Should Difficulty Options Even Exist? | Design Delve
Added 2025-10-13 15:03:59 +0000 UTCThis week's episode of Design Delve is now available!
Comments
To avoid giving Bloober Team too much credit -- the option to have different puzzle difficulty settings separate from combat difficulty options was not an original idea of theirs for the SH2 remake, it was directly lifted from the original Silent Hill 2. SH3 had those options, too!
Anders Carlson
2025-10-15 02:46:57 +0000 UTCYou guys on SW mentioned it at the time, but before Blue Prince had been released and figured out by the online community you were playing it on a 'naturally occuring' hard mode with no outside help available. The intended hard mode is still present in the game if a user plays with determination (and lots of note-taking), but the dev knew that over time puzzle solutions would be made public knowledge and create a naturally occuring accessibility feature via the internet. This is probably a just niche situation with puzzle games. After beating the one-difficulty story mode in Inscryption there is the Kaycee's mod with difficulty adjusters via challenge skulls, but even these are unlocked cumulatively through repeated runs at lower challenge levels. The game is allowing you to replay the primary gameplay loop while also offering an increased challenge and making you 'git good' at the same time.
David Cook
2025-10-14 08:06:34 +0000 UTC
