Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
So we broadly agree but all speedrunning/challenge runs are things you do playing a game repetitively.
My point is that “difficulty” (I don’t actually like that term for reasons like this) also encompasses stuff like when a game is first approached. I love dark souls (1, fuck the others) and everyone knows it so as an example your first play through is difficult, not because darksouls requires any particular skills to play but because it’s very strange. Back in 2010 or whatever games without objective markers and stats explained, hell games without a compass or map, were uncommon. So playing it was genuinely quite difficult because it is very opaque.
Learning the language of a game can be challenging, can be really challenging! But none of that challenge is replicated on repeat playthrough. Someone looking for that would not find anything satisfying in a challenge run/speed run/whatever. So maybe some people who say they like difficulty like the blind exploration and learning kind, rather than the others. They might not be full of shit, just wrong about accessible design.
I think it’s hard to genuinely go into a game blind, especially when you consider genre conventions. It’s not like the 90s where you can play a (non-platformer and non-shmup) game that is one of the first of its genre, so you literally have nothing, not even genre conventions, to rely on.
Take Hollow Knight, the game mentioned by the OP. In the end, Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania that didn’t stray too far from the conventions of a Metroidvania. It has a lot of Metroidvania cliches like the player needing to progress through the game to double jump. Breaking Metroidvania conventions would be either not having the ability to double jump or starting out with double jump. You have to beat various sections of a level once filled with enemies before unlocking a shortcut or quick travel so you don’t have to go through it the normal way. Hollow Knight is very much a “it’s all about the execution” game with a pretty cool and thematically fitting aesthetic.