FTL. At least until you've beaten the game several times

Anything where you're more interested in the story than the challenge.

So... story-driven games.

Dwarf Fortress! Turn off attacks and sieges and just let your dwarves die by your own incompetence instead

Personally, I am playing Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 on easy. They come from an era where if you aren't suffering through it then you must really suck. Personally, I don't have time to fight the same boss for an hour only to die when he gets down to the last 5% and start over again, I only get a few hours after work to game. However, the story is honestly pretty good, and I recommend them - if you play on easy.

Three games came to mind just now, for slightly different reasons.

Similarly to others, just for feeling good: Earth Defense Force (whichever release, really). While it's great to have a challenge in the missions, getting through the game, finding a good mission to farm weapons on, then using those fun weapons to destroy horses of insects and aliens is just so fun. And some missions can feel a bit BS with the weapons you might have available normally.

I would also actually say Baldur's Gate 3. I know a lot of people enjoy the tactical side of things, but my opinion is that the DnD 5e ruleset kinda just sucks for a video game. I play it as a TTRPG, it's fine. But I found rolling badly in something my character's meant to be good at just so frustrating. This let me actually explore the story and world my own way, which was way more fun to me than restarting combat because I got unlucky.

That one might be controversial, but I was also speed running completion because I wanted to know conclude the story and see the world, but something about the game just didn't click for me.

And finally, because I think it's a fantastic game that deserves attention (with the best soundtrack I've heard in a while): Rabbit and Steel. It's a brutally hard roguelike bullet hell that's based on dungeon raid boss mechanics from FFXIV (which I haven't played, but that's what everyone says). The difficulty will make you want to not play it, and for me stuff only really clicked once I unlocked my penultimate class. I can now heat Hard fairly consistently, but it has taken a lot of runs to get there. No shame in admitting that those started from Cute and Normal and involved me grinding out all the unlocks by charging through Cute difficulty.

So really, the summary of this far too long reply is: just lower the difficulty when it's frustrating or keeping you too much from getting to the fun stuff. You can always try again on a higher difficulty later.

NieR Automata, for basically the same reasons. Hard mode is filled with instakills everywhere and is really just a damage multiplier, so you have to be the right kind of person for that. If you're not, Normal is probably already fairly easy because of all the auto-heals, but the pacing can be a bit slow for something where most enemies aren't dangerous. Might as well play Easy and play for the story.

I'm taking this as an opportunity to illuminate issues with particular games, since... well, play on easy if you wanna, naturally. So, for my recommendation: If you don't use the mod that makes all weapons very dangerous, Mass Effect Andromeda. Without a mod to speed it up a lot, every fight becomes ages of tedium. There's one weapon that can be made any good and even that doesn't make fights bearable. You're basically sitting for like ten minutes at a time hosing down foes with off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated and leave. It's quite bad. Just play it on easy. Not just easy, the easiest easy. Whatever the lowest difficulty is, pick that one. There's just no point in anything higher unless you've got infinite patience. And ammo. Bleeegh.

So, generally I play things on easier difficulties when I feel like anything higher will get tedious rather than interesting. The Mass Effect trilogy, I play on the maximum difficulty because that adds a bunch of mechanics that give me more to work around. Fighting armoured enemies should be done differently from fights against shielded enemies, that sort of thing. Enemies become more dangerous when they're not shut down so there's that encouragement to get them figured out before they bring out the scary attacks. Some games just increase health amounts, which... okay, just shoot them more? 😴 Boring.

tl;dr: Games like Mass Effect Andromeda where difficulty settings only increase tedium. Am never gonna want to crank up the tedium setting.

Uncharted on console/with a controller. Unless you really love sitting behind knee-high-cover™ I highly recommend playing them on easy and like an older Tomb Raider game. Much more fun that way.

Project Zomboid. That’s the most recent game I can think of where I reduced the difficulty (and that’s coming from someone that has nearly 400 hours into Elden Ring). It’s not that the game is tougher than ER or anything like that. It has a ton of cool mechanics and detail that are really enjoyable if you’re into zombie survival games, but the zombies can really swarm you in that game and you won’t live long.

It also has sandbox mode where there’s no zombies and you can focus on farming, building, etc.

