I don't know about Senua's Sacrifice, but besides Uncharted, the rest of the game feature little to no platforming. Maybe that's his Achilles heel: he doesn't know to jump on games.

Ignoring the tutorial, the first level was basically a contra level.

Just a standard side scroller that you shoot enemies. No real platforming involved at all. You jumped over a stump a few times, but that's it. Well maybe there was more to the level, but 30 minutes later he only managed to get halfway through the first level, and that first half was no platforming. Hell the first level was called, Run & Gun. Basically all you did, you ran and shot things. And your shooting in a side scrolling, so way less skills invovled than a FPS with dual analog for movement and aiming required.

I read your previous post, and I agree that it's not only jumps what he doesn't "get". It's like he can't do two things at the same time: jumping & shooting, looking at the enemies while controlling the character, etc.

He seems to score higher the games where he can stand still, shoot, move to the next position and repeat.

I'll never complain about a game being "hard" ever again. hahaha.

Maybe his writing on "economics" i.e. business is good, that doesn't mean he should be covering games themselves.
Underlying issue is, status hierarchies mean certain people have certain positions and priviledges,
and because this guy has ingratiated himself with that hierarchy (perhaps legitimately by his business analysis),
he reaps the fruit of that by editors, etc, feeling indebted to him to give him work that he doesn't necessarily qualify for.

I fail to see how "learning by death" is not a legitimate approach. It's not the type of game where death is supposed to be utterly rare. Dying once in such a circumstance is not the problem, it is just +1 death to an un-ending stream of player caused incompetent deaths. The problem is the journalist can't pay attention to game enough to learn by this method, as he described re: jumping on enemies not working.

Exactly, there is no way anybody remotely engaged with gaming can continually perform to that level, even if they had zero experience with genre to start.
Even if you're a BAD gamer, there should be capacity to grasp the low hanging fruit, so to speak. This isn't a gamer in action, it is business and PR person who doesn't really enjoy gaming enough to pay attention.

Being a good journalist on topic of videogame BUSINESS, or hardware or software engineering doesn't mean you're qualfied to write about games themselves. The problem is that "general status" is being used to qualify writes instead of actual direct competence of subject matter at hand. Having other professional or personal accomplishments isn't a reason why he should be commissioned for article instead of a more qualified person. Note I'm not saying only very skilled gamers should write game reviews, addressing casual gamer intro level gameplay is fine. But this guy can't even manage that level of competence, and he thusly lets article become distracted from actually relevant perspectives to the results of his dull-head minute-long banging into a column. 

Umm... So don't backtrack and cause enemy to re-spawn and then you won't be annoyed?
Refusing to play along with game is hardly a convincing basis of critique.

Spot on. And this isn't about attacking him personally, but the system which gives him job of reviewing games.
Allowing this level of incompetence (NOT merely low-average skill) to define metric by which games are judged
in articles which influence game sales means games become designed around people who aren't real gamers.
His article actually has some good lines, acknowledging that "hard skill-based games" may have positive value,
but most importantly noting that such types of games have become rarer... NOW WHY WOULD THAT BE???
When game reviews are given to people who can't engage in MOST BASIC LEVEL gaming skills or even apparently
just pay attention to the game and not repeatedly do the same things that don't work and/or lead to death?