Here it is, folks! I’ve finally found a section of God of War which, I believe, is undeniably broken. Does that mean I’m going to stop playing? Oh, goodness no. But I certainly am going to complain about it.

Rooftops of Athens

Okie-dokie. I believe I’ve reached the first area of the game that suffers from absolutely poor game design, as most of the navigation here is dependent upon a kind of jumping the game just doesn’t do well enough. Early on I found frustration with the wall-jump, especially the incredibly misleading way its interruption-instruction teaches you to do it. After failing countless times trying to perform the exact action they perscribed, I just tried how I naturally do this sort of thing in games, and it worked out nicely. Again I’m convinced that if there’s one thing standing in GoW’s way of becoming a truly classic game, it’s bullshit like these interruption-instruction moments. Not only do they disrupt the flow of the game, but all too often they don’t even teach you how to play the game effectively.

This brings up another point, which I’m embarassed and extremely pissed to say– I’ve gotten my first “Would You Like To Switch To Easy Mode?” moments. Ordinarily, I would’ve taken these bits with the grains of salt with which they’re meant to be ingested. So they’re encouraging me to play better by poking and proding at my ego a bit– no prob. The problem I do have with these screens are that, in my circumstances, it doesn’t exactly have anything to do with how I’m playing the game, at least in the way they’re expecting.

See, all the times I’ve been dying so far, it’s been because of control or navigation issues. Either jumps are made artificially difficult by confusing explanations for controlls or the game doesn’t efectively communicate exactly what you’re supposed to do at a given moment. Granted, I appreciate the fact that in a game like this you’re supposed to gather the clues to puzzles and figure them out by yourself without being led down the Candyland path– that’s part of the Zelda-inspired fun of these adventure titles, right? Except that puzzles like these only work if the clues make sense, and so far in the rooftops all I’m getting are dead ends. I’m stuck at the point where the cowardly soldier won’t lower the bridge, and there aren’t any real hints that do a decent job of pointing you in the right direction, or any direction at all that doesn’t wind up in death. Therefore, I’ve been forced to trial-and-error efforts to explore all the possibilities the level design affords, which inevitably results in a lot of deaths, mostly from seeing exactly how far Kratos can jump and what areas seem to be the most lethal. After a while, I keep getting the “Easy Mode” offer, which annoys me largely due to its parenthetical info, which I paraphrase here:

(Switching difficulties only results in changes during combat.)

Okay, so let me get this straight– I keep dying because I jump into pits, and the game offers to make the fighting easier? Exactly how did 2 and 2 turn out to equal 5 here, folks?

Perhaps Jaffe expects the most difficulty in the game to come out of the combat– that’s cool. Combat in a game like this is exactly where the difficulty is supposed to be, getting all those button-timing moments correct, zoning out your rhythms and generally synching into the percussional battle beats of the game, effectively turning your strings of attacks into drum-solos.

Difficulty is not, however, supposed to come from getting lost in terms of what your objectives are supposed to be, not being able to figure out where you’re supposed to jump or how to get across seemingly unpassable areas. GoW hasn’t been a Metal Gear game so far, where oblique lateral thinking has always been a necessary part of the game, nor has it been a Mario game, where making difficult jumps from platform to platform is to be expected. It’s been Zelda and Ico occasionally, asking you to have faith in the seemingly random game elements until they all gel together in one harmonious sequence of cause-and-effect set-pieces which result in puzzles almost solving themselves in an elegiac Rube Goldberg fashion. Unfortunately, that’s just not happening right now.

Right now, the game is difficult in a way the designers hadn’t anticipated, and I know this because the “Easy Mode” offer opperates on the assumption that the only real obstacle the player will experience is the frenetic combat. Because they haven’t expected the basic physical navigational elements to pose any real challenge, they’ve been pretty lazy in some aspects of that department, and therefore large parts of it remain obtuse and muddy, hard to get through not because the gameplay mechanics have been tightened so strictly as to requrie the most disciplined of performances, but because the presentation is so unfocused at times it’s uncertain what the player is expected to attempt. I’m beginning to lose some of my faith in the game, now, because of that uncertainty.

Sometimes frustration in a game comes from knowing what you’re supposed to do and not being able to do it. Right now, the frustration is worse– knowing I’d be able to do what I’m supposed to if only I knew what that was in the first place. Don’t bother telling me, though, and not for my own sake. I don’t care if you want to help me– I just don’t want anybody helping the game.