Opinion: Playing on easy or just watching

We all have games we aren’t particularly good at playing and we also all have games we really want to play, and sometimes these two concepts mesh together and we find ourselves wanting to play something we’re not really able to play. It could be any type of game, but today I will speak about my own personal genre that presents this unique gaming problem as a case study of sorts. For me it’s horror games.

I love horror movies and horror books, but neither manages to scare me in the slightest. Even pointless jump scares do nothing for me, but video games are different. There’s a simple way to describe this. In horror films, you are watching the dumb blonde (because there’s often a dumb blonde, especially in bad horror films) and screaming at her through the screen that she shouldn’t go through that door, but in video games you are the dumb blonde going through that door. You also have to go through that door to progress that narrative and so stopping is pointless.

Because of this, horror games hit me way harder. I cannot play horror games with the weakest horror elements, never mind the heavy stuff. As an example of a horror game I did actually finish: Resident Evil 4. This game is often considered more of an action-horror departure for the series, but I found large chunks of it terrifying and it took me months to finish because I could only play it for a few minutes before I got scared. So essentially, I’m a coward.

For horror games, this is a bit of a problem. However, there was a solution I discovered while I was relatively young: just play the game on the easiest difficulty setting. This often helps a bit because you know you can get through the scary stuff much faster and, generally (if you’re a coward), you’re obviously not playing these games for the challenge. For me personally, I also do this with CRPGs because they tend to be difficult for me and so I play them on easy and then have a much better time with them.

So that often solves the problem, but one day I came across a problem, and I have re-encountered it ever since. While playing on easy may often help with genres outside of horror, the whole horror genre can often be terrifying without strong enemies. I first discovered this while attempting to play Silent Hill 2 for the first time.

That game… it terrified me… and I was playing it on a very easy mode. The enemies would die from one hit and they could hardly harm me, but the game was still too scary for me to play for longer than ten minutes at a time. I eventually stopped playing it maybe an hour in. It was too much for my little heart. Now, you may then retort to this with: “Well the game was really scary when it came out, but it’s from 2002. So maybe if you played it a bit later you could…” I played it in 2012. It was not a new game. The visuals were dated but I was still absolutely terrified of the all-encompassing mist and oppressive gameplay.

Silent Hill 2 is a classic, and I could never play the thing because I was too much of a coward to do it. The same thing happened to me when I tried to play Alien: Isolation, because that thing is also far too terrifying! It was only recently, at time of writing, that I realised I could still experience Silent Hill 2 in one format. I realised that I could just watch a no commentary playthough of it on YouTube. It’s not quite the same as playing it, but I knew that I was never going to end up playing that game ever again, and I needed to experience it in some way because of how famous and influential it is. So I did it. I wanted over five hours of gameplay and saw the story to its end. I finally did it.

I plan on now just watching all the horror games I’m too scared to play, because I want to experience them but I know I never will if I have to play them (plus, I often hate the gameplay in these games and so watching someone else struggle through them is far better than doing it myself). This isn’t the best way to experience an interactive medium but it’s better than nothing.

So for all those who want to experience certain games but know you can’t, just find it on YouTube, and if it’s too boring to watch without commentary there are loads of YouTubers and streamers who’d be willing to play through games and comment on everything they see. For the rest of the games, the ones you want to play yourself but maybe suck at: there’s always that easy mode. And if there isn’t an easy mode then just watch that one too! Sadly you may lose something, because watching something like Dark Souls does not present the same joy you receive when conquering it yourself, but it’s better than never experiencing these games whatsoever.