Silksong makes me want to cry sad tears of defeat.
It’s so melancholy and difficult sometimes. Yeah, there’s the whole ‘get good’ argument, but there’s a lot of arguably unnecessary tedium involved that starts to feel like difficulty just for the sake of being difficult and nothing else. That’s definitely been a bit of a detractor for me, as well as a lot of others it seems.
I avoided all Silksong articles and posts until I finished Act 1 and probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the response, but I was. To me, this threads the needle of that difficulty curve I’m looking for. It’s hard but none of my deaths have felt cheap - I made a mistake in my read or hit the wrong button or I’m old and my reflexes are slowing down.
The high you get when finally learning the boss patterns and beating them is fantastic although…
act 1 spoiler
when I landed the final blow on the Last Judge I dropped my controller and threw my hands in the air only for the corpse to explode and drop me down to one mask. It was 🤌
Difficulty and fun are orthogonal, one doesn’t exclude the other. Look at something like Celeste, it gets brutally difficult in farewell but never feels unfair.
A difficult game should motivate the player to get better, and that can happen while still remaining a fun experience. Nine Sols has a difficult combat system, but the combat feels fluid and fast-paced. Learning how to parry an enemy’s attacks and get in counter hits feels amazing, also you get lots of meaningful upgrades and rewards from everywhere.
Meanwhile in silksong you have a character with insane horizontal movement, then you repeatedly get pushed through narrow vertical platforming sections with flying enemies above, spikes on the sides. Killing a bell guy by agonizingly hitting them 1 hit at a time before they dash away out of reach again is not a fun combat paradigm and doesn’t create the power fantasy Hollow Knight excelled at.
The boss fights and >!Mt.Fay!< are fantastic but exploring the map just feels frustrating, especially when 90% of zones don’t drop any rosaries.
Why drop rosaries when you get killed in 3 hits (for about all of act 1 at the very least) and come across a dozen enemies that bait and dodge every input you make and spike traps within a couple screens every time you die and you get killed a second time on your runback anyway
I think it’ll only be “too hard” the first play through. I got every achievement in HK, I’ll probably do the same with Silksong, which means eventually I’ll be able to beat every boss in order without dying in less than 10 hours. It’ll get easier to the point where I’m adding challenges to my game just to stay entertained.
Most of the complaints are limited to the early game. After act 1, I didn’t really struggle to the same level anymore. I had the masks and abilities I needed to navigate hard fights.
I hope they don’t nerf anything else. I was grinding through Sister Sledge (or whatever the boss is called) and I’d nearly done it. Then patch 1 came out and I did it first time. I feel robbed of the achievement.
Tweaking the rosary economy is ok however there is a clear lore reason why it is less generous initially.
Every time I read about players bitching about difficulty, I wonder why they’re so persistent. Either git gud, or move on. There’s plenty of games out there to play instead.
I tried dark souls and realized that kinda game isn’t for me. Neither is getting over it, or anything like that. I just want to lean back and relax, and I don’t want to mess with tight timings and stuff like that. I just play puzzle games because of that, and I thoroughly enjoy it.
Why do they feel the need of forcing themselves through an experience they don’t enjoy? FOMO? Bragging rights? I really don’t get it.
I’m fine with the difficulty, but I’m sure a lot of players bought silksong without beating hollow Knight first, and I feel that the game is too hard for someone just getting into the genre. it’s unnecessary cruel to new players sometimes imo.
someone could enjoy most of the game but be turned away by some of the more frustrating parts, which in my opinion is kinda unfortunate. maybe they bought the game on release and now feel like they are stuck with a game that isn’t worth it.
If someone can speedrun the first two chapters in 1:08, it can’t be that hard, can it?
Holy shit did they do that on their first try? Or did they spend basically the entire time since it came out just grinding those exact levels to dial in as close to perfection as they can?
Cos like the rest of us got real jobs
I don’t know how long this guy took, but he knew his ways in and out, so one can safely assume he already spent a lot of time in the game.
