Hahaha, aren't you closer in age to Hank and me than most of these guys? I could swear you were...
But yeah, games these days do a lot of hand holding and take out a bunch of the difficulty/challenge. As such, younger generations don't recall the "old-school" games and how their design was challenging and they were hard to complete because of things like lives and continues running out. Gamers have become used to regenerating health and automatic checkpoints. So when a game doesn't spell everything out or doesn't make things easy, gamers just usually rage now ... (I still think this is why the original Dead Rising system gets all the hate it does [or at least a good portion of it]).
The design in SotN is pretty decent in that, if you go in a direction you're not supposed to yet, you will have trouble getting passed some obstacle. Some jump you can't make that requires the bat form, etc. -- the worst of most of the game is if you haven't found the items necessary to trigger the real boss in Dracula's throne room and open up the upside down castle. If you're stuck, you could always ask in here, if you don't want to use a guide -- I'm sure a lot of us played the game enough to at least vaguely remember what your next goal/area should be.
Super Metroid is the same way, I think -- there may be people in here who remember it better than I do, but I probably haven't played/finished that game since 1995... so it's been almost 20 years and when I watched the speed run on AGDQ2014, I was vaguely remembering stuff, but not anywhere near the level where I wouldn't tell you to go look in a FAQ.
Congrats, I think.
Is this the same girlfriend from before or a new one?