You're playing a fantastic action game with an excellent story. The hero whom was down and out is now on the up and up, the soundtrack is erupting, and the stakes are higher than you thought they would ever be. You're in the heat of battl--whoops! You died.

Okay, let's try it again. You're playing a fantastic action game with an excellent story. The hero wh--Fuck! You're dead.

Okay, let's try once more.

Along with the grey/brown tinged FPS and the white male protagonist, the difficulty of games (or lack of) is nearly always on the chopping block. To explain that, we have to examine the obvious. Galaga and Pac-Man are more challenging in the first five levels than most games are by the dramatic conclusion. Why?

The way we play games is fundamentally different. Instead of dropping a quarter, I drop $60 bucks and bring home a disc, (or not a disc) expecting to be immersed in...something. I can make up scenes in my head about the valiant crew of my spaceship(s) in Galaga and can pretend I'm the captain of my ship in Bosconian, but that's of my own creation, vague at best, and ultimately unimportant to the arcade experience.

Big, modern games are supposed to be fully engaging. As the player we expect fleshed-out characters, fantastic stories, well-detailed environments down to the textures on a tile floor, or the reflection of a cityscape on the rear window of a moving car. We expect gameplay mechanics that feel fresh and familiar, we expect voice actors to deliver their lines flawlessly, characters to emote with their faces and bodies. We expect the menus to be well-designed and a minimal amount of button presses necessary to navigate them.

When games don't do these things well--even one of them--they fail. They're right to fail, too. I'm not calling for the death of criticism. Without the ability to nitpick, most criticisms would be reduced to tweets written in Newspeak.

When you're engrossed in a game, flow is important. Many times I've had a game obviously want me to do a very specific thing in a very specific window and in a very specific way, and if I'm able to complete that task the payout is cinematic and thrilling. If I fail, the game is suddenly just a game. I'm not the ultimate badass, I'm just playing this fucking game. I'm suddenly in my living room again.

Right now I'm playing through Wolfenstein: The New Order on my PS4. I'm playing on the third to last difficulty, the one I perceived to be "Hard" but not "Extreme". I don't need that. I only mess around with crazy difficulties with games I absolutely love and am dying to squeeze life out of again. I'm on the last legs of the game and I'm looking back on my time with it and thinking I would have enjoyed it far more on an easier setting, or better yet, with no transparent setting at all.

Wolfenstein has stealth sections, but Wolfenstein also enables your character to dual-wield giant shotguns and blow Nazi soldier limbs into mist. However, I found myself taking the stealth approach nearly all the time because if I didn't, I risk alerting a commander, who will call in reinforcements until he himself is dead and the signal terminated. So I'm crouched, constantly using and retrieving throwing knives, using my silenced pistols to bag head shots before quietly exiting the area.

That doesn't feel like Billy "BJ" Blazkowicz, though. That doesn't feel like Wolfenstein, even if its still a great game. BJ Blazkowics erupted like a volcano out of a fourteen-year vegetative state to lead a charge against the Nazi regime that wouldn't end until the entire world the Nazi's had built was a pile of rust-colored rubble. Even coming into the game at a point where I knew exactly how it was supposed to surprise me, it still surprised me. It really does have great characters, even when the evil villains are just evil villains. It really is funny sometimes. It really is a serviceable story. To paraphrase Vinny, it's a lot smarter of a game than I (or anyone else) expected.

It's still thick as a fucking brick though. Yeah, it does have some pretty gut-wrenching holocaust-like scenes. It also has giant robots that shoot lasers and explode. The games tone during gameplay was off-the-wall, but since I chose a higher difficulty I was forced to play reservedly. I was constantly scavenging for ammo and going for the melee takedown when that game was designed for me to sprint into a group of men and spin around in a circle while two machine guns sounded off like buzz rolls.

Stealth elements and faux-cover elements aside, it's not a game to be played tactically in any practical sense. Popping in and out of cover is made awkward and when the going got tough, I never had an "epic" moment where I overcame because BJ is a machine. Instead, when I was having trouble with a mech, I would find an area the mech wouldn't get near and exploit it, because if I went toe-to-toe (like the game tonally wants you to) I would've been turned into hamburger meat.

Games that are punishing exist, and in droves. Super Meat Boy. Rogue Legacy. Don't Starve. Hotline Miami. They tend to be smaller games, because those can still subscribe to a more arcade-y type of punishment where you can die repeatedly over and over again and 1) Not lose any real ground and 2) Not be taken out of a greater story context, or world.

It isn't that I have anything against difficult games because I loved the four I just mentioned. I loved the Souls games and am looking forward to Bloodborne. The problem with Wolfenstein's harder settings is that they water down some of the most spectacular moments of gameplay with clunky tactics.

All games that have difficulty settings and stories run the risk of the player experience being damaged because the player has to replay a section seven to ten times. It's like tunnel vision. I'm playing a game for four hours and the story is progressing, the action is good, I'm way into it and then STOP! I have to spend an hour replaying the same part because I keep dying, or I get stuck, and I start to lose sight of where I was and where I was going. I start hugging the walls and checking the internet, wondering if my game is busted, and at that point I am no longer immersed. I'm dying and re-loading and hearing the same music, I'm hearing the same dialogue uttered over and over again. It's showing me more and more of how the sausage is made.

I don't need the games I play to be padded and I don't need them to be hard for no reason. Listen: I'm broke as hell, but I would rather spend my money on an incredibly tight and fluid six-hour game than spend fifteen hours being frustrated and bored half the time. Keep the settings in there when they're justified, but god forbid they're in a game in such a manner that fundamentally changes the gameplay and makes it a shadow of what it should be. Gaming is only getting more immersive, more real, and as this happens, game-breaking moments are only going to yank a player backwards even harder. The first time I see somebody clip through a wall while I'm wearing a VR helmet, I won't just frown, I'll be crushed.

I don't need mega-extreme-sledgehammer-my-balls mode, I need good games. I need experiences.