Some games are just supposed to be harder, it’s how they were designed. Developers shouldn’t have to come out and address anything. If it’s too hard for you, just refund it and move on to another game if you don’t have the patience to learn it.
Let me fill up the negative space in that comment…I want Silksong to be hard. I want to do things dozens of times before succeeding, I want to struggle then overcome
It’s all skill based. You get better, your character gives you more breathing room, but ultimately you have to learn and overcome each new challenge
And that feels amazing, it’s not for everyone but I don’t want a way to make it easier… It would cheapen the experience to even have the option
Agree but man it is punishing to get smacked back to a bench 6 screens back.
That’s the point?
Are tedium and difficulty the same thing?
Hmm, fair point.
It depends on the context. Let’s say their is a hard boss that you need 10 attempts for. It makes a huge difference if there is a checkpoint before it or if you have to do 5 minutes of chores again (I agree that these are extreme examples…)
20 minutes of challenge becomes 5 minutes of chores becomes 2 minutes to blaze through flawlessly once you get it down
And it breaks you out of the headspace. You can’t just dive back in, every attempt has weight, even if not much
Also most people who complain about this seem to not understand that this is not random, these are well thought out design decisions. If it feels impossibly hard to just get to the boss, there’s probably an easier way. There’s tons of shortcuts, there’s often an easier route to another bench, and when there isn’t the boss is probably an easy one when you’re not anxious about having to repeat the section
Plus, platforming is a huge aspect of the challenge in itself. Sure, it’s annoying chores now, but what happens when you need near perfect movement for long stretches with no platforms to rest on?
I’ve been stuck at last judge for hours. I perfected the runback and stage 1 and I feel I’m getting closer. Soon I’ll beat that oversized bug and get to the citadel and it will feel great!
It will! That one took me a while too, but it opens up a lot
I couldnt agree more. It’s okay if a game is too hard, either take the challenge or just move on to a different one, there’s no shame in it.
I feel like they should stick to their guns and just make the game they want to make.
Is it going to be for everyone? No, but no game is.
A game developer can have massive blind spots about their game, feedback can elevate the artist’s vision if responded to critically.
Yes, but trying to please everyone can also lead to pleasing no one.
These people have obviously never played cuphead either then.
Is cup head comparable? It looks really floaty
I’d say cuphead has overall better boss design even though dr Carls robot can go fuck itself and dr Carl too.
Silksong has beautiful story and better platforming.
Both are very very hard games.
Yet my, at the time, 5yr old finished cuphead with dlc on normal. Now, at 9, he’s beating silksong bosses faster than me. Got widow in 4 tries…
I mean, you’d have to try it to judge for yourself. But I think it’s one of the best side scrollers ever made.
It’s right in the difficulty sweet spot for me despite not being as into games (at the age of 40) as I used to be generally. It’s like it was made for me!!
Once I switched from my steam deck to a platform where I got more than five frames and switched wireless controller surrounded by two separate wireless routers It became one of if not my favorite game but while I was playing with an unknown handicap I saw a bunch of unavoidable flaws that were not the fault of the player at least on the bell beast, there are instances that are impossible to escape like entirely impossible, you can avoid them and I did eventually beat it even with the handicap but the game definitely has flaws that the difficulty accentuates but the later upgrades and tools definitely eliminates most of them.
Kinda bad timing to say this considering Randy Pitchford said almost exactly the same thing about Borderlands 4. Same message with different words.
EDIT: That headline gives a very wrong impression of what they actually said, holy.
It’s got the bloodborne blood vial issue with having to grind for crafting materials if you get stuck and use them all.
Definitely could use a cost nerf for the tools and not every attack from a boss should do two or three damage.
Huh. Maybe I’m just too early in the game still (despite having put 10+ hours into it) but crafting materials are like, the one thing I’m not hurting for. It’s got the Zelda rupee problem for me, at least at this point in the game – I’m constantly pegged at the max capacity, and it feels like I have basically nothing to use it on. (I mean, I do use the tools I have found so far, situationally, but I don’t think I’ve been down by more than ~100 or so from max other than for that one wish in the starting area.)
