Should game's difficulty always be through a particular title's mechanics battering you over the head for messing up, or can it be through a lack of checkpointing, the barest semblance of what you're supposed to be doing and occasional boss battles that'll slaughter you for not standing in the exact spot during their special attacks? Let's go with the latter, as one-man dev-team Tom Happ put together Axiom Verge as a tribute to old school Metroid and everything it represented. That means coming up against a string of dead-ends all looking like they need specific items to crack, fighting scores of enemies across huge labyrinthine worlds - and finding said items way later in the game only to realise you've almost no way of knowing what to do next. Ambiguity is always something that'll split people right down the middle, and although Axiom is one hell of an achievement overall, after you've got thwarted by another boss, been toasted by some random enemy as you were attempting to find where to go or simply had to resort to online help to find which of the many potential pathways is the right one - none of what's on offer comes across remotely naturally.
