After finally beating Night Five and making it to the boss level, my critiques remain. Like, I have finally figured out how to do most of the girls, but the amount just feels insane for any night.
I thought night five was bad, and even though it was, the Boss Level feels worse, since you get pulled out of the cameras whenever Cheshire Cat Sammy, which is what I'm calling her, jumps out of the screen in the office, and you need to parry. Now that's not hard, but that causes issues when Sammy Goons are either at one, two or ALL three of the doors, since you can't close them out, you need to click on them with the ping. But that fills up the corruption meter, and if that goes full you then have to focus on trying to find either the eye bird thing or destroy all the tentacles. It isn't helped that the doors stop working if the tentacles appear, so any threats you need to keep out via the door, like Security Poppi or Security Sammy, can just insta-kill you. I feel like an indicator for where the tentacles or where the eye bird is would make it far more enjoyable to do any of the nights or even the boss level, because you can't waste time going through EVERY camera just to end up dying to a threat anyways because you can't close the door or because you're too busy looking through the cameras to fix the corruption meter thing. And to top all of that, the fact you start with the corruption meter halfway whenever the Boss Level starts makes it even more unfun to play, especially if you get bad RNG.
I need to stress this, I do think the Arcade is a unique concept, and it can be fun, but the difficulty will definitely push a few players away or even discourage them from trying to 100% Arcade, due to the fact that the difficulty spike compared to previous levels is far more insane.
I feel like the main problem comes down to just how much is in the Arcade to begin with. It's really cool and I do think a difficult level is fine to have, but the sheer amount of things you have to do and keep track of makes it more stressful than fun. Even then, the in game instructions for the girls are so vague that it really feels like its just trial and error until you figure the girls out. Add on to all of that that you need to manage corruption, your energy, the health of other items, fuse boxes, all while keeping track of every girl and the goons and it just makes the nights feel very overwhelming compared to the other two levels.
That's definitely the issue I've been having. Its fun and unique, but the amount of girls and thus, stuff to focus on is insanely difficult. The boss level really suffers from this because, as mentioned, the corruption meter gets filled halfway, and when you have goons outside your doors, you have to destroy them with the ping ability, which further fills the corruption meter. If the goons weren't there it'd likely feel somewhat better, but even then, the mechanics of some of the girls in all the levels forces you to focus on one thing, and depending on your RNG, you could end up being attacked from all three doors by other girls and end up dying because your busy trying to deal with corruption or something else. It boils down to being a heavily stressful mode all around, and if RNG is bad, you end up dying and losing a lot of progress. Hell, I think making the boss level have checkpoints at the hours Cheshire Cat Sammy jumpscares the player in the office of the Arcade would definitely help a slight bit. Obviously if you exit the level or close the game you'd have to start over, but it would make the Boss Level at least a little better, since I can get close to the ending hour of ten, but end up getting rushed by multiple characters and dying because I didn't look at Nile or I didn't close the door on Sammy or I didn't get rid of the goons, etc.