Yeah, I'm done with Shadow of the Erdtree. I just don't enjoy this. At this point it's tonally unpleasant how empty and gratuitous the game's cruelty is. The mean-spirited bits of Souls games don't work if the game is all mean-spirited bits.
The part that broke me was the little run in Rauh where you go through a room with multiple enemies throwing projectiles at you where you get ambushed by a cursemask that spams grab attacks at you. Then you go into the next room and it's a fight against two fairly tough enemies where you're liable to just suddenly die because there's an archer golem off way in the distance shooting at you, that you can easily not be aware of at all. Then you go into the Romina boss fight and here's a boss seemingly designed to break the game's camera, whose movement patterns make you constantly whiff attacks, with one of the fastest and least telegraphed grabs yet.
And like, this isn't really about difficulty as such; until I got to Romina, I didn't die in this segment at all, I was able to manage all this bullshit going in blind. But by the time I'm at Romina I'm just tired of it. I'm just rolling my eyes. Because it's become rote, it's become predictable. Every encounter must be maximally unpleasant, that's the rule now.
Like what am I doing. There's so many video games, why play one that is this determined to not be enjoyable. It's just so frustrating because it's constantly tantalizing you with the quality of everything, with how good this game could be if it had a single priority it held more highly than punking the player all the fucking time.
