rinks wrote:But then I started to change my mind. Why should all games be accessible to everybody? Other entertainment forms don't have that imposition...
And at risk of just sounding contrary, as an experiment I do kind of like the idea of a film that suddenly becomes unintelligible, requiring you to go away and learn things. But it's not a fair comparison to what's going on in Cuphead. Say there's a film that deals with complex theories, or that is so deviously plotted that some people aren't going to be able to follow it. Should that film come with optional voice-overs to explain what's going on to viewers of various levels of intellect?
Primer is exactly like that; complex, contradictory and requires several viewings, a flowchart and lengthy paragraphs of exposition to begin to get, however the DVD doesn't stop half way through and ask me to explain the theoretical model of time travel it uses - I can watch the whole film and go "huh, that was weird, I want to go read up on what was REALLY going on", making that depth accessible on my own terms because I chose to, not because I walked into a cognitive wall and was prevented from fully experiencing something I paid for.
I play through stuff like Devil May Cry once on easy and have a good time because the game lets me. Sure I don't get into the depths of the combat or git gud at the Dante Must Die difficulty or whatever, but that's fine, I can engage with it on my own terms and have a good time while the purists can SSS-rank through on the hardest difficulty to their heart's content. I'm not going to buy Cuphead or other games like it because I know barely see any of the content before bouncing off, making it a waste of money, which is why making games accessible is good, it makes more money and broadens the audience.
An old Jim Sterling video talks about different kinds of difficulty with regard to Kirby's Epic Yarn, that you can muddle through the whole game but getting perfect scores etc. was extremely hard:
That's what I'd like to see in cuphead - let us plebs flail around in the padded ball-pit but still have room for the purists to do their thing.