Atomic Heart is twice as fun on easy mode

polygon.com:

Atomic Heart is a hostile game. You can only manually save at dedicated save stations (yes, in 2023!). You have to stomach an entire script’s worth of juvenile “humor.” The slim offering of accessibility settings is a genuine disappointment, to say the least. But there is at least one way to make this first-person shooter a tiny bit more approachable: Play on the lowest difficulty level.

Atomic Heart, released on PlayStation, Xbox, and Windows PC on 21. Feb 2023 (and at launch, as part of the Game Pass library), features three difficulty settings:

These settings don’t appear to alter the number of enemies you face, or to change the parameters of any missions and challenges. They do, however, tweak how much damage you deal and how much damage you receive. You can swap between difficulty levels on the fly in the gameplay menu.

Though developer Mundfish describes Peaceful Atom as “only the plot will keep you on your toes,” I’ve found it to be anything but. Some bosses have still killed me, particularly those that rely on quick-time events. (Switching the difficulty does not appear to lengthen the window of Atomic Heart’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quick-time events.) In the more frenetic combat encounters, I’ve found myself overwhelmed by enemies, scrambling to survive, and regularly failing. On easy mode, Atomic Heart feels like a typical first-person shooter.

By contrast, Local Failure comes across as less of a challenge, more of a taunting middle finger — as if the game itself is booing you from the sidelines, peppering you with ripe tomatoes, then daring you to give up when you stop to clean up the mess.

While some missions have a healthy number of save points, others, including the first major one, are stingy with how