terrehbyte

Generally, I wait for gameplay footage from official and unofficial sources before committing to buying a game. I have a number of accounts I follow on other social media platforms that keep me updated on new games I might be interested, but none of them are reviewers outside of a quick 30-second blurb on socials or their Steam Curator account.

If I’m leaning buy but still hesitant, I’ll generally pick it up and play for a bit to see if I’ll keep it.

I don’t find that my tastes align very closely with any reviewer, so I generally steer clear of them. If there’s any kind of massive community criticism, there’s bound to be plenty of people shouting about it online which makes it easy to take into consideration (whether to ignore it or not).

An extension called Indie Wiki Buddy can also help with this by helping direct you to known alternatives to fandom for specific franchises or falling back to Breezewiki-based instances that rehost Fandom content without all of the Fandom bloat. It also provides this filtering and hinting to search results too, so you don’t have to change your workflow too much to use it.

I think my preference would be to have the game offer to reduce the difficulty temporarily after failing or offer other forms of support to make the boss encounter easier. If I selected Hard then I probably want the challenge of Hard, but if this difficulty spike is too much, then smoothing it out could be acceptable.

This is also ideally in addition to a way to adjust the difficulty mid-game as needed, of course.