I think more games should have the ability to adjust individual aspects of the gameplay like in System Shock. Make the puzzles easier or harder or tone down the monsters if you just want to enjoy the story at a more leisurely pace, etc.

Course original System Shock also goes pretty silly with it by letting you turn all the settings down to "0" which basically completely trivializes the whole game. No enemies will attack you unless you hit them first and all the doors are open so you just run to the end and win in like 30 minutes...

Something I really liked about The World Ends With You was the multiple ways you could customize your difficulty by increasing enemy damage, reducing your health or chaining battles, and it rewarded you with more and better loot for taking the challenge.

The Mafia remake is fantastic for this. I can turn shooting down to easy (because I suck at shooting missions) and stick police response up to maximum (because being pulled over for jumping a traffic light on my way to murder someone never stops being funny).

The issue with puzzles that vary based on difficulty is because one would have to make several versions of that puzzle and make sure its solvable as well so they cant just generate and place it in, unless they somehow cracked a peice of code to do the testing it is really hard to do.

I usually hold the strong believe that these aspects should be carefully adjusted by the devs for the ideal gameplay experience and should not be tempered with by players. But not every game is dark souls, some games don’t suffer from being easier or harder. So I guess let the players go ham there.

I always liked him silent Hill 3 had a choice for puzzle difficulty and also combat difficulty! Those hard mode puzzles were pretty nuts though

God, what I would give to be able to go all DOOM on some monsters in System Shock. I know that's a long ways off from what you were saying, but I would like to imagine this hypothetical game would do that as well.

Having kids and a job, I always like a game that lets me change difficulty at any time. My free time for gaming is limited enough. Last thing I want to do is be stuck on some bullshit difficulty section for my entire time.

I think a lot of recent survival/crafting games have had granular difficulty adjustments. Something that I now want from other games too. Specifically in my case, I would like to make parry windows easier. I don’t want to get good at parrying, I just want to do it!