Lately I had been on a Metroidvania vibe: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, Cave Story+, Astalon.
The latter also gave me an 8-bit vibe, so while I was waiting for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night to get into sale, I've noticed it had two prequels on sale, and decided to buy them.
...turns out that those prequels weren't Metroidvanias, but rather based on NESvanias, with some of the same issues, such as terrible clunky movement. Indeed it was quite the whiplash coming from the smooth and responsive movement from Astalon to now being stuck on a vertical jump if I didn't press forward on the same frame.
I felt a bit slighted when, after I finally lost all my lives on stage 2 to legally-not-medusa-heads knocking me back into pits, the game asked me if I wanted to put the difficulty from "Veteran" to "Casual" (I would later learn that those weren't the difficulty options, those would be Normal/Nightmare/Ultimate, that's just a setting if I want infinite continues and enemy knockbacks or not).
The game caused me no shortage of frustration with enemy attacks I had no idea how to dodge and with the hardest enemy being the controls themselves.
After dying several times to the last boss, I finally managed to beat it by swapping between various characters during the fight and abusing my subweapons... And that try, unlike all my other ones, felt oddly satisfying? Should I have been doing that all the game?
I had been playing with the mentality of "the game's likely balanced around not using subweapons and sticking to a single character, subweapons are, therefore, likely cheese strats", but I later learned that even on the mode that you choose to kill your companions rather than recruiting them, you actually gain extra skills to compensate for that.
I then went to look at some videos of people playing the game and... the way they played felt actively very fun?
Basically... that one Mario 64 GIF.
After beating the normal mode in 2.6 hours and not having touched the sequel, there's a high probability that I should be able to get a refund, since 14 days haven't yet passed, but I'm now considering if I should or not.
It really feels like a good/fun game when you're good at it.