

Last Judge runback didn’t really bother me. Just sprint straight out, with a few properly-timed jumps, and you skip every enemy and reach the boss in about 30 seconds.
Bilewater was nonsense, even after learning how to run it perfectly. And I LIKE Bilewater, as an area.
I’m definitely overstating for effect, but yeah, to me, the game very much feels like they wanted to cater to the inhuman speedrunning and challenge running crowd from Hollow Knight, and made things unreasonable for causal/average gamers.
Maybe my bias is in having played and loved Hollow Knight first, but I NEVER felt like I was being given an unreasonable challenge in Hollow Knight. And Hollow Knight, by the late and post game, is HARD. They just managed to balance the difficulty curve so masterfully, that every escalation felt natural, even exciting.
Silksong, overall, did NOT do this for me. The early game felt obnoxiously punishing, the mid-game completely fell off a cliff into easy, once you get a handful of key upgrades, and the late game just varied all across the spectrum.