Seeing the way you talk about things, I’d be really interested to hear about your thoughts on Hollow Knight? (Both the story and the gameplay.)
I'm actually not a big fan of Hollow Knight gameplay-wise. I tend to dislike combat-centric metroidvanias and focus on the precision platforming side of things, and precision platforming is undeniably the weakest element of Hollow Knight's metroidvania formula. The aerial physics are at once too floaty and too abrupt in a way that can only be described as "squirrely", the terrain collision is jank as hell even after several major patches (and at launch it was much worse), and the game engine still drops inputs a little more often than one would like in spite of the developer's best efforts to fix it.
It actually kind of frustrates me when I see other indie games deliberately emulating Hollow Knight's platforming – I'm like, no, you're taking away the wrong lesson here, Hollow Knight's platforming is shit. Even Team Cherry all but openly recognises this; a large portion of the gameplay changes they've showcased in Silksong in their various demonstrations to date seem to be aimed specifically at addressing these criticisms.
