The word “difficult” gets thrown around a lot, but La-Mulana is not difficult. La-Mulana is simply obtuse. I went in expecting deep, challenging combat and mind-bending puzzles. This game has neither. Stuck on a puzzle? The solution is to have the right item, located five zones away.

That's the entire game really- Collect item A to get item B to acquire item C. This is nothing but a daisy chain of fetch quests. I got 35 hours into it before I burned out.

Boss battles and mini-bosses are fun, but not very complex. Bosses are always best defeated with slow, boring attrition, and mini-bosses are easily killed by spam.

TL;DR: Not hard. Obtuse grind disguised as depth.

The word “difficult” gets thrown around a lot, but La-Mulana is not difficult. La-Mulana is simply obtuse. I went in expecting deep, challenging combat and mind-bending puzzles. This game has neither. Stuck on a puzzle? The solution is to have the right item, located five zones away. That's the entire game really- Collect item A to get item B to acquire item C. This is nothing but a daisy chain of fetch quests. I got 35 hours into it before I burned out. Boss battles and mini-bosses are fun, but not very complex. Bosses are always best defeated with slow, boring attrition, and mini-bosses are easily killed by spam. TL;DR: Not hard. Obtuse grind disguised as depth.