Anyone mind telling me what's supposed to be scary? i can't even find scary in the Youtube videos of it. (I'm not playing hardball, I just haven't seen anything other that a Mario-style platformer rip-off with a slight twist to make you have to backtrack every level about 5 times, and a relatively nifty color effect and a wall of black bubbles that kills you)
I thought the stuff that happens in like level 5 and onwards is kind of scary. >_>
It's not really a "Mario-style platformer rip-off" if only the status bar and basic game mechanics are similar. Or you could say it is and also say that almost every other platformer is also a "rip-off".
I only remember one level when I really had to backtrack, and it wasn't that hard either.
I played it, and the first levels looks like a great concept. but in level 4 that concept crapped out to a macrabe game, and in 5, i understood the warning. i think "oh my gawd, this is like a lunatic level of knytt stories 
".
The lunatic levels I've played in KS are waaay harder than this game.
In this game there's only one or maybe two hard parts, while in lunatic levels it's constant trial and error usually complemented with three save points throughout the whole level.
I think it's basically like one of those old NES games, as far as difficulty is concerned. Kids these days are used to super-easy games they have on all these new systems, so they never got used to the old games that relied on pure reflex and memory.
Like the last levels in Super Mario, oh wow those are annoying. Harder than this, definitely.