This isn’t even the first time I’ve quit playing Lords of the Fallen.
Back in 2014, when the original Lords of the Fallen was released, I didn’t see it through. I found it to be a stiff and annoying Soulslike. While it was one of the first to follow in the footsteps of Dark Souls, it was, for a long time, one of the worst in the genre. I never gave quitting that game a second thought, because I wasn’t having any fun. But Lords of the Fallen in 2023 is different.
The game has strong combat mechanics, and an immersive world that made me want to explore. I had a great time taking on many of its early bosses and finding equipment to make myself stronger. But after close to 20 hours, I realized I was far more often being forced to sprint through intricate levels and to ignore the lore and dialog being thrown my way out of fear of death and lost progress, things similar games in the past have taught me to fight through. Despite the game having all of the right pieces, there was something about their arrangement that was just demoralizing.
Related: Lords of the Fallen Commits the Cardinal Soulslike Sin: Not Resetting Elevators
There’s a saying in the Soulsborne community that I’m sure you’ve all heard by now: “Git Gud.” Generally speaking, it’s not supposed to be as harsh as it sounds. Instead, it refers to the act of overcoming adversity, essentially entering into a Rocky Balboa montage of training, and coming out the other side victorious. It’s shorthand for a mentality shift that needs to be adopted in order to see what all the fuss is about regarding this particular brand of challenging action RPGs. Death isn’t just failure, it’s an opportunity to learn. Your loss of progress is a warning not to be hasty and run head first into traps or make careless mistakes. It’s designed to have you adopt a different mindset than the usual power fantasy we’ve come to expect from many games and I absolutely love it.
Perhaps my Catholic upbringing has predisposed me to accepting punishment and suffering as a pretense to reward. The sense of accomplishment from meeting a virtual challenge head on hits the exact same synapses for me as real world achievements like winning my little league championship my rookie season, or taking multiple first place trophies back in my college step dancing days. All of these things required time, practice, and patience. It’s not a false sense of victory to replace a lack of it in the real world, it’s just more of it. The delayed gratification I’m apparently addicted to is fast tracked in the Souls games.
I’ve played every Souls adjacent FromSoftware title, from Demon Souls to Sekiro. The few I haven’t finished are on my to do list, but I’ve beaten The Radiance in Hollow Knight and made it to the summit of Celeste. I’ve even unwittingly made these experiences harder than they needed to be. My recent review of Lies of P, a roughly 30 hour game, took me 60 hours to complete, because I have an ingrained compulsion to face and defeat every enemy I encounter at least once. It’s a ritual that parallels what these games have been teaching me: “Don’t back down.” There’s an unspoken promise in this genre that determination and patience will be rewarded. It’s a philosophy I subscribe to in my everyday life, but I feel Lords of the Fallen breaks that promise.
Related: Lords of the Fallen’s Mobs Aren’t Challenging, They’re Frustrating
The Umbral plane is a decrepit facsimile of the mortal world in Lords of the Fallen. Both of them exist simultaneously, and you can travel from one to the other semi-at-will in order to deal with threats in both. It’s a really cool mechanic that adds additional depth to every area, and I looked forward to fully exploring both versions of each location. Upon death in the mortal world, you’ll revive in the same spot in Umbral, basically affording you a second chance to fight your way back to life using emergence effigies found throughout the maps.
But Umbral puts a doom clock on your time in its realm. The longer you stay in Umbral, the more enemies will spawn and come after you. Umbral isn’t only a space for a second chance, though; it’s required that you enter it regularly in order to solve puzzles, find information and make progress. This dual purpose hurts that sense of exploration, because in Umbral there is no way to stand your ground and defeat all incoming threats, as these enemies will respawn infinitely.
Even worse than that, both versions of the world have a habit of stacking an unreasonable amount of enemies in the same area. Manageable hordes of basic soldiers or monsters are often joined by bigger champion level threats. The sorts of enemies you’re usually first introduced to as mini-bosses, show up in groups of two or three right alongside regular mobs and multiple ranged enemies all at once. My specific proclivity to clear the area in situations like this takes an exceptionally long time. Often the ranged enemies in this equation can’t be reached without traversing a bridge or ladder only available in Umbral, which as I’ve mentioned introduces new challenges smack dab in the middle of the first.
Even as I type out these frustrations, I’m tempted to go right back and play in order to convert them into another challenge that I’ve fought through and overcome. But Lords of the Fallen doesn’t provide that light at the end of the tunnel once you do. There’s a distinct lack of the sense of accomplishment I crave, because Lords of the Fallen instead wants you to run. I was forced repeatedly to sprint past tons of enemies, a big group that I’d be dealing with would only get bigger as I’d see just how many more threats were waiting along the path to the next safe space.
Related: Is Lords of the Fallen Harder Than Lies of P?
I realized that despite all of the parts of Lords of the Fallen that I was appreciating I wasn’t having any fun. The issue wasn’t that I was being stopped from progressing; it was that after making progress the experience rang hollow. The challenge was cheap, and the barriers were superficial. Overcoming difficulty through bad design does not hit the same way as doing it in a fair, but tough, encounter. But it can be incredibly difficult to discern when you’re dealing with bad design vs your own mentality, and this is what creates a big conflict in the Git Gud mentality.
How do you know when Soulslikes, which are games meant to have steep difficulty, are being unfair? Matters of difficulty are deeply subjective in games already, but in this genre it’s a veritable minefield to claim that something is “too hard” when there’s an army of players who will likely rise to that challenge.
The trick is, essentially, to know yourself.
Lords of the Fallen isn’t so difficult that it can’t be completed, it’s just been unrewarding for me after struggling through it thus far. Someone else can and will have different thresholds for that sort of thing. It’s up to the individual to recognize if the challenge they’re trying to overcome is worth the effort. Because the Git Gud mentality has, like most things on the internet, been twisted into a black and white, all or nothing, style of thinking, with your options being either Git Gud or get filtered. In reality, you could just get your money back if you’re not enjoying your time.
I do hope that, down the road, Lords of the Fallen can address some of its balancing issues, because as I’ve stated, there’s a lot to like about the franchise’s second attempt in the genre. I quit after realizing I wasn’t enjoying myself and pushing through it wasn’t going to change that. But the potential is still there, and I shouldn’t have to jump through mental hoops or deny my frustrations with what it currently is: Too freaking hard.
