It’s the difference between deriving pleasure and finding only pain. In fact, City of Brass illustrates an elusive but important distinction between challenging and tortuous: while the former may be hard, the latter is overwhelmingly unfair. But while I’ve completed notoriously difficult trials from Contra to Bloodborne and Cuphead with cheers and sighs of gratified relief, City of Brass aroused in me no feelings so strong as misery and anger, even when I finally, mercifully defeated its back-breaking final boss and concluded its seemingly interminable 12-stage campaign. I can’t speak to its possible replay value, because I simply don’t have it in me to play it again.Criticizing a game for its difficulty is a delicate matter because one person’s excruciating gauntlet is another’s leisurely cakewalk - and I appreciate that I may be admitting my own ineptness here. I got through it in the end - after much pulling of the hair and gritting of the teeth, after screaming at the television in agony and sending my controller pinwheeling across the room.

Even by the exacting standards of the rogue-lite genre, which aspires to difficulty like most games aspire to fun, this is a grueling, grinding, brutally hard experience, one that left me full of bitterness and resentment rather than satisfaction or joy. It is a more patient person than I who endures City of Brass without a great deal of suffering.

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