What Games Do Difficulty Levels Well?

[Moonface]

Most of the time, difficulty levels in games involve just making enemies and/or the player tougher/weaker and not much else, and in my experience most of the time it just makes most enemy encounters feel like a slog rather than an actually more interesting challenge. However, there are some games that I think did a good job with a harder difficulty:

Fallout 4 does a pretty good job with Survival Mode adding in a lot of gameplay changes as well as doing a better approach to enemy toughness. In Survival, the player deals 1.5 damage but receives 2x damage, so all fights are a lot more dangerous because everyone hits harder rather than just enemies being harder and the player being weaker. I chose Survival when I played Fallout 4 for the first time and I really liked the glass cannon feeling that I and every enemy had.

Dying Light is mostly the typical approach of tougher enemies and a weaker player, but I did like that Nightmare made nights longer (even though you can skip the night by sleeping) because I love playing that game during the night since you get double XP, and the threat of losing all my XP if I die keeps it always feeling tense even when I get every skill in the game whereas on lower difficulties the lack of consequences make it hard to be on edge when out at night. However, I do think Hard difficulty is done really badly in this game and I would never recommend it to anyone, as the flashlight in Hard is constantly going out and it gets really annoying having to keep shaking the controller. Nightmare doesn't have that, so the flashlight remains on like it does at lower difficulties but it doesn't make the game feel easier, it just stops the feature from becoming annoying. Normal or Nightmare are the only two difficulties this game has to me; Hard doesn't exist because it just doesn't grant enough perks to make up for the nerfs.

[ShiraNoMai]

I think Hades has one of the coolest difficulty additory systems I've seen in a game. Like, pick your own difficulty basically, and add as much or as little as you like!

[Moonface]

Dang I completely forgot about that system in Hades. Now I'm trying to rack my brain about other games with a similar approach...

I had this game come to mind but it isn't really the same at all which would be Sekiro with the Demon Bell and Kuro's Charm, which can make the game harder but are entirely optional. I never really found either to be worth using though. I also can't think of any other FromSoft games I've played providing options to increase the difficulty like that.