“There’s space in the medium for ultra-hard games.” – Below and the difficulty in crafting difficulty

“Under the hood, too many games are just primarily about finely-tuned reward systems. Nothing more than expertly crafted dopamine injectors which often border on, if not fully embrace their Skinner box-like qualities.”

Kris Piotrowski didn’t want to create a game like that. As the creative director and co-founder of Capybara Games, he and the team spent years working on Below, a roguelike in which you steer a tiny person to explore a labyrinthine cave. “Players have been trained to expect soft padding around their games, but if they don’t pump the brakes and take it slow when they begin venturing deeper into Below, if they don’t play carefully, if they don’t prepare their backpack for deeper exploration, then the game eats them for breakfast.”

The problem: a lot of players didn’t like being eaten.

(more…)

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