Even on easy mode, the difficulty spike was really annoying to the point I wasted so many breaks at work trying to get past certain puzzles... Which normally wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't a kid's game.

Lunatea's Veil had a similar spike too and I was close to ragequitting after one level, but that was when playing the original PS2 version. I don't know if Phantasy Reverie fixed or made that worse.

I'm sure that I'll end up switching to easy mode in Lunatea's Veil sooner or later too, lol. The difficulty spike in these games is so weird! They feel like kirby or (recent) yoshi platformers up until those points so the challenge feels super jarring.