Cheating the Challenge Away: My Experience With ‘Elden Ring,’ ‘Dark Souls,’ and ‘Returnal’
I have made no secret of my aversion to difficult video games. It has never interested me to complete a first playthrough while using a game’s hardest difficulty settings. Cuphead, for example, locks away its final boss if you choose the “simple” gameplay option; if I hadn’t known about this feature of Cuphead, I would have needed to replay the entire game to reach this proper ending. As long as games don’t artificially lock away story content behind barriers of difficulty, I will simply choose the easiest mode where difficulty sliders exist. Over the past few months, however, I have voluntarily saddled three games that provide no such difficulty sliders: Elden Ring, Returnal, and Dark Souls. Despite the uncompromising challenge of these three experiences, I inevitably found that it was quite useful to “cheat” to make my journeys more fun.
Cheating is an intrinsic part of the gaming experience. From my earliest days of elementary school, inheriting the Konami code in the lunch line was a rite of passage for some early experiences on the GameBoy. Soon after, I sneakily obtained a copy of Grand Theft Auto III for the Playstation 2, sending lists of cheat codes to my mother to print out at work. I’ll never forget those joyous evenings dropping tanks all over the place, earnestly trying to maximize my “wanted” level as the police aggressively chased me around the city. Years after that, I would find myself typing “O CANADA” into Age of Mythology, squealing with joy as flying bears sporting the Canada flag as capes zoomed in to laser my enemies. The fact that you can cheat in video games – especially when developers intentionally program their games with these absurd exploits in mind – is one of the things that makes gaming unique from other artistic mediums.
Most modern games do not have built-in cheat codes. But with some basic computer knowledge and plenty of internet forums, many games have a serviceable modding scene. I have always been hesitant to mod my games, fearing that I’d break something fundamental in their code and waste tons of time patching the game back into a playable state. Furthermore, I don’t know the first thing about coding. So I never dabbled in the modding scene until quite recently, the most obvious example being Elden Ring.
Elden Ring in “Easy Mode”
The mod that caught my eye in Elden Ring is billed as an “easy mode.” While I was not unduly struggling in my playthrough of Elden Ring, I had reached a point where I wanted to simply accelerate my experience working through it. The first move I made was to seek out an obscure cave in Caelid, one of the game’s notoriously unforgiving areas, where after a few dozen stubborn deaths, I obtained an item that would double the runes I received from defeating enemies. With this item equipped, I searched around until I found what seems to be a universally accepted grinding spot: a giant crow that, once aggravated, runs off a cliff to its death.
The placement of this cliff crow in Elden Ring is perfect, where you are not in harm’s way and can quickly reset this enemy by the Site of Grace where you heal, thereby respawning enemies in the area. I stocked up on a few hundred arrows and went to work. A few hours went by and I jumped nearly 100 levels. By the time I reengaged with the unexplored areas of the world, I was wiping the floor with just about anything that wasn’t a boss. To me, this was exactly what I wanted from the game. I take no joy in killing enemies while I am trying to explore an area, plumbing it for its secrets. At the same time, however, I am practically addicted to boss battles that flatten you at first – which Elden Ring has no shortage of.
Eventually, I found myself reaching a part of Elden Ring where it seemed like I would need to take a hike back to the tried and trusted cliff crow for a few hundred thousand runes. But at around 11,000 runes per crow kill, I was dreading the inevitable hours recycling this process, which caused my mind to wander back to the easy mode mod I had read about on Twitter a few days prior. I pulled open NexusMods and scrolled through to easy mode which listed ten times the runes as a primary feature. To my delight, I realized that there had been so many requests to edit the mod that the developer had posted a tutorial that allows you to tweak the mod to suit your interests. I could, in other words, not impact the difficulty of the combat and instead multiply the runes of my slain enemies by tenfold. I could gather a few million runes in the time that it previously took me to gather a mere hundred-thousand.
So I returned to the cliff crow, leveling up nearly to level 300 – an absurd number even for NG+ – and plunged back into the late game of Elden Ring. Luckily, enemies do not scale alongside your own player level, so I found that I was able to saunter through regions like Caelid and the underground with ease. I felt like the meme where the grim reaper appears knocking on a door, with a trail of its fallen enemies behind it, with each of those proverbial doors being marked for Redahn, Godfrey, and eventually endgame barriers like the Elden Beast and Malenia. I personally do not believe that leveling in Elden Ring breaks the game outright, because each of these fights battered me around like a puppy’s chew toy in my first few encounters with each. Rather, my levels afforded some gracious padding where I could endure a few hits as I learned the patterns of each enemy, shortening the grind-ish distance between myself and victory.
