a satisfying failure
so, heres a little short story. I was bored, and on my laptop, so I chose to play a run of Risk of Rain 2, my favorite game. It is a roguelike, which is a type of game genre that would take a video essay to explain, but part of what that entails is having different "runs", in which you start from base level and work your way up, becoming more powerful until you complete the run (usually killing a final boss or completing an objective) or die trying. Either way, the next time you play it will be a new run, and you will start from zero again, rinse and repeat.
This gameplay loop keeps the game feeling fresh, and with random item generation and many different characters to choose from, every run feels different. I wanted to play on the hardest non-challenge setting, a game mode called Monsoon. its pretty much hard mode, and enemies are stronger and get progressively tougher faster. I have over 250 hours in this game (dont judge me) and I'm still shit at completing Monsoon runs. I'll go a couple stages, feel great and all, and then die to something trivial as the enemies became too strong too quick for me to keep up.
A big part of Risk of Rain 2 is this mechanic of timed difficulty. You have a set difficulty for your entire run which you decide before you start, for example, Monsoon, but in each run of risk of rain you have an in-game difficulty as well. As time passes, enemies get more plentiful and difficult. Thats part of the balance of playing risk of rain: finding a sweet spot between completing stages quickly and spending time exploring each stage and looting for items and powerups. Part of what makes Monsoon really hard is that the timed difficulty goes very very fast. It takes maybe 6 minutes to fully clear a stage for the average character, and in Monsoon you will have already gone up a timed difficulty by then. This means you might decide to pick less items, but that will make you weaker fighting bosses, perhaps ultimately leading to your demise as well. In short, Monsoon is really hard!
So, even though I have experience playing on Monsoon and have beaten the game with every character in that game mode, its still extremally hard. But today, I was doing well. I started off, with a little challenge in the first few stages, but picked up the pace. My dodging was really good and I didnt have any close calls with death, and even survived being swarmed by a hoard of enemies with some lucky flight equipment. Then, i reached stage 5. At this point, the player gets a choice. Go defeat the final boss, or extend the run and keep clearing stages. I chose the latter, because I didnt feel prepared and also wanted to see how far I could go. I had been pretty lucky so far, but surely I couldnt go much further?
I uh. I went a lot further. I completed another 11 stages, amassing items and becoming more powerful in Monsoon than I had ever before (on a run without a crutch called Artifact of Command). I was getting to the point where I merely had to stand still, and enemies all around the map would be annihilated and sent to the shadow realm (in some cases quite literally). After getting so strong, I reveled in my progress. I usually struggle to survive, but now I was at a point that I could survive as long as I wanted! After a total of 2 hours, I decided to go fight one of the Final bosses. I cleared the Void Fields and Void Locus, two hard stages on the way to the final boss, with ease. Confidence nice and high, I reached the Planetarium, and prepared to face off against the Voidling, one of two final bosses. It was going to be a massacre.
But infact... the one who was massacred was me. In my hubris, my dodging got sloppy, and I let my gaurd down. Many laser beams and alien missiles to the face later, and i die. Haha, a fitting end to one of my longest Monsoon runs! Usually, i get a little pissed (not veeery mad but just annoyed) dying so close to the end, but somehow, today I just felt accomplished. Although I didnt succeed, I had gotten a lot further than ever before. Infact, I dont think I've even reached the Voidling in Monsoon mode before, I had always gone for the easier one! So although i did not complete my ultimate goal, I had still made more progress than ever before. It feels pretty good. And next time, well... the Voidling better watch its back! ...it doesnt have a back because its a giant alien spider thing with a floating head, but yall get what i mean.
Anyways, thanks for reading! hope your days are good, and people playing games, I hope you have good luck and make progress! Talk to yall soon, take care. :)
-Dio