I also don't have that much trouble playing on the default difficulty, although I used to find it a lot harder before the recent changes. I was also watching a pretty new lets player the other day and he made it in and out OK. Maybe this just affects the higher difficulties.
Actually, I think you're right.
Switching to Adept (the default) was.... ahh, I'll say, Adept is a bit too easy for me, and even with the absolute swarms of crap getting even worse past that first room (Mirror Cubes, laser spiders, Scouts, the drones with the bouncy shots, AND those roller guys with the splitting shots.... all at the same time....) I dont think I went below half health at any point when going through that. AND I wasnt exactly using the best spells here, I mostly just kept using the slow-firing fire flare spell, which is hard to hit things with normally. This was with 5 hearts of health as my max. No special equipment.
The thing about these facilities are.... they really are very darn exciting when they WORK. But something about the difficulty changes kinda warps them. I mean, heck, there are two difficulties even higher than Hero, I cant even imagine trying these on those two levels.
I'm not really sure though why I didn't think to test these on Adept as well, but for whatever reason it didn't occur to me. Still, that does seem to indeed be a big part of the issue. One part of it is enemy health; I can actually pop many foes on adept even just using the flare spell, because they cant take all that much damage, even when I have no concentration. They take longer to bring down on Hero, AND they do more damage overall (and move faster, and all that).
Also, Mick's post just now reminds me of something: The freefall segments, these are pretty neat, but the camera is all wrong. The character is way too close to the bottom of the screen in these for whatever reason. They're great other than that.
