I don't remember Gameboy games having quite such a terrifying difficulty curve; in fact some of the magic of e.g. Super Mario Land on the original Gameboy is the simultaneously precise and forgiving nature of control.
Ray Man for the Game Boy Color (which I mentioned in a comment elsewhere on this post) had the titular figure teeter on the edge as if about to fall, to help with playability when jumping between small platforms.
Now, some original 8 bit Spectrum games were absurdly fiddly right from the start -- Hewson/Rafaele Cecco's Cybernoid springs to mind, as does FTL's Hydrofool.
I remember some very playable games too of course -- Imogen from Micro Power/Superior Software on the BBC Micro was beautifully drawn, very playable, and still has me by my wistful heart.
I was speaking more broadly about the retro aesthetic, not just GameBoy. Games from Sega and Nintendo consoles used to be pretty brutal, to the best of my recollection. Although maybe I was just a bad player, I was quite young after all.
There was a Gameboy original platformer of Ren & Stimpy in space that when I was a kid just never beat, despite the persistence of a kid with nothing else to do in the preinternet era.
More recently I tried it in an emulator and it really is just like harder than Cuphead. I used snapshotting to get through it and the whole game is only 3 levels, so I think they cranked the difficulty to try to give it some longevity but they really overshot it.
Ray Man for the Game Boy Color (which I mentioned in a comment elsewhere on this post) had the titular figure teeter on the edge as if about to fall, to help with playability when jumping between small platforms.
Now, some original 8 bit Spectrum games were absurdly fiddly right from the start -- Hewson/Rafaele Cecco's Cybernoid springs to mind, as does FTL's Hydrofool.
I remember some very playable games too of course -- Imogen from Micro Power/Superior Software on the BBC Micro was beautifully drawn, very playable, and still has me by my wistful heart.