Been playing a lot of Steam’s NextFest demos and posting about them. There’s a lot of fun and interesting games being highlighted. Also finally getting around to Psychonauts 2 and it’s great. It picks up directly after the events of the VR game Rhombus of Ruin (which I haven’t played due to lack of VR) which apparently picked up right after the first game, keeping a strong narrative thread between the games. You also have all of your powers from the first game, avoiding the classic yet annoying trope of arbitrarily losing everything just to get more or less the same powers. The gameplay is exactly what you’d want from a sequel, keeping the basic loop the same while expanding on it with new abilities.
I am playing the story mode on the easiest setting, and it is almost too easy. The story mode has some survival mechanics, but on the lowest level they make it so easy you can almost ignore most of it. The survival mode is a lot more brutal and is more of a sandbox-style (no defined goals beyond ‘survive’) so I got bored of it relatively quickly. I guess my answer is that the learning curve is as hard as you make it!