Hades

Pyre's camera keeps both the active character and the ball on screen. In a Rite, the character you control and the ball matter equally, so the camera zooms and moves to keep both prominent. This stops the player losing track of the ball while steering a character.

Quote: "the camera zooms and moves in an attempt to make sure both are prominent on screen simultaneously."

Hades rewards swapping to weapons you have not used lately. Instead of upgrades that lock players into one style, Hades gives incentives to try a different weapon, nudging players toward new play styles and keeping the power fantasy moving as they improve.

Mark Brown contrasts this with style-specific upgrades that create a positive feedback loop, as in Dishonored, where players quick load when spotted instead of going violent.

Hades characters react to the specific details of your last run. Characters discuss your most recent run in detail, and Hypnos teases you about which enemies killed you and suggests killing them first. The game logs many small actions rather than a few big choices and reacts to them.

Mark Brown groups this with Shadow of War's orcs recalling your last encounter. Quote: "it can build up a massive, and highly detailed databank of everything the player is doing."

God Mode makes you stronger each time you die. Hades ships God Mode as an assist that raises your strength with every death, one of several examples of breaking difficulty into separate options rather than one setting.

Hades ships full in-game button remapping. Hades was among the games offering full controller remapping inside the game, which more than half of the controller games surveyed did. Console-level remapping exists but is tedious to redo per game.

Quote: "developers shouldn't rely on it. It's tedious to change the buttons between games."

Hades' many projectiles, enemies and traps make action hard to read. Its busy screens are cited as a visual clutter problem, the kind options that boost the visibility of key elements are meant to solve.

Hades offers weapons of different difficulty plus unlockable power so time can replace skill. The shield is defensive and forgiving, while the fists demand close, risky play. Players can also unlock extra power and health through persistence, so effort can substitute for skill.

The aim is that both a player using assists and one picking the hardest options can each hit their optimum challenge. Quote: "it's possible to succeed not by getting better - but by simply playing the game for a long time."

Hades rewards swapping to weapons you have not used lately. Instead of upgrades that lock players into one style, Hades gives incentives to try a different weapon, nudging players toward new play styles and keeping the power fantasy moving as they improve.

Mark Brown contrasts this with style-specific upgrades that create a positive feedback loop, as in Dishonored, where players quick load when spotted instead of going violent.

Each death in Hades unlocks more story and character backstory. Every respawn reveals more about the characters, and gifting items found in runs to hub characters unlocks more story. That gives players something to hold onto while they keep failing at the actual game.

Quote: "Unlocking new narrative stuff gives you something to hold onto, even while you're failing over and over again."

Pyre pairs its snowballing progression with negative loops to keep matches close. Characters level up when they win and the game always moves on after a loss, which could snowball in either direction. Supergiant countered this with negative loops, so mistakes became a road bump instead of a tipping point.

Reusing the same team every match would outgrow every challenge, while a few losses could leave a team too weak to catch up. Mark Brown compares the structure to XCOM, where veterans become steamrollers and players who fall behind get stuck in a death spiral.

Losing a match still earns some experience, and there is no permadeath. Because Pyre moves forward after a loss, a weaker player could fall behind for good. Giving XP for lost matches and keeping characters alive means one bad match does not wreck later ones.

This is the contrast with XCOM, where dead soldiers are replaced by weak rookies. Quote: "you still receive some experience points for failing."

Liberation rites remove your best characters, and that removal is the goal. Winning a liberation rite lets a high-ranked character leave the Downside purgatory for good, so you permanently send away your strongest units. This forces you to level the whole roster, and the final, hardest battles are fought with weaker characters, which made them among the tensest.

Since freeing characters is the stated objective and tied to their story arcs, it does not feel like a punishment for winning. Mark Brown calls it "a permadeath that is a good thing" and says he freed his favourite characters because they truly deserved to get out.

Balancing loops never make losing better than winning. Pyre's negative loops leave a win as the better result, so the player's incentives stay aligned with playing well. Inside a Rite, a scorer sits out the next play, giving the other team a numbers advantage, much as the other team gets the ball after a score in real basketball.

Mark Brown contrasts this with Resident Evil 4, where Capcom hid its dynamic difficulty because telling players the game eases up when they struggle is effectively telling good players to make mistakes. Quote: "It is still better to win a match than to lose it."