Good evening everybody! This is Aifos coming to you alive from Kingdom’s Edge! Look at all this snow! It’s so pretty! Papika: “Eww.. It doesn’t taste like snow..” Hornet: “It’s a decaying corpse.” Oh.. Um.. Still pretty! A bit.. Morbid.. But pretty! Anyway, difficulty is a big part of any game. Generally speaking, a game starts off relatively easy, and slowly gets harder as the game keeps going. Often times, this comes from things like increased enemy HP, more scarce resources, no fences on sharp turns, and/or harder platforming jumps! But that’s not always true.. A game may put the hardest challenge in front of a dungeon, to make sure if you can get in, you can handle it. Or, maybe, it’ll add a unique twist to existing challenges, forcing you to adapt your tried and true strategies! Point is, games can increase difficulty in a lot of interesting ways. What are some of your favorite examples? [b][u]Tl;dr? Here’s my point![/u][/b] Interesting, and/or unique ways a game has ramped up/altered difficulty? My answer: (spoilers to Hollow Knight) [spoiler]In Hollow Knight, there is a character named Hornet. Hornet is both the game’s second boss, and one of the last ones. In both fights, she shares mostly the same moveset, but she attacks much faster in the second fight, has more health and has a new attack. However, none of that makes the second fight all that difficult. Her moves are still pretty well telegraphed, and the traps she can now lay down are easily taken care of. But, the fight is still a pretty tough challenge, despite all this. I didn’t give it much thought on my first playthrough, I took a few tries to learn every boss, after all. But, on my second run through I was able to go through almost the entire game without dying. Up until this point, I only died due to platforming mistakes, and the Soul Warrior, but Hornet absolutely destroyed me. And that got me thinking why, and then I realized how brilliant Hornet’s moveset is. When you first fight Hornet, you have a whopping total of 0 mobility upgrades (she guards the first one), but you have all of them during the second fight. And dissecting Hornet’s moveset, you realize it’s actually designed to punish you for using your advanced movement. Here’s a few examples. Hornet has a move where she throws her needle forwards, and then pulls it back. If you simply jump over the needle, you’ll be in the air long enough to usually dodge it. If you decide to try and dash, you’ll actually cut your air time short, and you’ll hit the ground just as the needle is coming back, and then you’ll usually get hit. Clinging to the wall makes you vulnerable to her dash, and double jumping is slow enough that she can usually jump up and hit you before you land. Compounding all that, her spike ball traps in general punish moving around recklessly. While there is, of course, a time and place for all your moves, such as a dash, to get away from her flurry attack, or wall climb to avoid a needle throw, the fight is actually a [i]lot[/i] easier if you try to mostly rely on basic jumps, rather than dashes, and double jumps. And what a brilliant way to make a recurring boss harder that is, don’t you think?[/spoiler] That’s all for now folks, jambuhbye!