26 hours later, I got the true ending for Ender: Magnolia.

Excellent metroidvania.
Medium difficulty is just above average, meaning I had to customize my gear for certain bosses, and not just use my exploration build all the time, but I was rarely frustrated from failing encounters.
Controls are good, and hit boxes feel fair.

I missed metroidvanias that aren't 2D Darksouls, not everything has to be so brutal that I have to memorize enemy patterns and animations, they're no longer enemies at that point, they're state machines.
It takes me out of the game.

Thankfully Ender Magnolia was not like that.

9/10 much recommend

@coded_artist the obsession with making every game ball bustingly difficult was already bad enough when it started over a decade ago. Feels like every other game is chasing that now. Like how am I supposed to immerse myself in a world if I keep getting destroyed and then punished for it? Not my thing at all.

@beardalaxy @coded_artist I thought people were complaining about modern games being too easy. Have the tables turned?

@xianc78 @coded_artist the issue with modern games being too easy, from my knowledge, usually comes from things like "yellow paint" and the characters pointing out obvious as fuck things, or just straight up spoiling puzzles. that's bad too. the "let's make this shit super hard" thing happens more often in the indie games space, whereas the "yellow paint" issue is more often in AAAs.

@beardalaxy @coded_artist I remember hearing that the whole "making games as easy as possible" mentality came from the fact that a lot of people have games in their backlog that they never finished.

When it comes to indies, it's mostly just copying the practice of old games were you make the game longer by making it harder or it's a response to the practice of AAA devs making games piss easy.

There clearly is a market for ridiculously hard games, but I don't think they should be the norm, even for indies. Indies want to be the exact opposite of Triple-A games, but this ends up making the vast majority of indie games the exact same, which is why you see so many Metroidvanias and Roguelikes, as they aren't common in the Triple-A sphere. There is an untapped market for indie games that emulate the double-A titles of the pre-7th gen days, which should be easier with engines like Godot, but it seems like nobody got the memo.

@Pawlicker @beardalaxy @coded_artist I'm surprised that PS1 slop is more popular than N64 slop. I know that the PS1 outsold the N64, but the N64 is much more fondly remembered. But it seems like in terms of actual homebrew games, it seems like the N64 is the more popular choice, while I never hear about the PS1, so maybe N64 fans would rather make actual N64 games.

Also please don't call the PS1 the PSX. I never owned a single Sony console and even I know that the actual PSX was a Japan-only PS2-DVR hybrid.