Hogwarts Legacy isn't a hard game even on its hardest difficulty setting. As long as you learn how to block and parry with Protego, you're nearly untouchable in combat. And the rest of the game's puzzles and beast catching are just as simple, if a little grindy.
The Accio Masochism mod pack wants to make it all much, much worse.
Modder MBiggs2334 says Accio Masochism is aimed at making "the combat a little more Soulslike and the general pacing of the game a little slower." It includes 14 categories of mods, each tackling different parts of the game, including challenges, economy, creatures, enemies, experience, and spells. All of them make everything weaker and harder to obtain, which, if you ask me, isn't actually very Soulslike, but the creator encourages you to pick and choose which mods to enable.
The individual changes are granular. The enemy mods can make enemies attack more frequently, deal more damage, have more health, scale above your current level, and come in larger packs. And spells can be tweaked to have longer cooldowns, deal less damage, and stun enemies for a shorter period of time. Almost every part of the game can be turned against you.
"So I read diligently through the fixes this mod does and a big majority of them simply just make the game more grindy instead of challenging," NexusMod commenter Swordy22 wrote. "Now I would be fine with a little more grind IF the reward was more substantial."
MBiggs2334 replied to Swordy22's pretty fair criticism of the mod—difficulty should be more interesting than punishing, as far as I'm concerned—and said that they will consider that as they continue to develop the mods. Swordy22 suggested having powerful potions drop from enemies, which, according to MBiggs2334, isn't feasible with modding tools at the moment. They did say they'll look into removing the dodge and parry alerts to make combat slightly more unpredictable.
To install the mod, you need download the mod pack and move the .pak file into a mod folder in the Hogwarts Legacy directory. MBiggs2334 recommends starting a new character or using one that is close to the start of the game so you don't find yourself underpowered and under-geared.
It's not a bad start for a difficulty mod, but I would like to see tweaks that add complexity to spell combinations and potions to give the combat more weight. Ruthless difficulty with nothing to strategize with is about as boring as easy combat. Hogwarts Legacy has a list of almost interesting talents and spells that a mod like this could make a lot more satisfying to use.
