Obnoxious, over-the-top bombast aside, there is an interesting point here: You were perfectly willing to put up with being instantaneously clobbered several times over before figuring out a vague approach to survival in SotC, whereas Okami struck you as uninteresting until Hour 10.

SotC? If you don't know what you're doing the minute you start doing it, you're dead and you start over. Attempts at experimentation are met with retrial. There's no real "puzzling it out" from a controller perspective - do it even vaguely wrong and it's over.

Can I recommend a game to you?

"death" is a concept Valve devs talked a fair bit about in the Portal commentary. They point out that players enjoy a game when failure to solve a puzzle results in sliding back a few steps, rather than:

I have a friend that likes to bring up a little fact about Amensia: The Dark Descent:

The developers specifically designed the game to feel like you are about to be ripped apart by the monsters at any moment. However, actual mistakes by players are tolerated to a fairly wide degree. It's way more fun in the moment of the chase than when the beast finally catches you and sends you back to the loading screen / desktop.

Dark Souls gets off on deliberately ignoring this aspect of user experience, training players to be careful and learn a strategy while being stabbed, crushed, and burnt left right and center. You aren't even allowed to pause the game when you want a drink of water.

SotC felt like a middle ground between the two. Yeah, a colossus can crush you in one blow using a pillar a hundred times your size. But also as you dodge the swings, your character can tolerate the earthquakes as they stomp their feet. Once you hop on board, you can cling from the hairs on their back while they try to shake you off. You can even be tossed to the ground and live to tell the tale.

It's not the most polished of mechanics, but you gotta admit there's an appeal to be the ant crawling on the backs of these giants. To navigate their rocky torsos in the constant face of death. To bring them to their knees with but a puny stinger. To watch the life slip from the eyes of these elemental gods.