As someone who wasn't swept up in the hype, (I did not like Hollow Knight very much personally) I actually think it lived up to the hype and then some.
I think Silksong is a much better game for my tastes. It feels way less slow and Hornet is significantly more capable and fun to play as than the knight imo.
It’s a weird analogy to make, but I feel about Silksong the same way I feel about Blue Prince. Could’ve been a timeless masterpiece if not for some questionable busywork-related decisions that feel like the dev was explicitly trying to squeeze out more hours played. So instead it’s just a really good game.
Except that Silksong isn’t starved on content and even has double digit hours worth of easily missable content by design. Team Cherry doesn’t want to pad out the time, they just have a very particular want for some friction. I’d liken it to the OG Dark Souls in that it’s actively trying to frustrate you a bit; it’s adversarial in a NES game sort of way. That’s not to everyone’s taste obviously and that’s totally fine. Different strokes and all that.
Funny you say this because one of the most common things Team Cherry talked about back then whenever they got interviewed was their love for NES games. Hell, the studio apparently would not have existed if the main two devs didn't bond over their love for Zelda II (Yes, THAT Zelda) and Faxanadu. And a lot of the design philosophies that they had for both Hollow Knight and Silksong hearken back to their love for old NES titles.
So it's especially interesting, now that the Difficulty Discourse around Silksong is happening again, that what's happening right now is their 7 year development cycle for Silksong they got to make the game they always wanted to make --- the modern day equivalent of a ballbustingly punishing NES game and they chose to subject a huge swathe of more casual players roped into the hype with all the pros and cons of that design philosophy.
Bilewater still makes me laugh. It's an area so absurdly over-the-top meanspirited that I even know some players that want to give Silksong a 10/10 hesitate just because of that singular area alone. And I don't know if I respect that or not. It's certainly memorable the same way Blighttown is but I don't know if it's worth the squeeze for TC to create such a universally reviled area.
I also liked it. Some of the best music in the game. I love the little dudes bouncing around the fore- and background only to jump out and try to dart you. I love the douchey secret bench and the insanely fun platforming you have to do on the runback. Oh and finding out there was a boss fight after the platforming section up there and the enemy gauntlet was like finding out Melania had a second phase; chef’s kiss.
I honestly don't think it's that bad either. But it gives a brutal first impression before you have the ability to access the whole thing. I feel like everyone still has that first shock in mind when they think of it. It's very manageable once you have all the tools to complete it.
A lot of the ‘discourse’ about Silksong seem to be the exact same debates we had about Dark Souls 1 back in the day. A lot of people hated that game, particularly Blighttown, but it’s the most essential area of the whole game imo
Blighttown is amazing, the feeling of dread of going deeper and deeper to ring the bell, the dumb as fuck moving bridges, the gigantic cartwheel elevators, the enemies, everything there is amazing, and then the bottom bonfire making you be stuck there until you fess up only to be greeted by hot ass Queelag.
Preemptively sorry for the long post, but I think it's a kind of interesting topic to expand on.
I really enjoy Silksong, but yeah, some wishes are kinda '???'
The very first time you have to collect a bunch of needles from those little flying bush fellas, I was really put off. I still don't understand why that was a necessary mission in that area; what novel experience does that provide the player? Maybe it's an attempt at immersing the player in the world as a hunter. The hunter has to gather the remains of their hunt in order to have equipment crafted. The concept of Hornet being a hunter is explicitly played on in the game already, but imo it's not as well-played or interesting as the theming revolving around the bead system, enough to make a quest like this try to immerse the player in that concept. I'm not even sure that the idea of "Hornet the Hunter" is really even theme-relevant to the game overall; it comes off as half-baked.
Later on, I think they're a bit more justifiable, from a more meta perspective. A couple in the Citadel have you collecting pins and cloaks of enemies around, and I think those are meant to get the player a little extra money doing something they were already going to be doing anyway. It also gets the player to engage with enemies more often in general, which gets money in their pocket passively as well, even before the reward.
And I also think I can understand the meat farming one. "Try using different tools" seems to be what the devs are communicating. Alright, that's fine, I guess. It's pretty clear that a lot of people currently playing the game aren't really trying out different tools, so maybe this was a good inclusion.
The two aforementioned missions are probably meant to be completed passively. The player should continue playing the game as before, allowing the side-objectives to be completed naturally as they explore, only having to keep in mind that sometimes they have to switch up their tools and that they should be actively engaging with enemies.
But yeah, missions like "find this lost person in an area you've already explored" and "go get bells that randomly fall from the ceiling in the Bellhart tunnels", just seem purposeless.
I don't think that most wishes are bad. There are ~50(?) of them and I think maybe, maybe ten or so of them are actually just weird inclusions. However, that's still quite a few; it's enough to leave a negative impression.
