Guacamelee

Metroidvania Hell & Accessibility

It is my sad duty to report Guacamelee Gold will probably be the best game I never finish.

It’s a really phenomenal platformer. The controls are smooth and responsive, the graphics are awesome, it’s funny, easter eggs and homage to ye platformers of old abound. It is also extremely difficult. My reflexes are decent, but it’s one thing to be able to hit a button or joystick quickly and another to be able to hit combinations of buttons quickly and remember a variety of different moves. I have trouble with right/left anyway, so I tend to get flustered and hit the wrong button and, bam, bottom of the pit. While the game generously respawns you on the last platform you touched, I’ve reached the point where even the smallest progression has become a significant time expenditure. I haven’t given up entirely, but when I sit down to play a game at the end of the day I generally want to play a game, not fall into the same pit 25 times.

According to the devs, Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition is heavily rebalanced and removes the “cheap” sections of the level design, but that would require that I buy another copy of the game and start over. I’m not necessarily averse to starting over, but I was a little annoyed to find there are two different versions of the same game and I would be pissed if I found myself back in the exact same position in STCE.

I decided to try another Metroidvania and ended up with La-Mulana, an exploratory platformer that is also very challenging for entirely different reasons. The controls are limited, so part of the challenge is understanding those limits, but the rest is navigating intricate puzzles and maps. The player is equipped with a bull whip, a la Indiana Jones, and a laptop with various software programs for additional UI features. La-Mulana requires the player unlock the ability to view maps (finding the maps themselves it a separate task), warp from save points (sorely needed, oh my God), and read tablets, among other things. There is software to record tablet text that I haven’t found yet, so I’ve been jotting things down in a notepad in the meantime.

One could not find more disparate Metroidvanias. Both are challenging, but one should be more accessible than the other. (What follows is a long ramble that may be partially moot depending on how finely Guacamelee STCE has been tuned…)

I’m going to preface this by saying there should be punishingly-difficult games and there should be games that offer accessibility features (easy mode) and it’s the developer’s responsibility to determine which is appropriate. You can do whatever the hell you want with your ASCII roguelike but generally when I purchase a game I expect to be able to beat it given reasonable time and effort.

Accessibility is usually going to address mechanical difficulty rather than intellectual difficulty. If a game relies on cheap tricks to ramp up the difficulty – flooding the player with projectiles or overwhelming enemy waves, punishing resource scarcity, etc – those mechanisms can easily be reduced or eliminated to create an easier difficulty setting. (It’s also a poorly-designed game, but that’s a different issue.) Players should be able to skip mini-games, either via options or after a certain number of failures. Quick-time events should be optional. I feel really strongly about players being held hostage to crap that gets shoe-horned into a game for the same of gameplay.

Guacamelee is designed around tricky platforming that requires physical and mental mastery of its controls, but it also provides challenging enemy encounters and bosses. The former cannot easily be changed and is essential to the game’s feel, but the latter can be adapted, so an easy mode would constitute less enemy encounters and reduced difficulty bosses. Most players can still reasonably complete the game, but only the most proficient players are able to max out stats or cheevos. It’s a reasonable compromise between ‘git gud’ and ‘I’d like to actually play this game I bought kthx’. Ideally, the game would have been designed so that the most punishing platforming was reserved for collectibles or optional content, but having played half of the Tule Tree section in Guacamelee Gold I can tell you this is not the case.

Indie darling La-Mulana presents a combination of intellectual/limitation-based challenges, and those challenges are not easily circumvented without watering-down the game experience. I think this is the sort of game the git gud crowd may be thinking of when they are resistant to calls for accessibility. Even if the player is given a handicap (increased HP, for example), the crux of the game is exploring complicated tombs and solving riddles and puzzles, so there’s not a good way to reduce the difficulty without changing the game or eliminating the need to traverse entire areas. And in that case… why play? Once that aspect is stripped away, what does La-Mulana have left?

Guacamelee Gold bothers me at times because I know my inability to progress is the result of my fingers/brain not being fast or well-coordinated enough and that’s very frustrating. I want to play, and can mostly play, but I can’t play well enough to fully enjoy the product. As a developer, I would consider that a problem. La-Mulana is what it is. If I can’t progress it’s because I haven’t figured out a puzzle, so it’s a question of ‘do I want to devote time to exploring and solving this riddle’ rather than ‘do I want to devote time to attempting this jump 50 times straight’. In other words, the difference between being unable to progress versus being unwilling [to devote the resources] to progress. La-Mulana is only going to appeal to a certain demo, it’s a niche game and as such, gets a pass. Guacamelee can, and does, appeal to a much broader range, and that should be taken into consideration.

AAAs, on the other hand, should be completely accessible across the board. I mean completely. There should be a story mode. There should be multiple difficulty levels, and yes, the ‘easy’ mode should in fact be easy. There should be a nightmare mode and corresponding cheevos that only the most skilled players can obtain. If you made a badly-designed game, I should be able to circumvent or otherwise adjust my exposure the shitty, unfun parts, like endless wave enemies or QTEs. This doesn’t tamper with anyone’s vision (and there are so many devs involved in these huge titles there is no one ‘vision’ anyway), it just makes the games playable for everyone who shells out for it.

If You Could Do It All Over Again: Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition

Prior to Steam sales I dig around in my bundle stash to see if I have any unclaimed keys I’ve forgotten about. I almost always find at least one game that was on my to-buy list. This time a nice, crisp copy of Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition was humming softly as it played with luchador dolls, waiting for my return.

Guacamelee presents an interesting development situation. When the development team created additional content for the game they were apparently unable to release this content as DLC for the original game, Guacamelee Gold, so they created a second “definitive” version of the game, Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition. I was happy to be able to play GSTCE while GG was still fresh in my mind to see how they compared.

GSTCE adds new sections, such as the Canal de las Flores, as well as improved controls and map refinements. Obviously I went into this game already familiar with the general layout and controls, and therefore had an advantage. As expected, I had little trouble progressing, even wearing the Pinata Costume, which makes the player more vulnerable in exchange for larger coin drops. The Tule Tree was the real test. In Guacamelee Gold there were several treasure chests I gave up on. I died/fell dozens of times at each major obstacle, slowing progress to a crawl, and ended up putting the game aside near the top of the tree.

In GSTCE, I was able to complete most of these jumps within several tries, including jumps I was never able to complete in GG. I traversed the Tule Tree in one sitting. GSTCE is not an easy game, the Temple of War is kicking my ass right now, but feels like a much more manageable difficulty that can be overcome by trial and error.

GSTCE’s normal mode presents a true “normal” difficulty level, whereas GG is just ridiculously fucking hard in certain areas, which makes it feel unbalanced. GSTCE also comes packaged with a new Intenso mechanic, a power-up mode that increases your speed and power . This mode, combined with the purchase of a break-any-barrier upgrade, means players who get stuck on tricky shielded enemies can bust their way through if they have to.

This is how you improve a game.

They worked on most of the things I talked about my previous post, plus they added a new mechanism that allows more skilled players to rack up crazy combos while providing a ‘lifesaver’ ability for players who get bogged down by swarms of enemies. For those who git gud, a hard mode and leaderboards. Multiple save slots. Extra costumes. GSTCE is an improvement in every conceivable way. I don’t begrudge them creating a separate updated version of the game the changes are so good (and I’ve now learned they routinely offer 80% loyalty discount, putting the price at DLC levels). For the first time in recent memory I’m quite happy to own two copies of a game.