I know it, you probably know it, probably anyone with more than a passing familiarity with the Rayman series knows that the first game is really hard. But as someone who grew up in the 8-bit era where games were brutally hard by default, and who generally enjoys playing rage games like I Wanna Be The Guy, this game got me wondering what it is about some hard games that filters me more than others.
The answer I arrived at ended up being pretty simple: the best hard games find a way to be fun anyway. The best rage games get really creative with their trolling and don't punish death too harshly, making you want to keep playing. Games like Qwop and Octodad make it ridiculously hard to do the simplest tasks, but also make your inevitable failures hilarious. Road Rash 64 had plenty of cheap jank but was gloriously chaotic and offered you incentives for causing chaos, so you could lose a race and still have a good time.
Unfortunately Rayman has very little to balance out its unforgiving difficulty. Every gimmick, from the tiny slippery platforms to the darkened rooms to the reversed controls to the autoscrolling sections (which don't give you any warning when they start!) to the long waiting sections interspersed with instant-death hazards, are obnoxiously unfun and strung together in gauntlets that drag on for way too long. It even takes a leaf out of Fantasia's book by being a collectathon with extremely obtuse requirements; in order to unlock the final stage you need to find and break every single hidden cage in every single level. And the problem is the requirements aren't so much puzzles as they are completely arbitrary, like "walk to this completely unremarkable corner of the map then walk left and suddenly the cage is there!"
It's not all bad: the visual style is really great, Rayman is a cool wholesome little dude, and the setpieces/bosses that aren't obnoxious are actually quite creative and memorable. But this was unfortunately one of the games that crossed the Bullshit Event Horizon where the isolated "bullshit" moments were so plentiful that they became my main experience with the game.
I'll get to the sequels eventually once my trauma wears off, and I promise I'll bring an open mind!
The answer I arrived at ended up being pretty simple: the best hard games find a way to be fun anyway. The best rage games get really creative with their trolling and don't punish death too harshly, making you want to keep playing. Games like Qwop and Octodad make it ridiculously hard to do the simplest tasks, but also make your inevitable failures hilarious. Road Rash 64 had plenty of cheap jank but was gloriously chaotic and offered you incentives for causing chaos, so you could lose a race and still have a good time.
Unfortunately Rayman has very little to balance out its unforgiving difficulty. Every gimmick, from the tiny slippery platforms to the darkened rooms to the reversed controls to the autoscrolling sections (which don't give you any warning when they start!) to the long waiting sections interspersed with instant-death hazards, are obnoxiously unfun and strung together in gauntlets that drag on for way too long. It even takes a leaf out of Fantasia's book by being a collectathon with extremely obtuse requirements; in order to unlock the final stage you need to find and break every single hidden cage in every single level. And the problem is the requirements aren't so much puzzles as they are completely arbitrary, like "walk to this completely unremarkable corner of the map then walk left and suddenly the cage is there!"
It's not all bad: the visual style is really great, Rayman is a cool wholesome little dude, and the setpieces/bosses that aren't obnoxious are actually quite creative and memorable. But this was unfortunately one of the games that crossed the Bullshit Event Horizon where the isolated "bullshit" moments were so plentiful that they became my main experience with the game.
I'll get to the sequels eventually once my trauma wears off, and I promise I'll bring an open mind!