About your Cuphead review: it could be how the game is structured.

I also found myself really not liking the mostly boss rush structure of it. In a game like Dark Souls, it felt motivating because each boss had at the very least a solid hour of moment-to-moment gameplay before and after the boss, and few bosses took that much more than like 5 attempts to beat.

But in Cuphead, the platforming levels are the exception rather than the norm, and even in co-op there were bosses that took as many as 20 attempts to finally beat; it wasn't exactly motivating to finally beat one of those bosses, only to realize that my reward for doing so was yet another boss that we'd have to bang our heads against for another hour or two trying to beat.