I am a gamer. I have loved video games since I got a Gameboy Advance for my birthday when I was 6, often turn to video games when I have time to burn, and have written about various favored games here in the past. I have been spending a lot of time playing video games so far this summer, and I've noticed a few things that my favored games have in common: they are wicked hard.

Take Breath of the Wild. Oh, boy, that game is amazing. The only reason I haven't climbed every square inch of that map is the sheer scale of it--that, and at least ten different things would kill me if I tried. There's what you would expect, minibosses, stronger enemies that can kill you in one hit without warning, new, nasty enemy types(Lynels are brutal. BRUTAL.) Not only that, you can have things fall on you, fall down a mountain, break your sword in the middle of combat, or die from hypothermia, dehydration, or catching on fire. You have to be prepared, whipping up elixirs or special meals from foraged ingredients, making sure you're wearing the proper armor, and planning out your every move during an encounter. My preferred method of combat is to take out any sentries that might exist with my bow, then either shoot the explosive barrels that just happen to be lying around(stupid Bokoblins) or sneak up and slay 'em before they can get to their weapons. Of course, due to me being bad with the controls, things often go sideways fast, meaning I end up in a normal combat encounter anyway. While this is easily recoverable from, what is not is the perfectly timed button press that lets you fight the giant robots that swarm Hyrule Castle and keep me from Ganon. (I'm not joking about that.)

Another game I've been obsessed with recently is The Binding of Isaac: the Afterbirth+ edition for the Nintendo Switch, to be more specific. The game itself was first released in 2011, but it has been remade and updated several times since then, and this seems to be the definitive version. Basically, you play as Isaac, a small boy who has to venture into his basement filled with horrible, gross monsters to escape from his mentally-ill mother--and it gets darker from there. While the story itself is simple, the gameplay is quite complicated. you use both joysticks to move and fire tears(yes, tears) at your enemies independently, and falls into the general category of roguelike: you fight through randomly generated rooms collecting randomly generated items while going down many, many floors. And if you die once(usually), you need to start all over again from the beginning. While it does sound frustrating, and is frustrating at times, every once in a while everything lines up: I get enough hearts, I get one powerful item early, or a critical mass of items throughout the game, and I blast through, getting further than I ever had before. The other day on one of these good runs I beat the final boss--only to unlock a new final boss, which according to my online sources, I'll have to beat 11 times to unlock the next one. So far I haven't even seen that one yet. And on it goes...

I think what attracts me to these sorts of games, the obtuse, difficulty-cliff type of game, is that you can have a clear sense of progress. Sure, sometimes you die to a cheap shot or run out of health on the first level, but if you prepare and keep at it, eventually you get somewhere new, or reach where you wanted to go. Doing that feels great, feeling like you actually did something. Honestly, I wish I felt that more in real life.