When you hit the bullshit dungeons that are just unfair...

Like the late game dungeon with ghosts that come from every direction and go through walls and you have no chance to beat them...

Or the late game dungeon that is littered with traps everywhere that instakill you -- and you can't find/disarm them even as a rogue-type character. (Wait, in this one, I rage quit and never went back to the game.)

Or when the game is so disrespectful of you that it's just wasting your time (not always hard, but often grind).

Or when you're expected to do ultra-precise inputs regularly and repeatedly.

Basically when it goes from "challenging" to "bullshit"...

As long as it's singleplayer, just do whatever you fancy (even cheating) if you have fun.

This!

Or maybe you need a certain class that *isn't* a rogue type to disarm that trap?

When its cost you more in frustration broken peripherals that it did for the game?

It also has this one particular enemy type that you need to interrogate to be able to eventually discover all end game tech, but if you fail to capture one alive early on in the game, it soon becomes so rare that even in easy difficulty you might never be able to finish the game. And it is not even any high ranking member of its species, so most players might have opted to make room for other, "more important" aliens in their contamination units...

Games that are designed to be unfair don't warrant bothering to 'cheat'.

I got Evil Within a couple of weeks ago and regret it immensely, despite it's reputation it is basically crap and I will have to accept the hit.

The trouble with unfair games are that there are a demographic of gamers who believe that games like Super Meat Boy and others that punish you when playing are git gud scrub.

They aren't and having grown up playing games like Manic Miner and other brutal 8 bit games that were not affectations like they are now - I am not impressed. 20 somethings might think they are cool, I don't.

True fact - once upon a time you didn't get save games and had to restart a game when your lives were gone, no matter how far into the game you were.

Games are for fun, not to prove how amazing you are, no one cares.

As others have said - there are difficulty settings on games you can change, with hard just being less health or more damage from enemies than normal. I usually play normal as I just want to enjoy them without having to replay areas multiple times.

Only game I ever looked to 'cheat' on was Force Awakens or whatever it is. The combat is so bad I got to Vader - which I believe is the end having watched youtube videos for the others.

I looked to see if there was infinite health but there isn't.

Quite simply - bad game is as bad game does. Move on with the dissatisfaction of an unfinished game.

Okay, so I had a quicksave at the beginning of the map where I just god moded my way through and did it legit this time. Those swastika helmets wanted to make sure I was dead enough to enter an exploding building, but they did not have the mercy of quickloading over and over, did they?

Seriously, I had more patience this time and used trigger discipline. That doesn't stop MoHAA on hard from being sadistic as hell though.

EDIT: I took a screenshot, converted it into .png format, and even downscaled it to 1 MB and GOG won't take it. :(

It's just showing me at 6 health anyway at the end of the level.

Except that Super Meat Boy doesn't punish you that much. The levels are short, and if you die, you immediately respawn at the beginning of the level, and can immediately try again; no need to wait for loading screens or anything like that.

This approach was adopted by many other games I consider to be in the same genre, like VVVVVV and Celeste.

(Worth noting that VVVVVV and Celeste have assist modes in case you do feel the game is too hard for you, allowing you to do things like slow things down, become invincible, or even, in the case of Celeste, have the game pause whenever you try to dash, giving you time to input the direction you want to dash in.

I almost never cheat, but I do ragequit if need be.

Definitely I have ragequit out of "Slain: Back from Hell" that I bought from GOG years ago. I hate that game vehemently and regret having bought it, even though it was for a cheap price.

And the reason I hate it is because the difficulty is ludicrous and requires endless trial and error and repetition of the same sequences over and over again dozens or hundreds of times in a row.

I also semi-ragequit out of both Outlast games, both of which I also hate vehemently. But I would come back to them from time to time, and play them in small doses, just because I wanted to see how the stories would end, until I eventually beat them after many cycles of ditching them and then coming back months later until I ditched them again, and so on.

In hindsight, I regret having done that too, because after I beat Outlast 2 I realized that it doesn't even have a story, but rather it's just an endless series of random nonsense with no plot connecting it together.

And I beat Outlast 2 on the so-called "story mode" which is "supposedly" supposed to be the devs' version of an easy mode...but in reality, it was just as agonizing to play through (in a bad way, meaning gameplay-wise, not horror-wise) as was Outlast 1.

I agree with that too. Evil Within has excellent aesthetics, but total garbage gameplay, uber-clunky controls, way too few ammo boxes, and way too many enemies with way too much HP.

I also hate that game and ragequit out of it too numerous times.

There is an apparently much better version of that game that gives you unlimited ammo by default and other much-needed improvements, but GOG has been missing that version for years, and is instead stuck having only the crappy, borderline-unplayable version.

