What I learned from my latest gaming humiliation
Kid #1 informed me the other day that Horizon Zero Dawn was coming off PlayStation Plus at the end of October. I wrote about what this game meant to me back in July, playing it at a time when I had multiple life challenges, and the escapism and sense of achievement at completing it was a lifesaver. I did NOT complete the extra chapter The Frozen Wilds, however, because I moved to a new job, leaving consoles and TVs behind for a month or so. I passed the game on to the aforementioned oldest kid to play and she adored it even more, putting it up there with Zelda Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us on her best ever list.
Now she had done her completionist, 100%-ed-it-on-the-hardest-difficulty thing with it, she was about to return to the sequel – and wondered if I wanted to nip in there while the PlayStation was free and get The Frozen Wilds done before it disappeared off Sony’s subscription service and into the ether.
She handed over the joypad to me, still warm from her adventures, and I felt a sense of kinship. A passing back of the gaming torch I had passed to her a few months ago. It was a beautiful thing.
I restored my old save-game and was back with Aloy, running around in the Frozen Wilds. That was basically it, for ages. Running around, and not a lot else – because I had no clue what I was doing. Keith Stuart wrote beautifully recently about his fractured memories of games played decades ago, but this was one I had only played three months before, and I had already forgotten everything.
I kept asking Kid #1 what the controls were and how to craft stuff and whatnot. She sat there, explaining patiently as if I was an elderly parent in a care home whom she had to teach how to eat soup without spilling. Eventually I got back into the swing of it, even though I’d lost a few threads of the story, making certain plotlines a tad confusing. But this is a modern openworld game, yeah? Just head for the marker on the map and fight stuff.
And fight stuff I did. And I have to say I was pretty damned good at it, carving through an assortment of robotic mechanical prehistoric hybrid monsters like a knife through warm cliche. I sat like this for about an hour thinking, “The old man’s still got it, eh?” Even when I came across new fearsome beasts, I was picking them off with a couple of perfect ranged arrow attacks then steaming right in there and meleeing them into oblivion with just a few swipes. My technique was perfect.
Then I heard whispers behind me. It was my daughter and my wife. I turned around. And they stopped whispering.
If you have a daughter and a wife, and they stop whispering when you look at them, that means they are whispering about YOU.
“OK guys, what’s up?” I finally sighed.
“Are you enjoying the game, Dom?” asked my wife.
“Yes, I am, as a matter of fact.”
“You look pretty good at it,” she continued.
“Thank you,” I said, “I was thinking the exact same thing.”
I noticed Kid #1 smirking.
“What difficulty are you playing on?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. Same one as when I played before. Normal?”
“Really, Dad?” she said. “I think you should check.”
So, I paused the game, went into settings, and checked the difficulty.
The level was not on Normal. It wasn’t even on Easy. It was on Story.
Back in July I had set up a photo of me changing the difficulty level of Horizon Zero Dawn to Story mode for a gag I sent to a friend. I hadn’t changed it back. (True story, honest!) So here I was in October – the month that people received a book about my old show GamesMaster, which influenced a generation of gamers – playing a game in Story mode. The bottom rung of the gaming skill ladder. The level that is so easy it can be completed by a jar of pickles. No wonder my family was laughing at me.
It was enough to make me consider retiring from video games. Except I’m not. Because, you know what? It was actually fun on Story level. It was stressfree. I think I might play EVERY game on Story difficulty now. I am 52 years old. I have paid my gaming dues. I blistered my fingers on a million Mega Men when gamers today were but a twinkle in a parent’s eye. In the same way as I have stopped caring about what clothes I wear, I now officially give zero latemiddle-aged fucks about how awful I am at games.
The rest of you can crack on with your MANIA BASTARDO levels of difficulty. I will be that elder family statesman who sits in a deckchair on the beach while the kids go surfing. Happy to wriggle my toes in the sand, go for a shallow paddle in a rockpool, and just have fun.