Difficulty options have increasingly become a major topic in video games, whether you’re talking about approachability for players of all stripes or hardcore players who demand a challenge. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to how you perfect difficulty in a video game, but it feels like the most common answer we keep seeing is that the more people who can play your game, the better. That’s a message that S-Game, the studio behind the hotly anticipated Phantom Blade Zero is taking to heart. And that’s perhaps most apparent in the newly revealed Hellwalker mode — a tough-as-nails hard difficulty that genuinely makes it feel like a different game. After getting to play over an hour of Hellwalker, it’s now the single aspect that has me most excited to see the full game.
While Hellwalker is billed as a sort of “Hard Mode,” sheer difficulty clearly isn’t the intent behind it. This is because Hellwalker doesn’t just provide some damage buffs or increased health of enemies, it integrally changes enemy AI — right down to how they attack and defend, and even the combos that they use.