I would recommend Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. The normal mode is already stupid easy, so you feel like a god on easy mode.

It's a fantasy setting with a ton of story and lore, so if you don't care about that it may not be for you.

I think easy game modes take away what a great game makes a great game. I'm not sure if I can explain this with words, but if you are going to play on easy, then it means you don't want to play. At that point, its probably not a game for you. I'm talking across all kind of genres and type of games. However, if a game is unfair or badly designed, that is the moment when I would recommend using easy mode. And it depends on how the difficulty scaling is implemented. Some easy modes are really dumb and take away the core principles of the game, while others are very intelligently realized.

Your example is a great example of what I meant by that. You are not interested into the combat, therefore made it easy so it does not get in your way. You didn't turn it down because its unfair. What happens is, you are actively playing a game, which you don't want to. I don't know what exactly scales in that game, so maybe its not a bad easy mode at all, but can't judge the game.

I'm currently playing Metal Gear Solid 5 for the first time (just played a few hours on launch and now I'm back to it) on normal difficulty. The game can be brutal at times and there were multiple moments when I almost quit the game. Yet I did not turn easy mode, and now I'm happy that I overcome the challenge naturally. And that's what I mean. I you turn the game to easy mode, then you get into these habits of not solving the challenges.

This might be a weird one as the game is often blamed for not having difficulty settings, but Elden Ring. While it doesn't have a straight up setting that says easy, there's a lot of ways to make the game easier.

I really hate how Fromsoft put the "Prepare to Die" tagline onto Dark Souls when it came to PC and seems to develop into more bullshitty scenarios that kill you in unpredictable ways. Elden Ring has for example a lot of enemies that hold their attack for unintuitively long just to catch you off guard and punish you when you roll on the intuitive timing.

The community is to blame as well for the bad reputation of the games with people making fun of others using big shields and summons to beat the game. And herein lie the difficulty options of Elden Ring:

• Using greatshields makes a lot of the game a lot easier
• Using spirit ashes makes places that allow them a lot easier (as opposed to player and npc summons they don't affect the enemies health pool)
• Using magic allows you to attack with little risk to yourself

You can also summon other players but i don't know if that makes the game easier: As noted above it raised the enemies HP so everyone has to do their part to succeed but if you are a caster you can mostly sit back and blast enemies from afar while your summons tank. Using player summons also opens your world up for invasions and while the invader usually is in a 1v3 situation they also usually know what they are doing and how to deal with such situations.

If you're still stuck at a boss, just go somewhere else and explore. The game is designed to teach you that lesson with the first actual boss but a lot of people take it as the game just being hard.

All of this is to say: it is okay to use the games integrated mechanics that make it easy. It doesn't make you less of a gamer. Elden Ring has such a beautifully crafted world and if you're looking very interesting lore and it's a shame that seemingly all people talk about is the difficulty. It is actually the easiest Fromsoft title if you want it to be as it gives you a lot more and more powerful tools than the other games.

(Also if you see a chonky looking gal in black full body armour called Sieglinde, summon me. I have great heals, a big chonky sword and love helping people 😘)

Literally any fire emblem game, I might just have dum tho

The Ascent.

Bit of diablo, bit of Borderlands; good game but lacks variety and also has some insane jumps in the difficulty. Playing on Normal is hard enough with no extra payout. Hard is impossible unless you are absolutely perfect in execution. Might as well put it on Easy and just have fun endlessly blasting punks, mutants and machines because when you start dying in the first 2 seconds of every boss fight, it stops being fun.

XCom

Uncharted, especially the final installment. On normal and higher difficulty dealing with the enemies becomes a bit of a chore: they force you to hide a lot, as well as waste entire clips of ammo on a single guy. On easy the game becomes forgiving enough food you too start pulling off cool stunts: swinging on ropes, shooting during a climb/jump, etc.

It's just more fun on easy.

Maybe it’s a skill issue, but this game was Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 for me. I think I played it on the second easiest difficulty. On higher difficulties, the enemies move much faster and do more damage, and you start to realize how inaccurate the guns are. On top of that, the weapons are projectile weapons, so you’re aiming inaccurate and slow projectiles at stormtroopers shuffling left and right rapidly. I think it’s much more fun to just play on the first or second difficulty.