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"Assist" Mode Detector AsMoDe
STEAM GROUP
"Assist" Mode Detector AsMoDe
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26 November, 2025
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ABOUT "Assist" Mode Detector

Every journey needs barriers to grow on - to make it worthwhile

A community dedicated to reward ballsy-singleplayer games for stucking to their vision and making games feel "grand", "unpredictable" and "mysterious" again.

As such every game that features a so called "assist-mode" or similiar sliders/toggles to completely customize the fundamental rules of an singleplayer game will be recorded here.
Games are judged by the extent of their features and how restricted they are.

Positive - games with no Assist Mode or sliders to compromise the gameplay experience.
Dedicated difficulty Levels are fine, as long they maintain the possibility to lose. Also games with exclusive hardcore modes that deactivate all possibilities to use assist mode functions during playthrough permanently can be positive.

Neutral: Games with extensive options to customize the gameplay experience, but restrained and/or restricted to reward interacting with the Core-Gameplay-Loop like its intended.

Negative:
Assist-Feature under the disguise of "accessibility". Allows you to circumvent the games design-goals and rules with no detriments.
Every piece of content and reward can be received with no effort. Punishing players taking the game on at face value, by not acknowledging the effort ignoring the assist mode options. (no ingame rewards, exclusive challenges, achievements etc)
Only games that completely trivialize core-parts of its gameplay-loop land here.
Also Remasterds and Remakes will be judged more critically as their is a direct comparison to the original, inheriting much potential to distract from a more worthwhile experience.

The extent of each games "Assist" functions will be listed.
Wheter you agree or disagree with the purpose of this group, is up to you.

Feel free to view positive or negative listings the opposite way, it's not our intention to tell you what you have to play and how you wanna play it. Our intention is for you to find what you want, building a community of like-minded people and inspire aspiring game-developers to become transgressive in todays market with a purpose.

Every listing is based on their willingness to compromise on the mediums unique characteristic of having to push through resistance, it does nothing say about the overall quality of the games, besides this factor.
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STEAM CURATOR
"Assist" Mode Detector reviews
"Compendium of titles that offer so called "Assist Modes" and other features that compromise or downright annihilate the core-gameplay loop, for a false promise of "Accessibility". Sapping the mystery out of games"
Here are a few recent reviews by "Assist" Mode Detector
7 Comments
Chocos Ramabotti 31 Jan @ 6:04am 
Welcome, thanks for joining.
Yes this is definitely not centralizing on the idea of difficult games per se. The best easy games are conceived as such in their core-design, so nothing is really lost. The problem is bypassing the core-design for trivialization purposes, which doesn't differentiate between the initial difficulty design.

So we're rather against the postmodern (and sometimes intersectional) mentality that the player is entitled to control the game however they wish for, as this leads only to a decline of potential valuable videogame experiences.
I Rule Hyrule 30 Jan @ 2:03pm 
Thanks for letting me know this group exists! Glad I'm not alone in seeing through the veil and there are other like minded gamers out there that understand why some form of challenge within a game is important. By no means am I suggesting every game needs to be "hard" but making them nearly impossible to lose imho is nothing more than a cash grab move by devs and invalidates the efforts of every other player who earned their way through the story.
Moonlight 15 Dec, 2025 @ 11:11am 
My counter argument is what are you learning from using assist mode? The game themes about struggling, the platforming is like a manifestation of the protagonist struggling.
Chocos Ramabotti 1 Dec, 2025 @ 10:38am 
Hey there, thanks for taking interest and commenting I open up a discussion thread as it's easier to navigate discussion not being limited by characters. There are some points I can adress.
Puntato 1 Dec, 2025 @ 5:57am 
celeste, again, is primarily intended to share a story and a moral. although the game is renowned for its challenging platforming, and the moral is partially about overcoming challenge, to claim that is all it is meant to be is totally reductive. it does not, in my opinion, take away from the game to offer the assist modes that it does, and i do not feel that the game must be unrelentingly challenging for its message to work.



basically, this group appears to be totally against assist modes and features as a blanket opinion, which i feel is rather unfair to the games you are reviewing and harming your credibility as a curator.
i'll stay in here for now, because it would be nice to see this group develop into something with a bit more nuance, but currently i offer no support.

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Puntato 1 Dec, 2025 @ 5:57am 
another crab's treasure prioritises it's message over all else; this is particularly clear in the very mediocre ending which sacrifices the experience and the story to promote the message. in a game like that, i have no qualms with the difficulty options, because the point of the game is NOT to be dark souls. in this way, labelling it as a soulslike is actually quite detrimental to the game, and i take major issue with the existence of the soulslike genre as a whole (it is a terrible genre that doesn't actually have any practical use as a game category), but that's irrelevant to this discussion.

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