My decision to rapidly accelerate leveling in Elden Ring was the right one for my playthrough. It decreased the friction that Souls games are notorious for, enabling me to feel empowered amidst a game that’s singularly focused on killing you. After 30-40 hours, I no longer cared about organically chipping away at Elden Ring’s unfathomably large realms and wanted to be able to stride through the remaining environments without the intrinsic worry that venturing out into the unknown brings. Knowing my gaming preferences quite well, I’d say that I’d have grown frustrated and resentful of Elden Ring towards the end if I had not equipped the rune multiplier mod, and I am wholeheartedly glad that I decided to try it out.
Breaking the (Save) Cycle in Returnal
Enter Returnal, which I had sunk around 25 hours into in the months prior to Elden Ring’s release. As far as I am concerned, console modding is rocket science compared to what I had done with Elden Ring, so it never crossed my mind to even seek out mods (I’d be inclined to suggest that they probably do not even exist). Elden Ring was far from a cake walk, but Returnal was undoubtedly a more punishing experience for me. When you die in Elden Ring, you are sent back to where you last rested at a Site of Grace and must retrace your lost runes, assuming you had been saving them up; in Returnal, death means a complete reset, a loss of weapons and items and actual progress towards an uncertain precipice of progress just in front of you.
Returnal is characterized by its cyclical loop of death. You awake outside a crashed spaceship on an alien planet where anything that moves is hostile. At the start of each cycle, Selene, the game’s protagonist, has a pistol and whatever permanent upgrades you have unlocked through progression, but everything else must be collected through exploration and combat. A roguelike in nature, the more you play through Returnal, the better you can respond to the variant enemies in each biome. But when you die, it’s all the way back to the start – and Returnal’s opening areas take around an hour to work back through to the site of your death. In many ways, I found Returnal deaths to sting more than my deaths in Elden Ring, because, at least in Elden Ring, I could open a map and warp somewhere else if I got stuck. In Returnal, the map changes each time, necessitating your thorough engagement with the entirety of the world each cycle.
It took me months of chipping away at Returnal to reach the final boss, and I only got there due to the urgency to finish the game ahead of an episode of the Left Behind Game Club podcast that was about to be recorded. A community member reached out to me and described how helpful that “save scumming” had been for his progress in Returnal, so I looked up how to back up suspended cycles in Returnal and decided to try it out. I reached the door to the final boss organically, suspended my cycle with a full double-length health bar and my favorite weapon, the lobber, and backed up my save. Then, I entered the underwater cavern for the final boss. Perhaps it was the confidence of having my progress backed up in the cloud, but I was able to quickly beat the final boss to Returnal in two tries – downloading my save just once.
I don’t want to suggest that backing up a save to ensure progress in Returnal is cheating in the same way that I modded Elden Ring, but it was certainly deviant behavior than how Housemarque, the developers of Returnal, intended players to experience this finale. Given my time crunch for the podcast, however, and the 45 hours I had sunk into the game, I feel as though I experienced everything I wanted to in Returnal without compromising the experience. The final cutscene played, I respawned at the beginning of the game and worked through a few rooms just to decompress. I fully expect to revisit Returnal for many more hours when I want a fast paced but easy-to-pick-up gaming snack.
Ceaseless Discharge of Dark Souls Mods
And then there’s Dark Souls, which is astonishingly on this list after all but denouncing the game in my previous writing. My repeated efforts to play Dark Souls combined with the rather toxic “git gud” element of its fanbase caused me to dismiss Dark Souls as a game I’d never play. But somehow, after reaching the credits in Elden Ring, I was still craving more of that type of gaming experience. Furthermore, I had gained some degree of confidence in my trial-and-error playthrough of Elden Ring where I began the game as a sorcerer and alternated to a one-handed sword midway through when realizing that Rennala was practically immune to magic damage. I felt like I could handle Dark Souls.
