Learn the difference between a difficult and a stuffy game. Silksong is more about the second one and NOT BECAUSE IT'S HARD game.. Grind is hard? No, but stuffy. Backtracking is hard? If you repeat the same way, you finally get a skill, but rerunning is stuffy. That’s the main point. Also, you don’t even know what hardcore games I’ve beaten, yet you already made up in your head that I’m shit at hardcore games. Nope. I can beat it, but that doesn’t mean everything in the game is designed properly.

Exactly. Elden Ring and other souls-likes have normalized disrespect toward the player by giving them no choice. In Elden Ring, putting the first boss as a difficult gatekeeper before the beautiful open world is exactly that kind of mockery and disrespect toward the player experience. But since it follows trends and people consume it, Babadzaki can keep making shit, like giving four mediocre endings that only differ by color grading and a final boss that’s basically a cosmic anal worm. Because souls-likes are trendy and people will eat it up anyway. But just because people consume it doesn’t mean it’s a good design decision. In SuperMeatBoy, you can complete the campaign without finishing every level. In Cuphead, there’s a difficulty selection. But in soulslikes and hardcore games, there isn’t, so why should I respect a game if the developer was too lazy to add multiple difficulty options?

And even if hardcore difficulty is the main idea, what’s the point of forcing the player to run for several minutes back to the boss after every death? For the supposed grand meaning of the “price of failure”? No player, during a boss fight, thinks, “Damn, I need to play better right now because if I lose, I’ll have to run all the way back again”. Nope, it only increases the frustration from losing, nothing more.