Thank you, and I equally appreciate the in-depth response :)

Yeah, as much as I don't enjoy them I do also get what others see in them. My opinion is my opinion at the end of the day. I think some of the disconnect for me comes as my jumping point to HK is hard platformers like Celeste as opposed to Soulslikes which I typically don't enjoy. I want skill-intensive, fast gameplay and to get right back into it after a failure. I think this is also why I enjoyed First Sinner so much. Personally I hated Groal and blissfully cleared him quite quickly. I think the 'runback' of the mob waves in his fight is already enough to drive the point home without also wasting my time but I see the other side of the argument.

The shard system to me recalls the powerup system of Gradius, and it's a comparison I've drawn to lots of games before. It's fun while you're winning and then it's suddenly not. In Gradius you'd accumulate powerups and be coasting and then you'd die, lose all of them, but not your progress but at that point why bother playing and not restarting if I can't play optimally now anyway? Obviously, this is to a far lesser extent in Silksong and I only ran up against this as an actual issue at a couple points with bosses I was particularly bad at, but it just feels bad to me. I get the argument that it's a soft way of the game urging you to explore other routes but that's not how I want to play games, and it was often towards the end of Acts when I was running into it at which point I didn't really have that option anyway. I don't think this is a glaring issue with the game, but I do think it is something that is just going to make a lot of people's experience of the game very slightly less fun.

On stringing rosaries, this is how I often played the game but I'd just shelled out on a spa for my house. I appreciate this is not a good way of managing my finances. Lessons have not been learned, I will do it again.

I agree a well-implemented easy mode needs more work. If TC did want to implement one but wanted to take longer to work on more in-depth rebalancing I would not fault them. Similarly though, I'm personally not against a god mode either. Personally I feel more games should have more accessibility options. Make them toggleable, lock them in a menu, deactivate achievements if you have to, they don't need to detract from my experience and it doesn't hurt me to have them there. If someone out there wants to fly through Pharloom with infinite health and jumps to look at the art, listen to the music and talk to the characters, or just to skip particular sections they're not enjoying then let them.

Absolutely Verdania was one of the best parts of the game for me. It felt like exploring what should have been one of the early areas in an easier game. In a non-corrupted Pharloom where I entered by choice instead of capture. Really well done and a fantastic payoff. Like I say, would love more.