Much has been made of the difficulty of these games—­it has been criticized as exclusionary, lauded as a return to gaming’s roots, used as a selling point. (prepare to die, declared the slogan of the first Dark Souls.) But “difficulty” is an elusive concept, one word standing in for a number of ways in which a game can resist its players.

Another way to put it is that the games can be, for the wrong person, or someone in the wrong mood, simply unpleasant. It is not always clear why one would want to spend one’s leisure time swearing at a screen, lost, stuck, dying over and over in the dark. More often, though, they provide something much more complicated: a paradoxical mix of joy and outrage, relief and despair. The repetitive drumbeat of failure, occasionally punctuated by success or disaster or revelation, batters you into a kind of gleeful serenity. Failure becomes funny, even soothing. The games are full of jokes at the player’s expense—­traps and dead ends and carefully orchestrated aggravations. Game after game runs variations on the comedic setup of an enormous stone ball rolling at you down a slope, for instance. It’s there in the opening level of Dark Souls, to teach you about dodging, and about the game designers’ malevolence; then it appears again and again in more complicated arrangements. By Elden Ring such traps have become familiar, even comforting—­until the moment when a boulder rolls past you, stops, and then rolls back, seemingly of its own free will, to crush you from behind. The only possible response is to laugh or give up.