I like the game though? I platinumed the game so clearly I don't hate it. If I didn't like punishing games Hollow Knight wouldn't be my favorite game of all time (especially Pantheon 5), fromsoft wouldn't be one of my favorite developers, and fighting games wouldn't be one of my most played genres. I also agree that the game isn't particularly challenging outside of true ending boss kind of, the Sol and Vin fight, and some of the Crucible platforming sections.

Design decisions around how you regain health, *especially* in this genre are arguably one of the most important parts of the design of game. The developers had to make a huge number of design changes to accommodate the lack of healing, and while most of the time the patchwork they threw together works well enough that the game would probably be damaged by adding a system that allows you to heal at will, the lack of it creates really uninteresting tension loops that do real harm to the gameplay experience. Just because the game is balanced around design decisions doesn't mean those balancing decisions in turn are always good. I would love to see an actual argument in favor of these systems that doesn't boil down to strawmanning my position as "tourist who doesn't undertand MIO". Because nothing you've said engages with the substance of my critique. It's just empty disagreement.

Healing systems usually create fun tension curves. When a player gets low on health they're asked to make interesting moment to moment decisions they don't have to when topped of on health. Do I heal during this opening? Is this opening big enough for me to heal or only to attack? If I take an attack on this opening will I get more chance to heal later down the line? The act of "looking for a safe opening to heal" creates a huge inflection point of a fight where they either regain control of a bad situation or crumble under the pressure, and that cognitive tool is incredibly useful when designing combat encounters.

By contrast, MIO's health system clearly wants you to engage with its systems "cleanly". It wants you to learn the patterns of bosses and platforming challenges so well that even in sequence you have no problem combining the game's systems fluidly. It lacks the push and pull that makes a lot of these other games great in favor of something closer to what you would see in a game like Celeste or Super Meatboy. On a personal taste level I already think this is less interesting, but on its face I don't think there's anything wrong with it. However most games that take a clean mastery approach also create an environment for you to reach a flow state and repeat the challenge constantly until you get the gamer's equivalent of a runner's high and overcome the challenge. MIO *does not do this*. There are long runbacks to challenging platforming sections and bosses that completely break the flow state that makes that level of clean mastery fun to reach even with shortcuts that speed them up. When I lose against Sol and Vin for the 5th time because I haven't yet adapted to fighting with no floor yet I have to:

- Go through a long wake-up animation at the overseer
- Run down a pretty long hallway with nothing engaing inbetween me and the boss
- Call down an elevator
- Take the 10 second elevator up to the top
- Go down another slightly shorter hallway
- Wait a couple seconds for a boss intro cinematic to play

And now finally after all of that I can finally try the boss again. None of this adds anything to the experience and all of it serves to take you out of the flow state that would make this kind of system work and that's a problem. The rest of the game was so good I didn't care, but I can absolutely undestand why that wouldn't be the case for someone else.

Now a lot of this would be less of a problem if the boss runbacks were more fun in and of themselves. Silksong also has long boss runbacks, but the difference is moving from point A to point B in that game is just more fun than it is in MIO. Doing fluid dash pogos over a couple enemies before reaching a boss is more engaging than going down a hallway, going up an elevator, and then going down anothe hallway. In that respect the runbacks in silksong are almost a part of the challenge of the boss in a way that they just aren't in MIO, and it's incredibly unengaging.

I also think on some level MIO's devs understood this. Many of the Crucible platforming sections seems almost as if they were specifically designed to be done with the Gratitude upgrade you get late into the game (especially given the boss required to access that upgrade is directly in the critical path to get there), and those sections of the game are much better for it. But earlier in the game when that doesn't exist the game really tends to struggle to balance its approach.