This balance between Nightmare mode’s high incentive and severe sense of punishment creates a tense risk-reward dynamic, accentuated by the reality that death is a lot more common (what with nights being longer and stamina being extremely limited). This might seem overly cruel, if it weren’t for the fact that you can accumulate said points in Dying Light at a much faster rate on Nightmare mode, which also rewards a 10% XP bonus for every other co-op partner in your game. Nightmare Mode in Dying Light throws a number of new systems into the mix the most brutal of which being that players who die will immediately lose all of the XP they had previously earned above their current level. Other forms of difficulty spikes are even more systemic that this, with new mechanics that affect the gameplay itself. Never has The Last of Us been as scary or as strategically focused, and it’s brilliant. Every bottle thrown, every noise heard and footstep taken becomes as significant as moving a chess piece on a board, where the difference between life and death can be determined within seconds. While combat is a perfectly reasonable strategy when playing The Last of Us on normal difficulty, here it becomes a last resort. Not only does this bring the gameplay more in keeping with the context of the world itself (Joel’s natural gift for echolocation certainly challenged our suspension of disbelief), but the stealth sequences in The Last of Us became significantly more engaging and tense, forcing players to adopt a more cautious approach to every situation.
On Grounded mode in The Last of Us, Joel is no longer able to make out enemy locations through his listening ability, which Naughty Dog completely deactivates. This might just be as simple as deactivating the HUD, but other titles go a step further. One of the more common modifications to authentically enriching a game’s difficulty is to remove the visual prompts that would previously aid player action and progression.
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