Difficulty and Punishment in Celeste and Elden Ring (2024)

1.

I respect the Soulslike genre of video game but I personally cannot handle its punishing brand of difficulty. I gave Elden Ring an honest try on its release, and the game crushed me. I could not even get through Stormveil Castle.

I’m a relatively new gamer who is still figuring out what he likes, and for a while I thought that my bad time with Elden Ring was a sign that I don’t like difficult games that test reflex and timing. I thought that I was meant to make do with turn-based combat, or skill-based games that have an easy mode. But then I tried out a demanding little indie title called Celeste, and I realized that this lesson was a little bit simplistic; because I loved it.

Celeste is hard. In one of its Chapters I died 380 times, which no joke was an average of once every 14 seconds. I failed a lot. Yet in Celeste the feeling of failure is different than in Elden Ring. It doesn’t overwhelm or crush me; it’s unambiguously part of the fun; and it even makes me laugh out loud on a close call. So, I got to thinking: What’s the difference with Celeste? What is it about the way that this game implements difficulty into its design that makes Celeste such an accessible and bright experience to a gamer who cannot handle the Soulslike variety of difficulty?

The answer to this question requires us to distinguish two different components of a video game’s difficulty: the rate of failure, and the punishment for failure. Celeste is a game where you can expect to fail literally all the time, but the punishment for failure is negligible; and that’s what makes failing fun. Whereas Elden Ring is a game in which you fail all the time and the punishment is brutal; and that’s the reason why it crushed me. I’ll explain a bit more of what I mean.

2.

Each level in Celeste is an interlocking series of rooms, and each room presents the player with some kind of platforming challenge. The point of the game is to get through all the rooms by completing all of the challenges. It’s a simple concept, but each platforming challenge demands that the player execute an extremely intricate combination of directional inputs. These combinations never take more than five or ten or maybe twenty seconds to complete; but they require precise timing and accuracy, and the penalty for error is always the same: you die and respawn at the entrance of the present challenge room.

First-time players of Celeste will constantly be falling to their death. But — and this is key — since each of the challenge rooms are so small, you never actually feel like you are losing any progress when you die. Respawning at the beginning of the room means going backwards five or ten or twenty seconds in time. So, although the rate of player failure may be high, the punishment for failure is something that the player will barely ever feel.

Celeste’s manner of combining high rates of failure with a minimal penalty for failure gives the player a unique relationship to death. It reminds me of Groundhog Day scenarios in movies, where a character discovers that they are stuck in a time loop in which death has no finality or consequence, and a montage begins where they gleefully seek out increasingly ridiculous ways to die. That’s how I feel in Celeste: I happily throw myself at death, and I laugh when I fall into a spike pit ten times in quick succession. Because each time I instantly respawn at the foot of that very pit. This joy that I take in failure is a far cry from the feeling of despair that I took from Elden Ring, where I fail just as often but end the session in an unhappy fit of frustration.

What turns me off in Elden Ring is not the mere fact that it is difficult, but the way that it punishes the player for failure. Death in Elden Ring sets you back, not five or ten seconds, but five or ten minutes. The punishment for failure is that you lose time, large swathes of time, which you have to repeat again and again. I can respect the appeal of that kind of game to other players; I understand that the punishing nature of its difficulty is part of what makes this type of game good in the eyes of many. But I prefer the nurturing difficulty of Celeste, which forgives my failures even as it demands exacting precision if I am to succeed.