It's a rough world out there bros... but also the game's neat. I replayed Journey to Silius after going through it years ago on an old backlog of mine. I remember the game being a lot tougher than it ended up being, because it wasn't that bad on a revisit. The music slapped just as much as it did when I first played it, which is a massive plus for an NES-era game. The control is something I remember being more fluid, however. Running off a cliff won't make you plummet, but rather conserve your running momentum, which wouldn't be a bad thing if every cliff in the game didn't have a hazard underneath lined up with your falling arc. This means jumping and slightly steering off of cliffs to descend becomes the more common way to move without getting hit. Another issue, though really a small nitpick, is the lack of buffer when transitioning from a crouching to standing state. If I fire or jump too early while I'm still getting up, I simply do nothing. This was a minor annoyance when dealing with enemies that required quick movement between crouching and jump/shooting, like the boss of Stage 3. Speaking of, the perceived difficulty from this game is not found at all in the boss fights. NES-era bosses are rarely complex, but a lot of them had remarkably exploitable patterns or obvious no-hit strats that almost trivialized them, even the final boss. The stages, on the other hand, are quite brutal. Especially Stage 4, where life starts to become currency for some parts and knockback/pit traps are prevalent. Scrolling the screen slowly becomes the preferred strategy here. Cheapness aside, Silius is fun as heck and I think that people interested in Sunsoft's back catalog should give it a go, at least to see if it's for them.