Souls freak here. I've played Dark Souls 3 to death and I can name dozens of games objectively more difficult than it. Getting Over It is one of them, but Dead Cells is probably about on par.
The thing is, the difficulty curve is pretty much a sheer steel wall that you have two ways of overcoming. You can walk around it, i.e. ignore all the enemies and run straight through the level, or build a staircase out of equipment upgrades that give you additional attack power and damage resistance, which takes a long time and is kinda boring. Previously, I did the bravely-running-away thing because it's simply the most effective way of succeeding: engaging enemies is a risk of losing health and a chance to gain blue cells and gold, both of which are rather useless to your immediate success, so it's better to not take the risk. Then I got to the final boss and found that he wasn't that much more difficult than before, even though all the other enemies were much more effective at killing me.
Then I went another difficulty level up and this is where it gets truly ridiculous. Running away is too good a strategy so they countered that by making it the only strategy. Now there are multiple enemies that can shoot through walls stuffed throughout the initial level and they each do enough damage to one-shot you. You cannot stand still for more than a second or you'll get shot and die. You cannot stop and engage an enemy or you'll get shot and die. You can pause just long enough to loot items but that's it.
This is not the kind of difficulty I enjoy. It's serial escalation: just add more enemies that do more damage and require more hits to kill while you're forced to keep up with the arms race by grinding more and more upgrade points. I prefer it when games take something away to make it more difficult, and to be fair, Dead Cells does: you get fewer opportunities to replenish your health in higher difficulties. But then they combine that with the ridiculously hard-hitting enemies and it just shoots way too far in the other direction. Even the progression through a single game has elements of that: you're encouraged to seek out upgrade scrolls that increase your health and damage, the more the better. But at no point does the game offer fewer of these; you just get more ways to get higher stats.
One of the reasons I like Dark Souls so much is the opportunities it gives you for negative challenges. Like, I can defeat this boss if I summon help, but could I do it alone? Or on a much lower level than normal? Or with unconventional weaponry? There isn't really room for customisation like that in Dead Cells, because you're at the mercy of the random weapons the game gives you (and there's no way to shrink the pool) and the upgrade system means you're expected to become substantially more powerful before you even have a chance of killing the final boss. It feels like the game's incentives are all wrong.
Don't misunderstand me, the game is still very good, just structured in a way that isn't how I like. I do this a lot: play a game to death until I can peel away every layer of game mechanics and identify how it could be better. That I'm motivated to do this for Dead Cells at all instead of just deciding it isn't for me is a testament to how solid the basic gameplay loop is.
