[COLUMN] In Defense of Easy Mode | by Marty Sliva

Over the past few years, I feel like I’ve learned to embrace the warm glow of a given game’s easy mode. I’ve logged enough miles across countless games throughout my life, and at this point, I get no enjoyment out of the metaphorical badge of honor that comes from bashing my head against the wall of a frustrating level or boss or hours on end until I finally eke out a victory. I don’t look back on scoring a win over Promised Consort Radahn pre-nerf with pride, but rather shame that I could’ve spent those hours doing anything more enjoyable.

An easy mode isn’t something that I automatically lean on when I’m first trying out a new game, but it’s a tool that I have no qualms with using if the situation should arise. And while those situations tend to take on different forms, I’m always glad to be able to adjust the difficulty of a game in order to make it work for me.

I’ve had a few times recently where easy mode has helped me refine my experience, including South of Midnight. Compulsion’s stylish adventure through Southern folklore absolutely nails its aesthetic – the visuals are gorgeous, the characters are memorable, and the music is probably the best I’ve heard in a game so far this year. I loved every twist and turn that the story took, which propelled me through its relatively brisk 9-hour runtime.

Sadly, the gameplay itself couldn’t match the high bar set by everything else in South of Midnight. While the traversal and exploration is totally fine, especially as your movement kit expands, the combat here is sadly uninspired. Every time I’d see an open area in front me of, I knew that I was seconds away from being surrounded by a barrier of malice and forced to go through the slog of another combat encounter against bland enemies using my same handful of abilities with various cooldowns as I just counted down the minutes until I had taken them all out and could proceed with the story.

After a few hours of this, I decided to be gentle on my sanity by popping into the menu and lowering the game’s difficulty to easy. It’s not that the combat was too tough for me, but instead, it felt like a barrier between myself and the enjoyment I was finding with every other aspect of the game. And once that was notched down, and I could get through these combat slogs in a fraction of the time, I discovered a pacing to South of Midnight that kept the momentum going on the parts of the adventure that I loved.

When I look back on my time with the game, I’m going to focus on how much the story, the world, and the music resonated with me. The bland combat will be a footnote to that experience, as opposed to the opening paragraph.

Of course, an easy mode can come in all shapes and sizes. I’m particularly fond of the quality of life changes that are found in a lot of ports and remasters of older games on modern hardware. Things like save states and rewind features are an absolute blessing when revisiting classics like Super Metroid. As a kid playing my SNES, I have distinct memories of missing tricky jumps and having to trek all the way back to the ledge in order to try making the leap once again. But with the click of a button, that frustration ceases to exist, and there’s no one on this planet who can convince me that this isn’t a good thing.

Similar enhancements can be found in a lot of older JRPGs that have made their way to modern hardware. I love Square’s remasters of the first nine Final Fantasy games, because of the excellent QoL features that come with each one. The ability to fast forward through grinding sessions, create a save state in the middle of a particularly nasty dungeon, or turn off random encounters if I just want to retrace my steps through a dangerous area all help to sand off so many of the rough edges of those classic experiences.

I’m sure some folks will cry foul to the idea of tarnishing the original vision of these games, but having served my time in these adventures the first go-around, I can absolutely say that I enjoy them more when I’m able to make them work around the finite amount of free time I have in life. In fact, when a modern remaster comes around that doesn’t have these QoL features, it stands out all the more glaring. I’ve been replaying the first two Grandia games over the past month or so, and while I really dig their charming Saturday morning anime vibes, the lack of an ability to fast forward through the drawn out combat encounters really stands out to me.

The last way I love to use an easy mode is one that might be unique to my specific situation, and that comes from when I stream games either on Second Wind or my personal Twitch channel. There’s no right or wrong way to stream a game – some folks want to show off expert play, some want to engage in the masochism of a deeply difficult challenge, and then some just want to experience a game’s story in a communal setting.

I definitely fall in the latter category there, with an emphasis on wanting to hang out with and entertain the folks who spend their limited free time on this planet by watching me play a game. And so, whenever I fire up something on stream, the first thing I do is crank that difficulty down to the lowest setting possible. I want my focus to be on hanging out and providing a good time to the audience, as opposed to ignoring them to get through a sweaty segment of a game.

I often view the game itself as similar to a kind of background noise when you have people over to your place for a party. That might be a football game or a familiar movie or a weird nature doc, or a playlist of music videos on YouTube. Yeah, it’s there on the big TV and if you pay attention you can follow along with the action on screen, but it’s not so prominent that it stifles conversation in the room.

That’s how I’ve been treating my current replay of Death Stranding on stream. In preparation for the release of the sequel in June, I’ve been going through Sam Porter Bridges’ adventure for the first time since 2019. And while that first trek through America was a tense one filled with failed deliveries, optimized routes, and utilizing every single mechanic and tool I had in my arsenal, this time around I lowered the difficulty to easy, and I’m just here to experience the gorgeous views, stunning motion capture, and batshit insane story alongside my audience. And honestly, we’re having a hell of a time.

All of this is a convoluted way of saying that a game’s difficulty settings are truly a swiss army knife that you should use in any way that makes your time more enjoyable. I haven’t even touched on the accessibility aspect of it all, and how these modifiers can help make a game literally playable to folks who might otherwise not be able to experience it, which rules. So next time you’re playing something and starting to feel that sense of frustration creep in, try tuning in some of those settings to match the frequency you’re looking for. There’s no shame in an easy mode, because if you’re having a good time, that’s all that counts.