10 Video Games That Start Hard But Get A Lot Easier Later On

Part of the design philosophy of most video games is the age-old concept of the difficulty curve. It’s a pretty simple idea; as you progress through the game, it gets harder in order to continue providing you with a satisfying challenge.

Naturally, the more time you spend with a game, the better you become at it, so developers make use of various tricks like smarter enemies, tougher bosses, trickier levels, and more in order to make sure that the game doesn’t become too much of a breeze to play.

Likewise, most games start off quite easily in order to help you get your bearings and figure out how things work. The early levels of countless games are often designed to be kind to the player, teaching them various gameplay mechanics and holding their hand for the first few hours, before letting them loose.

That’s how most games are designed, but some actually work in the exact opposite way. In these games, the early stages are actually the hardest part, and players saw the Game Over screen way more often in the first few hours than they would in the entire remainder of the game.

Alien: Isolation casts players in the role of Amanda Ripley and tasks them with navigating a perilous ship, inhabited by a Xenomorph, rogue androids, and a bunch of armed humans who all want you to die for some reason or another.

To make matters worse, in the early goings of the game, you have pretty much no way of defending yourself except to run and hide. This makes the first few stages, especially the encounters with the Xenomorph, very tricky to get through, and it wasn't uncommon for players to die over and over again.

After a few levels, you finally get your hands on a gun, which makes it much easier to deal with humans and androids, but you'll have to wait until much later in the game to really have enough ammo to survive most encounters and you won't get an effective way to deal with the Alien itself until after the halfway point, when you finally get your hands on a flamethrower. With this, the last levels are so much simpler.