There's "hard" and then there's "I feel like my controller isn't working."

There's "hard" and then there's "requiring such pixel-perfect precision that you're just going to be stuck."

I like hard games, but this didn't feel hard to me, it felt shitty.

The marketing is pretty pretentious ("huhr duhr remember when vidya was HARD?"...failing to realize that not every game made before 1998 was an exercise in frustration) and there are simply better games that accomplish what it set out to do.

Cursed Castilla came out a year prior, actually looked like an arcade or Genesis game and had far better level design based around strict jump arcs and the need to think one step ahead since you didn't have the free-flowing movement of something like Super Mario. If you need a more modern example, Curse of the Moon went for the same thing with great results. Neither game needed to tell you it was "so hard" or "so retro", either.

Seems like this has its fans though. To be fair, it did release before the whole retro revival really blew up...but it just didn't feel any better to play now than it did upon release for me.

The game's difficulty comes mainly from: A) old style jump controls (ie. you can't change trajectory once in the air, except with the double jump), B) somewhat newbie-hostile level design that results in plenty of trial-and-error gameplay, C) unforgiving health system where you lose gear when you take damage, and D) long distances between checkpoints.

And yet... this isn't as rage-inducing as I would've expected.

It kind of reminds me of Celeste, in the way that you first need to figure out a sequence of actions, and then execute it with little room for improvization or mistakes. Also in the way that you will die a lot. The difference is that Celeste has waaay more checkpoints, an interesting story, and actually enjoyable fluid movement.

While I've never beaten this and have uninstalled it several times, it has never made me go "I'm never playing this again".

This game is really REALLY good, the platforming is tight, the jumping and combat animations are perfect, the graphics are good (for 2013), the enemies are hard as fuck but also fair; I die constantly but it feels like I suck and I can do better. It incentivises you to speedrun levels and to git gud, as you die over and over but discover new ways to interact with the environment to go faster, skip sections, kill your enemies before they have a chance to react, and it feels very rewarding when you manage to complete a level.

I don't understand why Volgarr has such a low score here, it's a really good game.

An unpleasant and amateurish attempt at a stripped-down Ghosts 'n Goblins / Makaimura clone that, unlike its forebears, feels like total shit to play and looks worse. I could maybe forgive the cheap-shot level design, obnoxious checkpointing, and bland combat if the basics of jumping and switching direction didn't feel like you're controlling Swamp Thing. Movement and combat that is this clunky is normally restrained to masochistic ironic GDQ speedruns of forgotten NES shovelware, not indies vying for a seat at the hardcore table. Compared to its pixel art contemporaries like Shovel Knight or Fez, the animation and visuals are blocky and disjointed. The music sucks too. I can see why it's popular with speedrunners, but if you're just casually looking for a difficult platformer you can do so much better.

Kept an extra half star because the adaptive difficulty idea is neat. Wish it were in a less crappy game.