https://www.polygon.com/after-hours-dev-says-players-cant-write-email/
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There’s a really good quote in there:
“Think about how dumb the average person is.
Then realise that 50% of the population are dumber than that.”
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From what I know of these games, that is not an easy feat. Congratulations, I’d say that accomplishment came with a wonderful high.
I know of a few similar games but they’re more about story and style than they are challenging gameplay.
I think cuphead, while a different beast, offers similar challenges in it’s boss battles but I’ve never played it.
While not entirely a metroidvania I very much enjoyed both games in the Hades series, with a scalable challenge you can control when you reach a point to unlock the games version of modifiers etc to make the runs even more challenging, though I don’t know if bullet hell/rogue-likes are your thing.
A game that came up a lot after doing a few searches was Nine Sols, have not heard of this game but the quick blurb on it references Sekiro which I know is a difficult game that opens up a lot of possibilities if you master it’s parry system.
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It is challenging, but honestly its not as challenging as others were saying. But maybe its because ive been gaming for decades so my reflexes are sharp? Maybe, maybe not. But every boss has a pattern to them and a limited amount of attacks. So once you learn the 5 or 6 different attacks they will do, you realise that you didnt really have to move around so much and you could literally stay in on small spot the majority of each fight.
I have to say, though. Overcoming the bosses did give me quite a high still. Lol. But what I really loved was how much you can explore and how the game rewards curiosity. If your struggling with a boss, just go explore and look for secret areas, you’ll often find new tools or other things that unlock new ways to play to suit your play style and they are completely optional too. You can also increase your health and the damage your weapons do too so its worth exploring for an extended amount of time before moving on to a boss so you could have an advantage.
I played this game when it came out and it is also a great game but I would say that it was much harder than either Hollow Knight games. The bosses can be more chaotic and there is a heavy reliance on the parry mechanic. Not to say its bad in any way, it was great, but it definitely did leave me frustrated on two bosses. Thankfully, you can lower the difficulty at any time if your struggling and… I did. 
I never like doing that but one of the two bosses I just couldnt at all read the pattern, if there was any pattern.
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That’s the median, not the average…although in most natural distributions they tend to the same value.
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Mathematicians and statisticians will tell you there are three kinds of “average”, mean, median, and mode.
This is bollocks. When 99.9% of people say “average”, they’re talking about the mean. And in a normal distribution, 50% of the sample is above the mean, and 50% is below.
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Since that is essentially a tautology, I’m not sure how helpful it is… 
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I make the distinction becaause with median and mode, the sample is not (or not necessarily) divided 50% above and below.
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I told you pedantic was my normal resting state.
99.9% of people talk about things without knowing what they are talking about, so that particular line of argument is a very dead end.
The main issue of this is that not everything comes in a normal distribution,* and when the distribution does not approximate the normal the mean and median can move very far apart.
*‘Normal distribution’ is in fact a technical term used for distributions that meet very specific criteria that is also frequently misused. Many natural phenomena when measured produce distributions that approximate the normal, including measures of human intelligence…however, such distributions are usually distorted to at least some extent by selection. With human intelligence there have been social pressures that pushed the distribution towards the higher side, and in modern times unfortunately there are social pressures pushing it towards the lower side.
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This is incorrect. The median, by definition, is the middle value when the data is placed in order, so half above and half below. The mean is the total of the sum of the data divided by the number of data points (in math, this is called the average…AFAIK math has no particular term for the median).
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I totally agree about mathematical ideal examples and real-world data.
In practice, you never find a truly “normal” distribution - there are always outliers, skews, and confounding factors.
However, even with a badly skewed distribution, the mean is still likely to give you the best fit.
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You’re correct, of course. But it’s only true with a normal distribution. You only need one rogue outlier to throw the median way off.
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Reference: any statistics textbook.
The median is defined as the middle value in the data.
Example: ten data points; 50, 51, 51, 52, 52, 52, 52, 53, 53, 54 (we will call this a measurement taken on ten Trump supporters selected at random). Note that it does approximate a normal distribution. Add them up, we get 520, divide by ten, and the mean is 52. The median is complicated by the fact there are an even number of data points so the ‘center’ does not land on one, but since number five and number 6 are both 52 the median falling ‘between’ them is still 52.
Now we add DJT himself, measured at zero. Our mean is now 520 (same total) divided by 11 (new number of data points), so 47.3. But our median is the sixth entry in the data when ordered, so it is still 52 and has not changed at all.
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Uh, no, that’s exactly what the median is. In the average, that’s not necessarily the case. Unless, as you mentioned, there’s an even distribution (whether or not that is a “normal” distribution depends entirely on what is measured, really).
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I’m gonna move you guys to a new thread; An Average Debate
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If we take a sample: 17, 19, 35, 50, 60
Our mediaan is 35,
If we add an outlier, say, 65,
Our median becomes (35+50) /2 =42.5
If, instead, we add an outlier to the other end, say, 14,
Our median becomes (19+35) /2 =22
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In statistics, the term “normal distribution” commonly refers to the Poisson distribution, or bell-curve. With a sufficient sample, it expresses the probability that a given measurement falls within the expected random pattern, or is likely to be caused by some outside effect.
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Wide spread in a small sample size, sure. But notice that if you add both of your outliers the median comes back to 35. And if you add ten data points in the big empty area in the middle of your sample the median will stabilize against single outliers.
On the other hand, your average shifts from 36.2 to be even further from the median.
Ultimately, they are two very different things, with the difference obscured by the fact that in a normal distribution with any substantial sample size they will always come out to the same value.
That was the levity we needed!
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I agree it’s an annoyingly small sample size - but that’s the sort of thing you get in real studies of rare events. If you’re plotting, say, vanadium poisoning, deaths per year from radiation exposure, or people trampled by enraged ostriches, that’s the kind of sample size you can expect.
And yes, OK, Let’s move on.
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@Jupiter.blues You could try play the The Average Debate game above? It seems very popular right now 
A fun metroidvania game I played during lockdown was Deaths Door if you’ve not tried it. You’re a fun crow doing crow things with a Sword. You’re also a reaper of souls. Kaw!
It’s a spiritual successor to Titan Souls, which is a short enough game where it’s just bosses/pattern learning but you get hit once and you die. Beating a boss acts as a checkpoint in progression.
Death’s Door is a lot more forgiving and it plays a bit more like a classic Zelda game, lots of little places to explore and backtrack to with new abilities.
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