That’s not tension, that’s edging. You can complain about it all you like, but fundamentally you’re ignoring the design issue here when it looks like the real answer is that it just isn’t for you. The issue of accessibility is difficult because – however much some advocates like to frame it in an abstract, deductive fashion about tailoring one’s experience – the reality of a lot of the “inaccessible” elements of games is that players, when given the opportunity, have a high propensity to “optimize the fun out of the game,” i.e. to do what is less fun because it is simply better strategically for the goal of “winning the game,” which is typically something you kind of gravitate towards when you play a game. There are some design features that are just bullshit and should be gotten rid of, like “mash the x button to escape” or whatever (and I think some Souls grabs actually have that and I won’t defend that shit), but many of the practices that have survived to this day have reasons beyond inertia and gatekeeping for their existence, and calling for their removal with no interest in either what those reasons might be or what could be a genuine replacement is just masturbation.

On the plus side, you can pause Sekiro, so maybe you can give that one a shot. “Doesn’t that demonstrate that you should be able to pause in all of them?” Probably, yeah, at least if you’re in “offline mode”.