this game is so frustratingly hard yet if anything i only wish it were harder to force me to sort out the clutter of my abilities and figure out what works
i just beat hornet’s second iteration and it was the first time i felt like i learnt anything about what the combat expected of me. i got really mad running into it frenetically trying to deal a bunch of quick hits! i had to come back later in a more relaxed state of mind and take my time trying to maintain the proper distance (more involved than it sounds)
side note: it occurs to me that sleeping on these kinds of games may be actually necessary in terms of the way we form muscle memory and undergo synaptic pruning, so when i say “take my time”, it could be that i’m actually perceiving time slower due to a more laser-like focus on the things i know i need to be doing.
with most of the other fights it just seemed like the game arbitrarily took mercy on me at some point after banging my head against it enough times. for all i know given the minimal feedback it could have been silently tuning the difficulty down until i fudged my way through. i never came away with a distinct feeling of progress or insight into How To Play; each boss is kinda doing its own thing and there’s a huge rift between the skill sets invoked in those fights and in the level navigation (to be fair, fromsoft aren’t great at bridging this either)