Media promotion and social posts from people playing the new Miles Morales Spider-Man kept reminding me of what I loved about Spider-Man for the PS4. Close to three years since I started playing. It was fun at first then I hit a difficulty wall.

Why hit a wall at all, it's a wide open sandbox game, isn't that like getting stuck on a playground?

Spider-Man as a Conceptual Motorcycle

My go-to sandbox game playground activity: jumping motorcycles. What would be inspiring this kind of fantasy? Old memories of Evel Knievel might be feeding some of that. BMX biking as a kid too. Not that I ever had a great BMX bike growing up, but I'd use what was available to do a little low stakes jumping. Could also be flying around on a motorcycle has been on my mind since the 1980 season of Battlestar Galactica. Jumping a ramp in a sandbox game is a whole interactive story packed into moments. Finding the ramp, building up speed, hitting a ramp at the right angle with enough speed, and the flying. Then the landing. Every bit of that can go wrong which makes it all attention grabbing.

Spider-Man has attention grabbing stunts built in to the main character concept. Climbing buildings in thrilling ways and using the web to swing with acrobatic moves is a whole meal of a game in itself. All the fun I could ask for. Better than jumping a pretend motorcycle.

The game's not all sandbox stunts, the story is also attention grabbing and makes the sandbox more meaningful. You can choose to activate scenes that have rules and consequences, when you're in a scene you've left the sandbox for the most part.

Then I got stuck in an early main-plot encounter. I play infrequently enough where the controls actions and combos are specific enough in different contexts that it's a big deal if you press the wrong button at the wrong time. It's a serious high-stakes scene in an art museum. One false move where the baddies see you and it's game over. I was not yet skilled with the controls so I was full of false moves.

I set down the game.

Chatting with a friend about it, they told me you can change the difficulty AT ANY TIME. I never considered. What a great option to have! Good advice filed away to live with the flying motorcycles in the back of my mind since I was already playing Borderlands 3.

Tempted to try again.

Then seeing the Miles Morales version in my social feed, I remembered my friends advice. After not playing Spider-Man for years I gave it another try. I lowered the difficulty ready to save the day in the art museum. In my haste I forgot I needed to re-learn the controls. It was game over town again and again with me and my false moves. Still not ready for that scenario I was in.

So I loaded an earlier in the game timeline save point.

That was the trick. Learning the controls at the lower difficulty was just what I needed. I noticed that the game still had challenge, conflicts with the baddies could still go wrong. It was a better challenge fit for me.

As a game creator, I know a big element of finding what feels fun is tuning the challenge to be just enough. When something is too difficult it's not rewarding. Adjustable difficulty is so kind and enabling to include. It makes a game work for a wider group of people. It even helps folks who love to crank up the difficulty.

Remember appreciating the flexible difficulty as a game designer.

Choosing a difficulty setting immediately and only at the start of a game is what I've grown up with. Making that choice at any time, this is what I hope to see more often. I need to be thinking of how I could make adjustable difficulty available at any time in my games too.