I love: Strip off and start from nothing

I thought it said 'Private Beach'!

Of the many uncommon gameplay scenarios that I love and other people seem to deeply despise, perhaps on of the most headscracthing ones on my end is the whole 'times when the game takes all of your stuff and throws you into a challenge area.' Just to be clear, I'm not talking about those final levels where the game takes all your weapons and skills and goes 'challenge time!', ('Half Life: Alyx') nor am I refencing the times when every skill and talent you've forged goes to utter waste against a final boss fight which breaks up into a straight 'press a couple of QTE events and you're done.' (Halo 4) I mean mid-game snippets when you've already reached the peak of your talent but the game design isn't ready to let you stomp all over it without putting up a fight. Just when you think there's nothing more to learn, you're stripped of everything, sent back to zero, and have to prove you're worthy of everything the game has given you.

I think it takes supreme confidence in one's systems to be able to bear itself without all those fancy gadgets and items which has bought you this far. And it's a great tool for contextualising exactly what it is that is making the player a badass; it is their skills or the sword tied to their back? A classic, 'are you wearing the armour or does it wear you' conundrum. And spoken in the unique language of 'gameplay' so integral to this special little industry of ours; I'm amazed, somewhat, that the Souls games have never repeated this rare practice. (Although considering those games depend on gear-defined builds to distinguish their gameplay variety; perhaps that isn't so surprising.) How about I demonstrate some titles that have taken this approach to great effect? 

Breath of the Wild famously features an entire challenge island of the course of Hyrule called Eventide Island. A place which magically absconds with all armour, weapons and food and throws you in the wilderness against everything from Moblins to a Hinox. All you have to defend yourself are the hearts you've collected, and the wits you've honed from using the Sheikah Slate up until now. That means really diving into the fantastic Breath of the Wild physics engine in order to make up the difference. Whether that be through starting fires and letting that rage encircle and burn groups, or rolling heavy rocks down hills for masses of damage; taking away those easy-win weapons forces the resourceful and creative mind out of the player's dormant psyche allowing for the subtle brilliance of BOTWs base systems to shine through. This island proved so successful that for the Trails in the DLC the team opted for a similar 'naked strat' and created pretty much the hardest challenge in the entire game. (Kudos, team.)

Far Cry 4 has a lot of high moments, and some lows; but one of the most promising in my mind came from the scene in which Ajay, the protagonist, is kidnapped and trapped in a mountain-carved prison with none of his tools. None sequentially (Because unfortunately this comes from the Ubisoft era where we can break these games down to their place in the uninspired sequence of repeated design choices) this marks the scene where the player is drugged and goes on a trip. But for its time that concept is actually utilised cleverly to have the player caught in a cat-and-mouse chase against their own delusions. Weaponless and defenceless, players are forced to play Far Cry in a totally different fashion for this moment, utilising cracks in walls and line-of-sight as though this is Outlast! And it doesn't even end with leaving the complex, because then the player is forced to fight their way through several checkposts, without their core gear, just to escape for certain. I'm still slightly peeved with the whole sequence, however, for the way that Ajay is literally placed in a cell without a door and just drugged, expecting that to be enough to stop him. Seems supremely contrived in my eyes, and I expected the entire escape to be a drug-fuelled delusion until the mission cleared and the game just continued; but for that brief moment before the shoe dropped I was enraptured in the challenge, and that's what matters.

Recently playing through New Vegas has given me the chance to confront that least liked of DLC by many, but one of my personal highlight favourites: Dead Money. The first of the additional content quartet, Dead Money traps the player in a Spanish-themed resort called The Sierra Madre, and locks them in a challenge of constant night, choking death clouds and deadly stalking Ghost-like creatures all over the shop. The theme of the DLC is greed and moving on, so it's somewhat fitting that in order to plunder the secrets of this hell you have to go in tool-less and blind, scavenging what you need to survive from bins and vending machines. I think I really started to hone in on what I love about this set-up whilst playing this DLC. It's the way in which the developers force you, through brute-force methods, to play as the weakling you started as but now with the knowledge to pick out what is important to your survival from what is not. You're not taking the Sierra Madre as carefully as you would at level one, you're picking through trash on the ground for anything you can use, using those Survival and Repair skill points to make bombs and poisons, and preparing a guerrilla campaign to overcome the death cloud and pull off the heist of the century! Dead Money is a an invitation to prove your mastery, and it's one I love to meet everytime I playthrough New Vegas.

And finally I present to you the king of this style; those that make use of it so much that it has become a genre style that generates millions upon billions each and every year; Battle Royales! Yeah, think about it! You never keep the same gear from match-to-match, all that differentiates a noob from a pro is the intrinsic knowledge of what loot is the best and how to best utilise it! Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends: All tap into that primal hunter-gatherer shade of the human psyche to fuel the power fantasy of starting from nothing and coming out on the top of the pack. And it's a constant gameplay loop of rising to the top and then being cast down to nothing, feeding those emotions time and time again. There's a draw to this style of gameplay scenario, and I think it's in the ego boost; who doesn't love to be the last one standing with the 'Number 1#' badge emblazed on their screen? No pre-game advantages, no pay-to-win, just resourcefulness and skill. This exact paradigm, perfected.

Adversity is sometimes the most useful tool in a game developers arsenal when it comes to establishing the satisfying power fantasy apex, and adversity scales with the advantages of the player. Short of starting the game from scratch, there really is no way to match the thrill of going rambo against a threat which you might role over normally, and overcoming the inflated hurdle regardless. I think this scenario strokes the same ego-glands that difficulty-defined genres that Souls-Likes do, only with the added benefit that you remember what it felt like to be the top-of-the-food chain, so you have the pre-established perception of superiority that now you have the opportunity to strengthen through trial and challenge. I live for those ego boosts.

Of course this is a trick to use sparingly, and like any set-piece this type of gameplay scenario works best in a short segment where we least expect it. I can understand why Dead Money can start to grate on someone when by hour 8 you're still trying to inventory manage whilst surviving the Cloud, and why the burst action of Battle Royales where you rise from nobody to overpowered in the space of five minutes is so easy to fall in lust with. Still, from a genre borne and bread around the ideas of power fantasies and feeding our egos, I'd say this is the sort of sequence that many great games out there would be remiss to omit. So if you're out there struggling to think of what special little moment your budding game needs to stick out that little bit more: try taking everything from the player and making them earn it all back.