The kind of art I like asks something of the person who’s experiencing it. It challenges you, and assumes you’re paying attention - and occasionally needs context or knowledge to be fully understood. A good Fromsoft game is like that. It can be just something you play, but it’s designed to be a curated experience, and I think it only works if you’re willing to meet it on its terms.
People bristle at the idea that a video game can be art, let alone art with intention. That’s a whole other conversation. But the takeaway is this: if you accept Elden Ring as a work of art, then no — you don’t get to ask the artist to change it just so you can consume it more easily.
When people say Elden Ring needs an easy mode, they’re missing the point. The “easy mode” is already there. It’s called spirit summons, co-op, overleveling, or casting Terra Magica & Comet Azur to nuke a boss from the other side of the arena. You can clear massive chunks of the game without beating a single major boss. But you have to learn that. You have to be curious, you have to participate in the meta, you have to find communities of players - that’s an explicit part of the vision and experience of these games, as directed by Miyazaki. The game doesn’t hand you these options, it invites you to discover them.
And that’s the point. These games aren’t just about twitch skill or reaction speed, they’re about engagement. If you pay attention, if you explore, if you piece things together — you’ll be rewarded. If you try to brute force your way through by mashing buttons, you’ll get wrecked.
Fromsoft and Miyazaki have been crystal clear about difficulty being a core part of their vision. It’s not about gatekeeping, it’s about intention - the world of these games are dark, difficult places, and that atmosphere is ruined if you can just turn down a health and damage slider. If they wanted to add a traditional easy mode, they would have. But they didn’t. Because it doesn’t serve the kind of experience they’re crafting.
People say, “But I just want to play it my way.” Sure. But then it’s no longer the game they made. And at some point, that matters. Take Sekiro, for example. If someone tells me they beat it, I know what they went through. We have a shared frame of reference — a baseline of difficulty and mastery. We can talk about how it made us feel because we were both shaped by the same constraints. That shared experience is part of what makes the discussion meaningful.
Compare that to something like Doom. If one person played on Nightmare and another on “I’m Too Young to Die,” they didn’t play the same game. They had fun, maybe, but the artistic and emotional takeaways? Not even close.
And let’s be real — Elden Ring was one of the most streamed games in 2022 and won a ton of Game of the Year awards. Tons of new and casual players picked it up. Many of them finished it. Clearly, people are up for the challenge. There’s no need to sand down the edges and flatten everything just to court a hypothetical player base that probably won’t stick around anyway.
Adding a “push here to win” button doesn’t make art more accessible. It makes it worse. Not just for the so-called hardcore fans, but for everyone — because it dilutes the very thing that made it special.
If a piece of art demands something from you, maybe the answer isn’t to ask less of the art. Maybe it’s to bring more of yourself to the table.