No, it isn't. It starts out with a nice balance. There are some challenging parts. But with a bit of exploration and 'grinding' you can make the later part of the game easier. But if you grind too much, you run into the opposite problem. It is possible to make your character totally overpowered if you max out all shards and get the best equipment. Then even formerly hard enemies become a breeze.

But then again, it is fun to run through the entire map on the chase for some secrets, after you have already finished the game, and just wipe the floor with these enemies that used to be scary! :-)

The indicator would be appreciated for sure, if not visually at least through some NPC warning you with subtle hints.

In general I believe that taste in games is subjective. Yes, there is lots of praise and hype for Hollow Knight. It's just that many people who enjoy (and promote) it might come from a Dark-Souls-y background, thus being accustomed to such gameplay.

Most of the bosses ended up being about the right level of difficulty, but yeah the runback is awful especially in a couple key areas where it takes 5+ minutes to get back with nothing engaging happening(soul sanctum and watcher knights...). Other than that the difficulty for me was in the platforming cause i suck at that

The game clearly has claws; even from speedrunners and otherwise expert players, I've heard complaints that Hollow Knight and/or Ori and the Blind Forest is simply too inclement in many areas.

To highlight, there's two main things.

1: Purposefully designed obstacle courses that exist to be obstacles.

2: Poor checkpointing.

I can happily recommend Feudal Allloy to anyone looking for this sort of game, but one that won't have you frustrated or runnin for 5-10 minutes back to where you fought the last boss. Honestly, some "git gud" players will probably call it too easy, but I think it's just right, not boring, not frustrating, nice graphics. There are some minor complaints I could have, but nothing that would spoil the fun.

It's been a few years since I played it, but I think Ori had way better checkpoint positioning (not to mention the overall difficulty / balance).

I'll be honest, the two kinda blurred together mentally for me, hence why I kinda mushed them together.

It's been a while since I played it, but I don't remember liking Feudal Alloy too much. I think my main complaint is that it doesn't have enough variety in level design and gameplay. It's kind of boring, though not overly easy. And I really wanted to like it, too. There's enough good elements there to be decent, but I think the game needed a lot more work.

It's subjective of course, but while I get where the complaint about level variety comes from, I think the game isn't long enough for that to become an issue. Plus, the checkpoints are common enough to make it well suited to playing in short bursts, which further mitigates the issue (for me anyway).

Definitely a frustratingly hard game at times, though some of that can be helped with the right charms and AP/HP upgrades. The real final boss will still be hard though, and several boss fights before that (also the white palace part) really screw with the overall pacing of the game.

The part I really didn't like about Hollow Knight was the map system. In every other Metroidvania I've played, whenever I would enter a new area the map would update and reflect this. But this was not the case for Hollow Knight. For some reason, in that game you have to find a specific NPC to "unlock" that particular part of the map. Enter a new area and haven't found that NPC? Well you get no map and if you die in this new area, it's incredibly difficult stumbling around in the dark trying to find your way back.

It's really a shame because I liked the style of Hollow Knight. I wish there was a mod of some kind of fix the broken map system. In a Metroidvania, the map is arguably the most important aspect of the game.

I haven't finished HK yet and I like it so far, but there are surely some annoyances like:

- full gold penalty on double death
This forces the player to farm easier areas to afford mandatory expensive items (a boring process).
And no, the soul-retrieval hut is a poor solution (usually too inconvenient to reach from your current position).

- bad map system
The only way to obtain a map is to find Cornifer (if reachable, damn Fog Canyon) and then purchase his basic map.
Once you have it, however, you'll be able to update it only on benches.
This means that you'll basically wander without any map for most of the times..
And the map markers? They're way too few and without labels, so they don't help very much.

- benches (kinda checkpoints) aren't always on straightfoward paths
Due to the various forks, you could completely miss them (there are some signs pointing to them, but only nearby). Some are even hidden behind breakable walls..

IIRC it is saved if you reach a bench (you can go back to an earlier one too), but you still need to buy a map for it to actually update.

I thought it was too easy until you reach the hard-mode version of the bosses and I am not skilled at all in video games.

What matters is what perks you want to use, figuring the build that makes most sense for you and how it affects your playstyle is half the games fun.

And can we just acknowledge just how amazing the world design actually is? It even made games like Axiom Verge boring for me. The sense of progress is perfect. Its like Factorios progression where every second seems to be absolutely worthwhile and fruitful, like the game cares about you spending your time with it :)!

I can see why the next Hollow Knight add on takes so long to make, planning out things to become great takes tons of time.