Horror and comedy games are interesting because can skirt around various gameplay-related biases mainstream audiences have. They can ignore what is or isn't conventionally considered "good design" and get away with it. They give developers a bigger palette to work with when designing gameplay mechanics, and I think arcade game developers should better take advantage of this.
While beat 'em up style games are moving away from strict player limitations and enemies that can surround and corner you, even to the point of putting you into checkmate situations, horror games are embracing it. Resident Evil 4 and 5 put massive limitations on how the player can move, how and when they attack and regularly try to corner you with enemies who actively take advantage of your blind spots. The games are remarkably beat 'em up like in their design, because they are influenced by the same general philosophy. Horror games can even get away with strict timers, provided they are contextualized correctly.
But whereas in beat 'em ups, this kind of harshness is treated as a kind of archaic design flaw, horror's emphasis on stress, (initial) player disempowerment and dangerous enemies make this a lot easier to swallow for players.
Comedy is in a similar boat - there have been many different "streamer games" that had deliberately overcomplicated gameplay mechanics which, if put into any other genre, would quickly turn players off. Physics based stuff like Getting Over It and Octodad and comedy platformers like Jump King or I Wanna Be The Guy fall into this category. They all have a kind of playful dev-player discussion going on, which contextualizes the player's frustrations appropriately.
This could be called ludonarrative consonance, but I want to tie it to my more general, broad concept of Staging gameplay mechanics.
These genres offer a convenient way to frame your gameplay mechanics since their conventions do all the heavy lifting for you. Other games like Dark Souls and Devil Daggers achieved this as well without relying on as clear cut of genre conventions. Players fundamentally want to feel like they are in good hands, and that the things they are feeling aren't a bug, but a deliberate artistic choice you as a developer made.
Ghosts N Goblins, as a series, is in my view an example of a failure to capitalize on its dark humor angle as a way to sell its more harsh, playful difficulty. The elements are there, but it clashes with the conventions of platformers in general, and it's too subtle to the point where players might not even realize that it's a comedy game at heart and assume all its mean BS is just oversights. Including things the nasty menu trick they pull in GnGR's Knight mode, where they hope that due to frustration, you will end up fucking up and picking the wrong option.
I think the most successful new arcade style games will not look anything like the arcade games of the past, because they will understand how to sell & communicate their core to a general audience, while the stuff all other arcade style game devs (me included) make does not. Something a bit like Returnal maybe.
Part of this might also be a generational gap - many older players grew up having to give games more charitability because everything had a lot of dissonant, clashing elements thanks to hardware limitations. Younger players are less tolerant of that sorta incoherence and less willing to "play along".
