When did the game first feel really hard to you?
I'm currently in my first playthrough, just short of 4 hours in my save file and I just finished chapter 4. First two chapters were not bad, third chapter with Oshiro felt a bit complex navigating the hotel, but the entirety of chapter 4 and fighting with/against the patterns of the wind, as well as much tighter spaces and windows, it started to feel very suffocating. I feel like every game has a "bottleneck" experience where everything starts to feel truly impossible before opening up again once the player gets the flow of things, and I think I just hit my bottleneck as the difficulty of chapter 4 gave me more stress than anything.
I mainly come from combat platformers like metroidvanias (Hollow Knight is my main one) and honestly have a lot more trouble with straight-up platformers (like even old Mario games from NES/SNES) just due to my point of view being to rush through and be precise about movement without messing up. I am far more used to being able to take more time and to base my reactions on enemies/fights, and to learn as you go. I think my main issue is having a completionist urge with strawberries (I may have left 2 that I actually saw, the rest I kept at until I got them) and that this game includes a death counter (like Mario with limited lives) which frustrates me as a player.
I'm not saying these are bad or not necessarily "not for me", but I want to know how universal my frustrations are, and if I can be optimistic about the difficulty curve going forward.
Another small question, because I don't know anything about this game besides what I've played - how linear is the game? I'm not sure how much choice I've had in anything thus far, and wonder if there are many other alternative "paths" or choices that I could do in a future playthrough, once I get very comfortable with how the game feels.
Edit: For whatever it counts for, through the 4 chapters, I've gotten 45 strawberries and 1 cassette, and have had 939 deaths. And I'm frustrated because I feel like I missed out on a million strawberries and I have died what feels like an absurd amount of times.