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i've always felt these sorts of games (none currently come to mind) are more to do with player skills. some people find it certain things too hard. and others too easy so the level is balanced to make up for it. meaning that some people feel it is unbalanced. actually some games do come to mind.

broken age - act 1 casual and fun - act 2 hard and not fun. i blame reviewers.
little nightmares - main game casual and a fun journey - expansion, puzzles for the sake of extending gameplay.

Actually, this is even an issue in RPGs. Sometimes, you hit a wall where you have to spend a while leveling up before you can continue. Sometimes, you hit an even harder wall which can't be solved, at least not in a reasonable amount of time, by leveling up.

The final boss of Paladin's Quest is an example of the latter. (That particular boss is much harder than anything else in the game, to the point where I would consider that boss to be *too* hard.)

Also, the Ice Cave in Final Fantasy. I am playing the PSX version on Easy Mode, and in the Ice Cave my party still got slaughtered multiple times by mage ambushes. Keep in mind, this is on *Easy* Mode, so my party was higher leveled than normal for that part of the game. (It's a good version this version has the Memo save; imagine how many players of the original NES game quit there out of frustration!)

A more recent example is Dragon Quest 8, which has one particular boss that is significantly harder than any bosses up to that point.

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For you, anything that involves spelling. "Spell THE" "Spell THAT" "Spell MY" "Can you spell?"

The absolute worst type of difficulty spike is when it comes with a genre change, or when it otherwise involves a sudden change in the rules.

Stealth sequences, particularly insta-fail ones, are the worst example I have seen. It's a difficulty spike, and it's the wrong type of difficulty.

If I signed up to play one type of game, don't make me play another, and certainly don't make that part harder than the parts that actually fit the game's genre.