I'm playing a similar game called just "Life". I seem to have misplaced the manual for it which is quite the hurdle because there are no save/restore points.

It's an open-world game and there are many NPC's, but the few bosses seem randomly placed (at least, I haven't found any pattern to it) and what's worse is that you can't really tell them apart from regular NPC's until you've already engaged them! Got burned by that a fair bit more than once.

I've considered just starting over but the prospect of losing literally my entire progress... 😬

Soundtrack

I got stuck on Resident Evil Rebirth for the same reason. Took me years before I motivating myself to give it an other shot.

I have a similar experience with Quake's final boss. It's the only thing in the entire game you don't kill by shooting. Took me 3 freaking days to figure it out.

It's stupid as hell because it's like the easiest thing to do, but no game had anything remotely like that, and it wasn't a mechanic shown to the player at all in SP (if you don't know you have to telefrag the boss by jumping into a gate when a purple spikey thing flying around the room clips through the boss).