Capsule: Fairly Hard, or Hardly Fair? Demiboy vs. Backlog, Game #8

What makes a game's difficulty fair? A well implemented challenge drives engagement with a game and heightens trust in the game's creators, while difficulty that feels cheap or like the game is "cheating" against the player dampens enjoyment. In today's entry, I'm going to pose a few criteria for fair difficulty, and rate the minimalist science fiction sim Capsule on those criteria. Let's just say I don't think it does especially well on this count.

The player can learn from their mistakes

Poster child games of the hard core, like Dark Souls or "Nintendo hard" classics like Mega Man, are notoriously punishing in their challenge. But they're also emblematic designs for challenge fairness, because when you fail, you know why you failed and have at least a sense of what you can do differently next time to pass that point. Each setback provides an opportunity at practice and learning.

Capsule is hit-and-miss on this count. Getting screwed over by a hazard does give you information about how that particular bit of nastiness behaves, and over time you do figure out tricks that help in evading them. But in some situations, there's not much you can do but lose and try again hoping you get a more favorable layout. Running low on oxygen and power, approaching a field of unidentified objects, you have no real choice but to send out a pulse to scan them in hopes of obtaining replenishment. But if they turn out to be a bunch of seeker mines instead, welp, you're screwed, and the only thing you take away is "yup, game just screwed me."

Randomness is carefully bounded

Random variation is a foundational game design tool. It rules out a pure pattern memorization or muscle memory route to mastery, as any given playthrough will include different configurations of elements to react to. If challenge elements are so wildly randomized that any given session can be painfully hard or impossible to clear, however, it gets to feeling like the game is taking cheap shots at the player.

In Capsule, almost everything between destinations is randomized, from oxygen and power pickups to obstacles and enemies. You might get multiple "Waystations" that top up all your reserves, or you might be bombarded by constant Drones and Shrikes that chase you and take resources away. Heck, you can even have an enemy spawn immediately next to you when you start, slamming into you before it's even possible to react. Classic unfairness!

Will those unidentified blips be oxygen tanks or useless pylons? Roll the dice. (Image source: Steam user Parallel Platypus)

In-game obstacles bring challenge, not the interface

Any game's inputs take getting used to, however shallow the learning curve. But for a game to feel fair, the learning process should feel like you're figuring out how to use tools provided to you in order to overcome the game's hazards, enemies, puzzles, etc., not that the challenge is in getting the tools to work in the first place.

Fighting the interface is part of Capsule's charm, and also its downfall. Working with a cold, stripped-down set of glyphs and abstractions reinforces the game's themes of isolation and claustrophobia. You don't have the first clue what a "Therium" looks like, only that it's larger than other objects in the environment and makes a sort of whale song as it draws near. But the minimalism also means some of the game's challenge comes from distinctly unexciting UI barriers, like the fact that the heading gauge only has a handful of numbered lines, forcing the player to mentally count tick marks to try to home in on the right direction. Crucial operations like reviving a dead battery have such sparse and subtle how-to hints that I didn't even know they existed until I looked up a fanmade guide.

But maybe I'm the one who's being unfair

The friend who put this game on my queue admitted, when I whined piteously over Steam chat about my frustrations with it, that he "enjoyed [it] for its mood more than its gameplay." And I let myself get so stymied by my failure to figure out its tricks without help, that I barely took any time to sit and appreciate the atmosphere the game created. Its greatest achievements are in sound design--the labored breathing of the pilot when oxygen runs low, the thump of the hull as your capsule bounces off a pylon, the satisfying clang and clamp of docking with an outpost--and here I ended up turning the sound off because I was sick of alarms and asphyxiation noises. I breezed over the communication logs I got to read at each checkpoint, rejecting them out of hand as bland and nonsensical, maybe missing out on worldbuilding. I got the vague sense this was some sort of underwater voyage, rather than outer space, but who knows? Perhaps, on the whole, I approached Capsule as a game of exploration and survival when I should have been treating it as a puzzle to decipher; that would have changed my attitude toward its interface.

And in the end, that is the most substantial determinant of whether a game's difficulty comes across as fair or unfair: the biases and expectations of the player!

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"Demiboy vs. Backlog" is a blog series where I play each game from my considerable backlog and share my thoughts about them here on Steemit! Capsule was selected by Brendan. Check out the play queue and leave a comment here to point me in the direction of one of your favorites! Think my backlog still isn't large enough or is missing some must-play title? I accept gift games via Steam, and will slot any game thus received into the queue at the nearest opportunity!