Mr Kissyface gave me some difficulties and he takes more hits to kill than normal but was overall pretty easy if you memorize his pattern. The boss fights aren't too bad with the exception of the final boss.
Shield enemies can be killed with the door if they get close enough but only if their back is turned, otherwise the door will just bounce them back a little bit. The motorcycle level sends more gun enemies at you and also includes machine gun enemies now.
As far as I could tell, it's not possible to sneak out of the prison with the extra enemies so you need to kill everyone. If possible, use the environment kills such as the exploding barrels and the laser walls you can control to wipe out as many enemies as possible at once. If you can dodge their first volley than they need to cool down giving you enough time to get in and destroy them. There's a lot more turrets so get good at dodging them. I barely used it on normal but I was using it practically every room on hard. It recharges pretty quickly and is basically necessary to even complete the game on hard. Use this to scope out rooms before you enter. Don't forget to use to look around outside of your normal line of sight. Use your deaths to experiment and figure out a path through the room a little bit at a time. The machine gun enemies also appear on the motorcycle level as well on hard. If you can take these enemies out without alerting them than that's the best but if have to go head on with one, (and you will in hardmode) Than use to slow time, parry the first bullet back by hitting it, then dodge roll through the next, then parry the 3rd, then dodge roll the 4th, and so on and so forth until he's dead. They shoot incredibly fast when your in their line of sight. Machine Gunner: These guys look like rambo and have a large machine gun. These can be annoying because rolling through enemies becomes basic instinct after playing the game a lot and this enemy led to my death a lot.Ģ. You just need to attack them head on with a single strike. You CANNOT dodge through these enemies, they will kick you back and stun you for a second. Karate fighter: These guys look similar to the melee enemies that can block your sword with their own strike except they're in a red outfit. This mode introduces two new enemy types to deal with:ġ. For reference this took me 3 hours and 45 minutes to beat with no cutscenes and 1219 deaths. If you exit out to the main menu during a speedrun than you can just resume it later by selecting speedrun and it will ask you if you want to continue. You also don't have to do it all in one sitting. THIS IS HARD, and you will die a lot, but the game retries incredibly quickly and once you finish a room then your good and never have to do it again. Hard has the same room layouts as the normal mode, but it adds a lot more lasers, automated turrets, more enemies, and tougher enemies more frequently. My exact settings were: Hard, stable seed, skip cutscenes, action only, skip replay, dragon dash max, show timer, show death count, katana and factory. I recommend also turning off all cutscenes to make it go quicker as well as the stable seed option that makes it so that enemy movements and boss attacks are consistent between retries. Then go to the speedrun mode and select hardmode. In order to unlock hard mode you need to beat the game once.