We have logged 4,912 attempts across 31 demanding games, and the pattern is consistent. Learning happens in the first dozen tries and again after a deliberate break. Attempts fifteen to forty are almost pure repetition, and everything past forty is a different activity entirely.
Every review records total attempts, the hardest single wall, whether the difficulty taught us anything, and exactly which assist options exist.
Review
287 attempts on one boss, and we can account for every death. Each one was caused by something the fight had already shown us, which is the difference between hard and unfair.
Review
Death to next attempt in 0.4 seconds, with no loading, no animation and no menu. The game is brutal and it never once made us wait to try again, which changes everything about how failure feels.
Attempt log
Our full data set, broken down by game and by attempt band. The curve flattens hard between attempts fifteen and forty, and recovers only after a break of at least four hours.
Review
Nothing in this game is hard to understand or hard to execute. It is simply slow to recover from, which produces the sensation of difficulty without any of the learning.
Note
We tested reaction time against pattern recall across 600 attempts. Above a certain density, nobody is reacting to anything; they are replaying a sequence they learned.
Review
A stealth game whose guards behave inconsistently enough that the correct play sometimes fails. We logged 41 attempts where identical inputs produced different outcomes.
Note
Most losses in defence-focused strategy games happen because the interface hid a number, not because the decision was hard. We counted which numbers were hidden across four games.
Essay
We test every accessibility feature in every game and record them separately from difficulty modes, because conflating the two has done real damage to how both are discussed.
