Contemporary game design has neutered these dated ways the genre used to use to make the player feel uneasy. Why it’s great: Hard Core Mode allows Dead Space 2 to live up to the challenging legacy of horror games where tensions arose from uncomfortable camera angles, fiddly controls, and infrequent save points that were byproducts of the hardware limitations. What it does: No checkpoints, three save points, and fewer resources Asking players to look more intently and react more quickly is fitting because it lets the player feel a bit more like Batman, who fights goons all the time without any sort of overt visual warning. It’s a lot to take in, even with the counter notifications, but the Arkham games give players responsive controls (that’s important) to deal with these threats and improve on a more dexterous level.
This requires you to look more closely at threats and demands you know what enemy animations to look for within a giant crowd of aggressive, meaty men. Every mode lets you feel like Batman, but Hard mode goes one step further by stripping out the blue lightning bolts that foreshadow incoming knuckle sandwiches. Why it’s great: The Arkham games, if nothing else, fulfilled one fantasy: They let you become the Bat. What it does: Erases counter notifications and shortens counter window Here are a few games that nailed their alternative difficulties and were better for it. But the most creative games rise above that standard and develop harder modes that benefit the package as a whole. Few games go beyond the call of turning the enemies into bullet sponges and halving the player’s health bar.
The Hard and I Hate Myself difficulties just don’t get the same amount of attention from players (which is explored further in Ben Reeves' article on difficulty). It makes sense that most developers would tune their base difficulty for the average player, because that’s the mode that the majority of their audience is going to see.