Appropriately balancing a videogame's difficulty is essential to provide players with a pleasant experience. In a recent study, Korean scientists developed a novel approach for dynamic difficulty adjustment where the players' emotions are estimated using in-game data, and the difficulty level is tweaked accordingly to maximize player satisfaction. Their efforts could contribute to balancing the difficulty of games and making them more appealing to all types of players. Difficulty is a tough aspect to balance in video games. Some people prefer video games that present a challenge whereas others enjoy an easy experience.

As a one-armed orphan – a disability that you might think would disqualify him from the opportunity to work as a lone assassin in 16th-century Japan – Sekiro is well acquainted with disadvantage. Still, a smooth sea never made a skilful mariner, as they used to say, and these physical and psychological handicaps have only served to strengthen this shinobi, who, with a variety of terrifying prosthetics, must now avenge his fallen master by taking down the Ashina clan. Up close, this is grindcore game-making, in which you are forced to watch the lolling of your victims' astonished mouths as you trace a katana across their necks. This world of blood, fire and pitter-patter footsteps across bamboo rooftops calls to mind Toshiya Fujita's Lady Snowblood or Akira Kurosawa's Sanjuro in both theme and body count. But in its moments of exquisite pause, it's also a game of refined cinematic style, the traumatised ninja silhouetted against a flaring sunset, while the reeds rustle and soothe.