Enders Lilies stands a a beautiful game, but it became too hard for me at the end. Enders follows a young, pure priestess as she works to purify the horrors caused by the Blight, a mysterious energy and rain that corrupts people. To combat these undead, the kingdom turns the Blight into a weapon. The kingdom finds a way to infect people with the Blight to make them immortal but slowly the Blight robs them of their self. The White Priestess has the ability to purify people of this Blight, freeing their souls from an eternity of suffering. As one of the White Priestess’s acolytes, you set out to find her and purify the tormented souls along the way. The melancholy of the game and the dark ruins hearken back to Castlevania and Metroid.

I enjoyed the game, at first, but it soon became too hard for me. The highest praise I can give a video game is describing it as fun. Enders Lilies started as fun and challenging, but as it neared the end, the fun ended. As I get older, I find myself not enjoying hard games. I prefer good stories and gameplay with difficulty I can tailor. I play games on easy or normal nowadays. Enders didn’t have any difficulty settings, which for the last 4 areas and boss fights, set me to cursing. Now, I associate swearing with immaturity and ignorance. Yet even I begin to swear when a boss kills me over 30 times. This was the point where the game fell apart for me. I stopped having fun. The game began to bring out an ugly side of me, as ugly as the corruption you have to fight through in the game. Of course, some of this ugliness came from problems I’ve been facing recently. Venting such held frustrations toward a video game, I suppose, is a way to safely release them. But this is just feeding the wrong wolf. Venting only feeds negative behavior and thinking. Rather, you should observe and accept your inner problems with doing what you can to remedy them with kindness, just as the Priestess purifies her enemies with her kindness in Enders Lilies.

So I went from enjoying a beautiful game to falling into frustrated disappointment with how difficult and unfun the game became. The game also stripped away some of my self control to reveal my discontent with problems I cannot resolve outside of changing my mindset and accepting those problems as outside my control, just as the game’s difficulty level stepped beyond my ability to deal with. I stopped playing the game, but I can’t stop dealing with the difficulties of a cultural environment that works against my principles.

I often write about how video games and anime matter. Stories matter because they shape our thinking. How we react to stories can reveal what we are dealing with at the moment we consume the content. I started playing Enders Lilies before various trifles (trifling but still troubling) hit my life. As the game grew more difficult, the trifles became more needling, and so instead of my usual calmness and patience, my lack of agency and frustration with that boiled over and targeted the game. So I cussed out the bosses as they murdered me over and over again with my cursing growing more vile until I finally realized what was happening. I stepped back then and turned to my journal to work out the problem. Enders Lilies became a call to mindfulness. I concluded I had to shift my thinking about the situations that led to my outburst toward the game since the situations sit beyond my power to change, just as I couldn’t make the game easier. My outbursts were absurd since the game wouldn’t listen, but the reasons behind the outbursts–with the game acting as a conduit–aren’t absurd. Emotions point toward problems that need addressed even if addressing them is accepting you can only change your response.

After working in my journal and finding some peace, I proclaimed Enders Lilies finished and removed it from my Switch. That was my response to the game’s difficulty for me. Within that response sits my acceptance for getting older and losing my reaction abilities. I was better at reaction-focused games when I was younger. Although I’m healthier and stronger than I was in my teens and 20s and 30s, my reaction abilities and ability to memorize patterns diminishes. In Enders Lilies, the soldiers and priestess caretakers take on undead immortality because they couldn’t accept their limitations in the face of the Blight. They couldn’t accept their reality. As you get older, you will find your facilities and abilities diminish compared to each decade before. Despite your effort to remain flexible, your thinking will harden. I favor easier games and don’t find difficult games as appealing as I had in the past. Enders Lilies is, perhaps, as difficult as Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse which I’ve defeated many times when I was young. Yet Enders Lilies, I won’t mince words, made me rage-quit. Some of this was the timing of the game with various personal challenges. Some of this was because I value my time differently. Over the past several years, many people around me have died. Most were lost to COVID. Just earlier this year, a friend died from a heart condition. I had just spoken with him a week or so before. Then he was gone. I’m keenly aware of how death sits on my shoulder, waiting. As I played Enders Lilies and died over and over, this realization hit me. The time I was spending with the game took time from writing or drawing or reading. How we use our time is a zero-sum game. Every moment you use on one action will prevent you from doing all other actions during that moment.

Enders Lilies is a beautiful game. It has a nice sadness and reflection to its story, but this is marred by its late-game difficulty level. The difficulty might be fine for you, but, at least for now, it became insurmountable for me. However, as I outlined, the game pointed out how I needed to step back and do some inner work and reflect. I didn’t like the conclusion: I could do nothing to change the situations, but I could change my response. Here again Enders Lilies provided another lesson. I turned the game off and filed it away in my collection. So too I decided the best way to handle situations I have no power over is to detach and turn off and allow the situations to resolve themselves: to trust God to handle them. In this way, entertainment can act as a helper or a guide that points to what you do wrong.