And Evil Within is one game that I did cheat with, by using the invincibility code, because I realized that I would literally never get through the game if I didn't. But even after having used the invincibility code to get through several levels, I still lost interest and ragequit out of the game again anyway.

And that also left me with Evil Within 2 sitting unplayed in my backlog for years, because I want to beat part 1 first, even though I hate part 1.

Depends. A hard mode, if there is an easy and a normal one, can be as hard as the developer likes. One can always play on a lower difficulty. But if 'hard' becomes the concept of the entire game, it's a no-buy reason for me. Or, if the story is compelling, a reason to cheat. All souls-likes fall into this category. If the story is good and the world is fascinating, I might play the game if it has some cheats to remove the unnecessary difficulty. But if 'git gud' is the entire point of the game, then it is too boring to be played. I don't play games for the challenge, but to relax.

Not sure about the remastered version available on GOG, but at least the original PC version of Forsaken was so insanely hard in the most difficult setting that I am 100% certain no one had tested the game by completing it on that difficulty level.

The developers even acknowledged there was something off with the difficulty as they released an update that apparently made the lower difficulty levels easier... but not the hardest.

EDIT: Reading my earlier comments on Forsaken years ago, the problem specifically was that the missions, or at least the ones I played, had a time limit. And if you chose the highest difficulty level, those time limits would be so tight that I was pretty sure they were practically impossible.


Tie Fighter mission pack had one mission that similarly felt pretty much impossible, you were supposed to destroy lots of powerful enemies that were attacking some convoy etc. that you were supposed to protect. I think I retried that mission a couple hundred times before finally switching to the easiest difficulty, just to get through that one mission.

However, apparently it was still possible to pass that mission in the hardest difficulty, as I think I did find a Youtube video of someone doing just that.

The last mission of Freespace was very infuriating, as you didn't have regenerating shields, meaning that every stray enemy shot that just happened to hit you, brought you closer to failing the mission. I did finally manage to finish it in the highest difficulty, but it was definitely not fun, and I was still very annoyed by that mission, even though I managed to beat it.

Fallout Tactics with the Redux Mod was laughably hard as well. In many missions a single shot could kill your teammate, so it could be completed only by pretty much save/reload constantly after each step. Not fun. Mind you, this was a user-made mod, so probably the increased difficulty came from that mod.

There's still the "missing difficulty" issue that some games have.

For example. Metroid: Zero Mission
* Easy: You're not going to die, even if you're not paying attention
* Normal: You're not going to die if you're paying attention
* Hard: Game is actually quite difficult, perhaps even approaching the difficulty of the original Metroid.

Thing is, there's too much of a gap between Normal and Hard, and that game really did need a difficulty in between. (I'm thinking having enemy damage and health use the Normal values, but limit player health and ammo like on Hard.)

In Shattered Stell, the game is actually impossible to beat on the hardest difficulty. It doubles all enemy spawns, which causes several of the escort missions to become impossible, because the convoy gets destroyed before you can even reach it and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The game was obviously not tested at that difficulty, because it also doubles any objective related enemies and only one of the objective targets counts towards completing that objective.

500 KB is the max allowed file size. I recommend using JPG (much smaller than PNG) and incrementally downsizing it in paint until you fit just below the limit.

I would say most games do not let you change difficulty level during the game. Some do, e.g. I think Tie Fighter lets you change the difficulty level before each mission, but e.g. Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight that I am playing right now, doesn't. You pick your difficulty level when you start your game, and that's it, you can't change it without restarting the whole game from the very beginning.

However, even if it is possible to change the difficulty level during the game, how does that differ from enabling cheats? When I changed the difficulty level to the easiest in one Tie Fighter mission pack mission that I had failed a couple of hundred times already, it didn't feel different from cheating. I breezed through the mission in the easiest difficulty, I could just as well enabled some cheat to achieve that. Forcing the player to guess which is the "right" difficulty level to them is lazy game design. Especially in those games where you can't change the difficulty mid-game, how can you know beforehand which difficulty level you should choose? Maybe the one you pick feels too easy, or far too hard?

There are lots of games where there is only one difficulty level, yet people of different skill levels can enjoy the game. It just takes more effort to design such games, e.g. designing it so that people with slower reflexes or less skills can e.g. take a slower and more cautious approach to the game or mission, and be able to finish it that way. People with better skills can advance faster and take more risks. Both parties are still happy with the same difficulty setting.

EDIT: Oh, some earlier discussions on this:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/best_and_worst_hard_modes_in_games/post9

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/release_forsaken_remastered_08fb4/post120

Those reminded me of Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper as good examples of games designed well with only one difficulty level. In those games, if you felt some mission or level was too challenging, the answer was to back off and take a more cautious approach to the level. IMHO it was good game design that those games allowed the player to change their playing style to their skill level.