The first thing I did in Dark Souls was open up a reliable guide to walk me through the routes and interweaving labyrinth of its world. I knew that Souls games were rather open-ended with the possibilities and, in order to avoid undue frustration, I simply wanted someone to tell me what to do. Predictably, I started as a pyromancer to get an early advantage, leading me towards the great bridge drake whose tail you can shoot off to obtain the drake sword – another early boon. I wove in and out of the game while using this guide, making it through places I had never before seen like the infamous poison swamp, Blighttown. I conquered Quelaag and popped out the back of a cave into a massive lava area housing a monstrous demon named Ceaseless Discharge, which one-shotted me, stealing the thousands of souls that I had foolishly not yet spent.
Feeling a little trapped by my lost cache of unspent souls, I stubbornly approached Ceaseless Discharge a few fruitless times before facing a decision of whether to abandon them or devise a more reliable method of combat. Only able to withstand one or two attacks, and more often than not getting swept into the lava pits below, I did not see a path forward that worked for my current build. I could have resigned myself to exploring elsewhere, rejecting the sunk cost fallacy, but I couldn’t help but tab out to search through NexusMods, hoping there might be a recovery option. While I didn’t locate a mod to recover my souls, I did find another easy mode mod. This mod didn’t have the same multiplier that I had used in Elden Ring, but it offered multiple versions of difficulty starting with 50% damage reduction from enemy attacks. It was worth a shot, at least until I recovered my souls.
Even with a 50% damage reduction mod, Ceaseless Discharge wiped the floor with me a few more times. I had to watch a video detailing the myriad strategies players use to overcome this fight early on, many of which appeared to cheese the fight. In the end, I used a staircase parallel with the boss to roll my way out of sweeping attacks, chipping away at its boss health meter until victory was finally achieved. A quick glance through the walkthrough suggested that I might prefer to return to this area later in the game, so I moved on, shuffling the story along with me.
For whatever reason, I moved into unknown parts of the world of Dark Souls without turning off the 50% damage reduction mod. My journey with Dark Souls hadn’t been unbearably difficult or frustrating – although making it to the lower swamp of Blighttown was a hurdle of its own caliber – but the immediate fearlessness I developed knowing that I had greater flexibility if ambushed by enemies was intrinsically enjoyable enough not to fuss about the implications of making the game easier in the remainder of my playthrough, something many Souls fans would lamentingly gatekeep. I partly told myself that I would eventually turn off the damage reduction mod, but I ended up keeping it as I wormed through Anor Londo, the Crystal Cave, and other perilous areas.
In a future article, I plan to delve more specifically into why I enjoyed Dark Souls for reasons distantly related to the difficulty modifications I made to the game. But suffice it to say that I do not believe I cheapened or undermined the experience in a significant way. I can still speak with eagerness about later game boss battles like the Four Kings or the Bed of Chaos, two fights which I was still required to precisely learn rather than wildly swing my sword through. I can still boast about my fast-paced battle with Smough and Ornstein, or throw my middle fingers up in lamentation at Manus, deep in the caverns of the DLC area, and feel like my experience was authentic.
I think I understand why Dark Souls is such a popular and compelling speedrun game. What once felt insurmountable becomes quickly assimilated into the realm of the familiar, and the brilliant interlocking world design of Dark Souls’ many areas encourages you to truly learn the map in a way that almost no other modern game does. I might be a little rusty upon a replay, but I certainly see myself embarking on such a playthrough again one day. To that end, I fully anticipate myself feeling a nostalgic groove as I return to treacherous areas like Sen’s Fortress or the Duke’s Archives.
Does Modding Difficulty in Games Cheat the Experience?
Collectively, my recent experiences with Elden Ring, Returnal, and Dark Souls all feel like important steps from my comfort zone – baby steps into notoriously difficult games. The curiosity and confidence that Elden Ring provided me left me eager to seek out more Souls-like experiences. The determination and dedication to barrel my way through Returnal to meet a podcast deadline proved that I was capable of overcoming the peaks of gaming difficulty without assistance. And the exploratory ambience of Dark Souls served as a forum of meditative meticulousness that kept me motivated to seek out nearly all of the game’s potential bosses and locations. I tweaked some (arguably important) settings along these journeys, but each of them is my own personal experience that I fully embrace as the right way for me to play these games for the first time.
As I move forward, I no longer fear the unplumbed depths of other games like Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne. I know they are going to sting all the more because I will be playing on console – a platform that feels all but unmoddable to a layperson like myself – but I know that I will be rewarded for repeatedly thrusting my skull into the proverbial brick wall. Who knows, perhaps one of those walls will be invisible, giving me something unexpected to explore beneath the surface.
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