If you gain joy out of souls-likes, that's fine. No judgement. But for me, the payoff isn't there.

You spend your time smashing your face into a wall to learn a boss' patterns, just to get a disjointed fragment of a story. 3/4ths of the story isn't revealed to you in the game through any means, requires reading a wiki, and watching a 3 hour youtube video essay to make any-fucking-sense of it.

The only attraction is the difficulty, and I'm not enough of a try-hard to put in the effort.

@da_667 I disagree (as a masochist gamer): Dark Souls games are for sure harder, but it's also incredibly fair. They teach you how to succeed, then test you, and it's a great feeling. They could have made it so much harder, at the expense of fun, but didn't - I think the magic is in their design.

But, that sorta game is my favorite style. I recently did no-armor challenge runs of all three Dark Souls + Elden Ring. It was so much fun!

They aren't for everyone, but I'm happy people are making games for people like me, but also others are making games for others

The story is whatever. I like the challenge, it just feels good to learn and then repeat patterns

@iagox86 @da_667 this is part of the reason why my personal ranking goes:

(the second dark souls isn’t worth ranking and i haven’t finished elden ring because i hit some massive bugs at launch)

Bloodborne and Sekiro are much less about shoving (back)story into the most random-ass places and far more about meeting players where they’re at. there is still some obscure shit in both but it’s far less prevalent and i prefer their gameplay anyway. if Sekiro in particular “clicks” i don’t think it’s insanely difficult either

different strokes for different folks, though

@nmott @da_667 Yeah Sekiro was a lot of fun.. I considered re-playing it along with the others, but I'd played it recently enough (and no-armour isn't really a meaningful challenge the way it is in DS)

I'm playing Expedition 33 right now, and it's a nice distillation of the "learn a pattern and dance with the enemy" style. Though I feel like the balance in Expedition 33 is weird.. I'm playing on Hard, but I want more danger and less HP-sponge enemies (too many fights just feel like they go on forever and you need to play perfectly the whole time)