similarly, even if your game is designed to
be approachable, it helps to be aware of different
kinds of difficulty and challenges, ones that
punish mistakes harshly but are able to be
memorised and internalised- they reward persistent
players, but might cause less determined people
to give up and go and do something else.
I think whilst we as gamers often talk a big
game about flow and the psychology of games,
there’s just so much we don’t know about
it. And if you ask me, it’s something we
could really stand to pay more attention to
in the future,
But really, why are we getting so stressed
out about game design? Why can’t we just
relax 
and go with the… flow…
Eh?
EEEEHHH???
Alright, fine. You know what?  My humor's lost on you people. Get outta here.
