The negative reviews that actual challenge in games earns

Ran into this twice, recently. The first is here. It's a review of the latest adventure time mechanic and it mentions that you can only get back to town after every five levels.

To make matters worse, you can only return to the surface after every five floors, so if you happen to lose all of your health before you reach the next checkpoint, tough luck--you’ll be dumped back above ground without any of the loot you’d accumulated. Worse still, there’s no way to quick-save in the middle of a floor, forcing you to continue playing until you reach the next checkpoint (or die trying).

Tre sigh!

And the next is of a review of might and magic in PC powerplay, where they say that whenever you rest, you use up supplies and can only carry six at a time. This is then described negatively as having to cut short the adventure instead of continue exploring.

It's so incredibly wearying to hear things that provide difficulty as being things which actually reduce the score a game is given. Perhaps unless they dark souls-like cram the 'this is tough!' meme down their throat, it's all exploro land to them?

Okay, caveat - Lord of the Rings, war in the north had checkpoints where if you died you'd lose your previously found gear. Which annoyed me greatly.

The thing is, it didn't announce when the next checkpoint was, unlike the adventure time game, where you can see how many levels you are away from the checkpoint.

Without stating where the checkpoint is, it's not a challenge that you're facing, I'd say. It's just struggling to 'not lose'.