No Punishment Is Boring

So recently I've been replaying Torchlight on PC, a hack and slash RPG on PC that plays basically the same as something like Diablo.  I quite enjoy this game but there's one thing that really irks me about the title is that the game is too easy.  It's not just Torchlight that's guilty of this but this is the one I've played most recently so I'll be using it as my example.

So Torchlight isn't by itself an easy game.  The game involves large amounts of enemies swarming you ALL the damn time and you have to utilize a decent amount of skills, planning and resource management if you want to make it through the dungeon.  However all of the challenge that the game poses is COMPLETELY pointless because death doesn't actually mean anything.  When you die you get to make a choice; come back where you fell for an exp/gold loss, start the floor over with a gold loss or go back to town for no penalty.  This sounds like a decent enough punishment but EXP is easy to accumulate, money rains down on you like a stripper in an expensive club and floors aren't actually all that big so even starting that over is more of a minor annoyance than anything else. Not only that but when you do come back everything that was dead stays dead, so even if you suck with some bone headed perseverance you can make it through any obstacle.

The game does feature some harder modes but these are all rendered pointless by the fact that the punishments for death don't actually matter and you can tell that the developers understand this with the inclusion of a hardcore mode.  Hardcore mode introduces perma-death to a character who dies but this is just jumping to the other side of the spectrum.  Perma-death is acceptable in a rougelike because you can, in a lot of them, clear the dungeon in one sitting.  Torchlight requires quite a few hours of play to get through so the idea of getting far and then losing all that progress  because you zoned out and didn't hit the heal fast enough sounds more annoying than anything else. 

Torchlight isn't the only game to do this, Bioshock being the other HUGE offender for this kind of thing.  You have this beautiful, atmospheric and immersive world and then you realize that none of it matters because you just INSTANTLY RESPAWN when you die and you lose a bit of money.  Again, money is so easy to get in that game that the penalty doesn't matter so it turns the big daddies from actual intimidating encounters to minor annoyance that needs dealing with.  Again you can turn off Vita Chambers if you do want more of a challenge but why can't the base game just be challenging rather than forcing me to turn on all these extra challenge modes if I don't want to be babied.

I don't dislike either of the games I've mentioned, I look at them quite fondly but this aspect of them is a frustrating blotch on what is otherwise a great gaming experience.  Going too far the OTHER way is also no good (Fuck you R-Type/Gradius) but that's another post for another time.  I'm not asking for every game to be Dark Souls but Jesus H give me SOME challenge.