What Games Do Difficulty Well?

[Moonface]

Most of the time, difficulty levels in games involve just making enemies and/or the player tougher/weaker and not much else, and in my experience most of the time it just makes most enemy encounters feel like a slog rather than an actually more interesting challenge. However, there are some games that I think did a good job with a harder difficulty:

Fallout 4 does a pretty good job with Survival Mode adding in a lot of gameplay changes as well as doing a better approach to enemy toughness. In Survival, the player deals 1.5 damage but receives 2x damage, so all fights are a lot more dangerous because everyone hits harder rather than just enemies being harder and the player being weaker. I chose Survival when I played Fallout 4 for the first time and I really liked the glass cannon feeling that I and every enemy had.

Dying Light is mostly the typical approach of tougher enemies and a weaker player, but I did like that Nightmare made nights longer (even though you can skip the night by sleeping) because I love playing that game during the night since you get double XP, and the threat of losing all my XP if I die keeps it always feeling tense even when I get every skill in the game whereas on lower difficulties the lack of consequences make it hard to be on edge when out at night. However, I do think Hard difficulty is done really badly in this game and I would never recommend it to anyone, as the flashlight in Hard is constantly going out and it gets really annoying having to keep shaking the controller. Nightmare doesn't have that, so the flashlight remains on like it does at lower difficulties but it doesn't make the game feel easier, it just stops the feature from becoming annoying. Normal or Nightmare are the only two difficulties this game has to me; Hard doesn't exist because it just doesn't grant enough perks to make up for the nerfs.

[ShiraNoMai]

I think Hades has one of the coolest difficulty additory systems I've seen in a game. Like, pick your own difficulty basically, and add as much or as little as you like!

[Moonface]

Dang I completely forgot about that system in Hades. Now I'm trying to rack my brain about other games with a similar approach...

I had this game come to mind but it isn't really the same at all which would be Sekiro with the Demon Bell and Kuro's Charm, which can make the game harder but are entirely optional. I never really found either to be worth using though. I also can't think of any other FromSoft games I've played providing options to increase the difficulty like that.

[Moonface]

Big bump because I got reminded of this thread from currently watching a stream of the new Hellraiser game. There might be games that don't tie this to a difficulty level, but how do folks feel about the concept of limited saves as a way of making a game harder? I've rarely played on a difficulty that does it, but I have mixed feelings on my experiences with it:

• Dead Space 2's Hardcore difficulty limits you to three saves, and dying means going back to the last save point you made, but I actually enjoyed it because by the time I tried that difficulty, I'd played the game through multiple times so it felt like a good test of my knowledge of the game and the encounters. The only time I hated it was at the start of the game because there's some really rough parts early on before you start getting upgrades and dying there means restarting the whole run, and as tempting as it is to save immediately after you get through all of those early sections it means having to go longer before using your next save to not fuck yourself over.
  
  
• The original Tomb Raider only allowed you to save in a level at a dedicated save point, which was single use only. Unless you were on PC, in which case you were spared this horror. I couldn't remember how many crystals the levels each have, but it averages at about 4-5 on most levels, which is very rough in the last few levels of the game where the difficulty ramps up massively. I prefer how the remaster made this mechanic a NG+ thing, but that difficulty also removes all medipacks and makes everything inflict near-lethal damage, and without having tried the difficulty myself it sounds horrible. Tomb Raider 3 remedied it best by having save crystals work as collectibles you could use at any time, so you were still limited but not forced to save where the game tells you to.