Breathedge 2 Difficulty Settings: Standard to Story Mode

The modes

• Standard — the default. Food, water and fatigue drain were reduced by 15% in Hotfix 0.8.6 after launch-weekend feedback.
• Easy — a step down, kept in the 0.8.6 notes as the first alternative.
• Story — “extremely slow oxygen consumption, having tons of time to explore”, per a player who asked on the forum before buying and then confirmed it. This is the mode for people who, as one review put it, “dread timers”.
• Hard — exists; one forum regular played the chapter on it and reports it is fine with preparation (ten-plus water, nutri-packs and oxyworms carried at all times).

Switching

You can change difficulty at any point without starting a new game — the developers said so in the 0.8.6 notes. Nothing reported so far ties achievements to a mode, and the achievement list contains no difficulty-specific entries.

Which to pick

If you played the first game on its easy mode with no oxygen depletion, Story is the closest thing here. If you want the survival loop but found standard “almost unplayable” on launch day, try Standard again after 0.8.6 first — the drain cut was aimed at exactly that complaint — and drop to Easy if the frozen area still eats your supplies.

Steam Deck note

The forum’s Story-mode player is on a Steam Deck and reports one visual bug after the snowman quest (two diagonal lines across the screen and the Man clutching his belly in the inventory view with full stats). There is no Deck rating on the store yet; see system requirements.