“Hello, player! You’ve failed at finishing this task within our time limit ten times in a row now. Are you still having fun? If yes, press A and keep trying. Otherwise, press B and we’ll remove the time limit. Or press X just to mark this as done and move on in the game.”

Adaptation and respect for a player’s individual abilities should be part of every single game. That includes games with time-limited goals. Those time limits are selected and tuned to provide a challenge to some class of players. If you’re outside that class, that arbitrary limit should not present an insurmountable obstacle that ends all pleasure and progress in the game. Sadly, I’m playing an otherwise wonderful game that requires me to do something I can’t seem to accomplish in the given time. The result is that the game is over for me, since this mission is mandatory to continuing the story. The game has ruined itself.

I greatly enjoyed Sunset Overdrive and its first DLC, so I recently downloaded the wonderfully-named second DLC, Dawn of the Rise of the Fallen Machines. Generally speaking, it’s more great Sunset Overdrive fun. With a huge, monstrous, glaring exception.

There’s a mission (Monster’s Ball) where you must do some stuff to achieve 1000 points in a given amount of time. It’s hard. Frankly, it’s too hard. For me, anyway. I’ve tried this a dozen times or more and I can get close, but I can’t crack 1000. And now I’m fed up, upset, frustrated, and unhappy. All I want to do is skip this aggravating torture test and get on with the game.

But as far as I can tell, there is no way to skip this mission. And I cannot complete it, so I’m at a dead end. I bought this DLC because the main campaign was largely so much fun. There was none (or very little) of this timed stuff in the main campaign or first DLC. The goal was to run around and have fun, nibbling away at missions, on your own schedule, in your own way. That’s what made it fun. The sandbox, the freedom. This arbitrary time constraint drains the game of all its pleasure, and turns it into an awful, horrible grind.

To make this even more frustrating, this mission requires me to master a completely new and unexpected game mechanic. I don’t merely need to be excellent at something I’ve been doing throughout the game; I need to excel at something completely novel.

This is unforgivable. I paid my money. I want to play the game. But my reflexes and timing don’t fall into the zone that this arbitrary time limit was chosen to reward. How could there not be a way to skip this? At the very least, how could it not adapt? After failing it 3 times, or 10, or 20, how could the game not offer me the chance to lower the point goal, or extend the time limit, or even just remove the damn time limit entirely?

To those purists who feel that a player must accomplish every event as the designers intended, I say fine, then you force yourself to repeat missions dozens of times until you manage to succeed (by luck or skill). To those who say, “This mission isn’t that hard, just keep trying,” I say fine, I’m glad that you found it easy or even tolerable, but it’s too hard for me. To those who value their bragging rights via achievements and trophies, I say fine, when I choose to modify or skip a mission then I just shouldn’t get any related achievements or trophies (the game should warn me of this, of course). And finally, to those who say I shouldn’t be able to skip something that is frustrating me because that’s not how a game should be played, I say screw that kind of controlling fundamentalism; how I choose to play my game is no business of yours.

By failing to respect me, this game has in a single mission plunged from an exciting, happy, fun experience that I played for pleasure into a frustrating, aggravating, arbitrary taskmaster that I must walk away from, regretting the time invested and the money spent. Just a few days ago I was telling someone about how wonderful this DLC was. Now I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.