Which boss you at?
You are fine till you hit a point and run out. Once you hit empty it’s a constant grind to get back to full and that’s also not counting the more expensive tools later in the game or the tools that need you to return to specific locations to “recharge” for beads.
It’s just this extra layer of grind and tedium that Hollow Knight didn’t have with the spells all using soul.
I’m not sure, but this is what my map looks like currently.
Your basically not even out of the tutorial yet in the grand scheme of things.
Shards didn’t become a problem for me for example till well past the half way point.
Farming 1600 shell shards takes less than 10 mins or so by farming rosaries and buying shards from a vendor.
At least for my playstyle, tools have become essential for boss fights, and I’ve run out and had to grind for resources for them twice. Especially when you get to the point where you are basically just doing boss fights and rarely, if ever, fighting a normal enemy.
Me after beating
a specific boss
Savage Beastfly for the 2nd time
only to immediately lose all my rosaries in
hard location
Sinner’s Road
and then spending the next 3 hours barely failing to
complete hard wish quest
deliver the courier’s rasher on time
The high points of the game are very good. The low points ruin it, in my opinion. I get that frustration might be fun for some people, but I find it discouraging and I don’t feel like Silksong wants me to be successful. It feels like it wants me to feel frustrated and angry, and that’s not an experience I want to have. I doubt I’ll finish the game, which sucks, because I loved Hollow Knight, and I love the parts of Silksong that aren’t just making me mad.
Maybe mods could be a solution to this?
It really wouldn’t take much. Just some accessibility options to address some of the most punishing mechanics would do it. Would be great if mods solved this.
You’re describing the horrid souls-like experience embraced by every gamer in these times.
It’s unpopular to dislike being annoyed and frustrated with your game, didn’t you hear?
Seriously. I love Hollow Knight and what I have played from Silksong thus far, but this elitist “game must be ultra hard and exclude people that can’t do it” shit is and always has been a garbage take as far as I am concerned. Having some sort of option to allow people that aren’t that good or have accessibility issues enjoy the game seems like a fine thing. Having those be optional should in no way prevent people that like the hard default settings from enjoying the game. Maybe have those options disable getting achievements/trophies if it prevents these elitists from enjoying the game knowing that their “lessers” are also able to enjoy the game.
Nine Sols did this perfectly. It’s another very hard metroidvania, but it has some options you can enable if you want to that adjust the difficulty in a variety of very tangible ways. I wish that was standard.
I think twitch drives this a lot. Streamers getting annoyed with the game they’re playing tend to do better on their vods and bring in more people. As a result, people become more and more tolerant to games that are just annoying.
Like I understand that some people enjoy the gameplay of soulslikes, but who enjoys run backs?
God, all the people that can’t imagine that people don’t enjoy things the same exact way they do.
Exactly.
Imagine being ridiculed for not enjoying frustration and games designed around failure. It’s a damned shame.
Then the game is not for you, saying that is not ridiculing you. At all.
It’s not a 70€ AAA game that’s trying to cater to everyone either.
Ok.
That’s me with Hollow Knight. I want to finish, but it’s frustrating to the point that I give up after 30 minutes with no progress.
That’s definitely a rookie amount of time with no progress for this style of game in general.
I’ve played 7+ total hours and I’ve only managed to get Greenpath and Forgotten Crossroads. The fact that my ghost can (and has, many times) kill me is infuriating. How am I supposed to progress if after 30 minutes I want to throw my controller at the wall?
The problem is not the game… its getting mad. You’re supposed to be having fun. If you’re not having fun you’re doing it wrong. Either enjoy overcoming challenges or find something else to do.
I’ll repeat a comment I posted on another article.
It has been 14 years since Dark Souls and yet, the holy words still stand.
Git gud.
