Hollow Knight
I'm fairly mixed on this. There's a lot to like, but also a lot to hate. The artwork is nice, movement is nice a lot of the time, and there's plenty of cute stuff to feel good about. But then there are some segments that are a chore to move through just to get to where you're going, so many of the enemies are sponges that you just hit in the face with no style or complexity, and a handful of the bosses I've fought so far have been so frustratingly terrible that I can't fathom how they got through testing. I'm not even just talking about difficult bosses, either. There are some bosses who can't touch you once you know their pattern, but just take so many goddamn hits to kill that you end up making mistakes from boredom. I also don't like that charms can only be changed at a bench. Benches are just far enough apart that it becomes a hassle to change up your load out, unless you do it after death. It feels like a sloppy system, one that is useful but is too tedious to engage with to get that use out of it.
I've explored a large amount of the game, and I'm sure there's still a lot more left, but I've decided to stop playing. I really feel like I'm on a hamster wheel, going around and around with no destination. I enter a new area, explore, fight some enemies, maybe a boss or two, buy a map, open a stag station, then either hook back to a previous area or end up in a new one and rinse, repeat. I get that my ultimate goal is to... something with the Black Egg Temple, but I have so little investment in the world and whatever lore there is that I don't feel in any way motivated. I don't care, basically. There doesn't seem to be any apparent consequence of me not doing whatever it is I'm there to do, and I still don't even know why I'm actually there to begin with. The only thing compelling me to keep playing is the gameplay, and that swings so violently from casual and relaxing to inspiring me to commit acts of terrorism against myself and everyone around me so often that by the end of each play session I feel like my day has gotten worse to some degree. I don't like that about Hollow Knight. I don't like that my overall feeling after playing it is negative, even if there were lots of positives while playing it.
Nothing specific has prompted this abandonment, it wasn't a boss I couldn't beat or an area I couldn't traverse or anything like that. I just stopped while walking somewhere in the Kingdom's Edge and thought "What am I even doing here? Where am I going? Why?" and then turned the game off when I didn't have an answer to any of those questions. I may pick it back up at some stage in the future. Maybe. I doubt I'll ever care enough to revisit it, to be honest.
Despite all that, I would recommend Hollow Knight. I generally do like Metroidvanias, and Hollow Knight is a well made one, my frustrations with it notwithstanding. A lot of people on the site here certainly love it and it's likely anyone who enjoys the genre, or even just 2D action/platformers, will like it a lot, too. It's well worth giving a go. I'm glad I did, ultimately, it's just a shame I couldn't find something about it to hook me in.