Any stiffness in her character may also come from wearing leather pants so tight they had to have separate sitting and standing pants, and alternate accordingly between shots

Incidentally, playing Wuppo made me realise how few metroidvanias actually use systems like a day night cycle, world events on fixed timers like trains, global states that tick up over time (like city debt)

I have been mulling over using a compute shader or similar to run live systems across a smaller interconnected world like this - I think the trick is to really let the player engage you need to make digestible repeatable chunks, so they can't mess up 10+ hours of gameplay accidentally.

Idea: Demonic possession that evolves like a virus starts melting your face off, but after a few generations is treatable with mild symptoms. Most people have a possession or two but with one hail mary a day they are safe. Some have an occasional relapse and crawl up the walls.

Further, I could easily imagine a metroidvania style game where you use weapons and other tools to progress but only get so many uses between checkpoints

This strikes me as a great idea for a puzzle style game - much like what neon white does with its gun cards per level

I wouldn't be surprised if content updates did this anyway - playing Hollow Knight at launch was quite different before Godmaster, Lifeblood, Grimm Troupe, Hidden Dreams. It made those early sections much more "full" - so I wouldn't be surprised if this time some room was left for them to occupy.

The rough parts feed into each other, with a few tweaks to healing or access to toolkit would hugely lessen the struggle. A lazy thing would be to make healing half as effective and costly, so you could do it twice as often. A finer touch would be having different moves show up earlier.

I suspect that a big balance patch is going to hit at some point. I respect exploring different design spaces, but a lot of people are going to bounce right off. For reference, only 18% of players on Steam beat the Radiance - I think anyone that didn't is going to struggle with Silksong.

I mean, I hope the fungus stays cool - but this guy was getting into all the medical equipment, so it may be a problematic hobby after all.