Hmmm…
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Tears of the Kingdom
Grand Theft Auto V
Baldur’s Gate 3
Elden Ring wasn’t a sequel, but the hype was way up since people really like the games before, but none were open world. It soared upon release, even gaining more hype.
Mass Effect: Andromeda
Whoa. Whoa.
That hardly lived up to the hype, did it?
Exactly, that was a counter-example. 
(A rather notorious one.)
Given its following and hype for Silksong, I’m sure that Hollow Knight is an excellent game of its genre. However, it’s a genre I have very little interest in playing so I never bothered with it (plus the 2hard4u stuff). As it turns out, the one person I’ll watch play video games is going to start playing Silksong so I can live variously through him without having to deal with my own fumbling inadequacies.
My teenage son has been obsessed with Hollow Knight for a few years (that and Undertale), and he was there to download Silk Song when it came out this week. He’s been playing it every chance he gets since. He beat the original, but it took a while, and he expects this will take even longer to beat, but he’s loving it so far.
What does he like about it?
I’m with you. I don’t dig platformers and especially not super difficult ones.
I’ll watch some videos (maybe) but I will never play it.
Of course, to each their own. If you like this gameplay…go for it!
My son says he’s enjoying exploring the world.
He says he likes the movement of the character and the new setting it takes place in. Also finds it challenging in a satisfying way.
Diving in again, even though I have yet to play the sequel, only because some here are saying they have been put off by hearing how hard the original game was.
It wasn’t that tough IME, and I am a pretty casual gamer. It’s definitely not in the cuphead league.
There are a few times where you run into a boss fight that you’re nowhere near prepared to take on but 1) it’s always possible even without the right power ups to learn the patterns and 2) Personally I like games where you can freely roam the map and run into bosses that are way above your level; makes it feel like an actual world and satisfying when you *are* powered up. (NB: Hollow knight is not quite free roam; sections of the map are blocked off until you obtain specific items, but there are still many fights you can be aware of and leave until you think you’re ready).
And overall the difficulty is well set such that you make steady progress.
I played the first one, and it was mostly a struggle to find enjoyment. Early game exploration, discovery, and aesthetic was fun, but by mid-game the repeated map traversals to re-explore every little corner was tedious and annoying. Trick-jumping off of stalagmites and ledges to get somewhere is barely fun the first time you explore, but definitely not the twelfth time. Elden Ring, as an example, solved the boss-runback and last-corner exploration tedium of its sibling games by respecting the player’s time and achievement. In Hollow Knight the journey was not the reward. The Hollow Knight bosses were also just generic HP-sponge platformer types, no creative or interesting mechanics, so the boss difficulty-spike-gateways to progress were also just a dreaded chore.
I asked him explicitly what he enjoys about it, and he replied:
Exploration, the aesthetics, learning how to defeat new enemies, the tight controls, and the platforming challenges that make me feel really cool for completing them.