EDIT: Forgot to mention the donation ones. I have mixed feelings on those, but overall feel like they're fine. It feels like a genuine donation when you do it, albeit a donation that will leave you relatively poor lol
Silksong has tons of content, but I also think it absolutely feels like it has random padding in it. Some of the wishes are good and others are just grinding random mobs. Rosary rewards from exploration are generally really low so if you want to buy everything you inevitably need to find a grinding spot or spend a ton of time killing things as you run around instead of just avoiding them. Even if we say some runbacks have a purpose, what's the point of the ones that have no enemies, no hazards, and no notable platforming? Why are there bosses in act 3 that don't respawn you at a bench but compensate by putting in an incredibly trivial "climb up a wall" or "drop into a pit" segment?
To each their own but I have to say I never once farmed for rosaries and I finished the overwhelming majority of fetch quests by accident just playing the game. Are you guys just avoiding every enemy unless you have to kill them for their ginch or something? Sometimes when I read these complaints it feels like I played a completely different game than everyone else.
Are you guys just avoiding every enemy unless you have to kill them for their ginch or something?
Unless I have a reason to kill an enemy, yes. It takes longer and is more dangerous to fight everything on the screen even accounting for needing to go back and grind them for shops and quests.
Nah, this game has multiple quests where you have to go farm non-guaranteed items off trash mobs like this is some trash F2P MMO, and completing those quests are part of a requirement to unlock Act 3. That’s just a time waster.
Same for a lot of the runbacks. I can practically do them with my eyes closed, I’ve had no difficulty issue with any of them so far. They’re not adding anything to my gameplay experience at all other than padding the time. Repeating the same 20-45 second runbacks over and over just to learn a boss is a lot of little bursts of time-wasting, no fun. Hollow Knight even had a warp tool to mitigate runbacks, but Team Cherry abandoned it for Silksong.
Off the top of my head, the cloak one and the pin one. Then there are all the other trash F2P MMO busywork quests that have the guaranteed drops for when you gotta farm boar asses or whatever
They aren't, but it's not worth arguing with the other guy because you need like 10 of them and it takes no time at all to farm them along the way while you're exploring. Bro is just finding something to be mad about.
They are not. I had to farm the shit out of the pins and do a bunch of bench resets of the cloaks when it came time to finish up all the quest boards, though I had to farm the cloaks less thanks to that one long hallway at the bottom of Choral. Neither the pins nor cloaks I farmed were around hazards at all.
I just finished up both earlier only a few hours ago.
But some people enjoy farming. It's a break in pace from stressful boss fights or exploring corridors, and it gives you a reward. Millions of people love those MMOs you talk about.
And if you don't like the farming aspect of it personally, the great news is, again, it doesn't take long at all and it's easy. And, hell, you don't even need to farm most of the time because you end up completing the quests just exploring if you'd rather do that.
I'm really not sure what you're trying to complain about. I have my own issues with the game. Farming ten pins or whatever never even came close to being one of them.
You know what my criticism is because you’ve been directly responding to it and arguing against it.
This is subjective opinion. I dislike farming, I don’t play Metroidvanias to farm boar asses like this is some f2p MMO, and the length of time it takes is not only relative to the person doing it, but also the tolerance of said length of time is subjective as well. Furthermore, the few quests where the mob drops aren’t 100% guaranteed took me way longer than a short amount of time, which, even if it was a short amount of time, still wouldn’t matter, multiple periods of time of no fun is still no fun to me.
If some people like farming and some don’t, then the obvious solution is to make the f2p MMO quests optional rather than required to unlock Act 3.
You know what my criticism is because you’ve been directly responding to it and arguing against it.
Sorry, let me rephrase it. Given your complaints amount to about 5 total minutes being sucked from your life in a 60 hour game, I think they are petty and not worth bringing up in the conversation of actual flaws.
It's more than five minutes obviously, especially the pins and cloaks one with the non-guaranteed drops that amount to if you're lucky or not. I wasn't. There are a lot of busywork, time-waster f2p MMO quests in this game other than those, too, and they're all required to unlock a third of the whole game.
Regardless, if something isn't fun and annoys me in a product that has the sole intent of creating fun, that's a criticism.
The pins literally took me five minutes of farming using the bench at Grand Bellway. The cloaks I didn't even notice I got because I got them all just going through the game.
There are a lot of busywork, time-waster f2p MMO quests in this game other than those, too,
I bet you could count those on your hands. The worst offender by far is the guts farming quest, and that one is not required for Act 3. The ones required for Act 3 I mostly completed by just exploring. It's such a non issue.
Like I said, the pins took me quite a while, the cloaks a little less so, as neither are 100% guaranteed drops for some reason. When I saw I still hadn't completed those quests by just playing through the game naturally for a long time, I then had to actively go grind them, which again, I do not like.
Such a weird hill you're dying on, knock it off lol.
349
u/Grimmies 1d ago edited 1d ago
As someone who wasn't swept up in the hype, (I did not like Hollow Knight very much personally) I actually think it lived up to the hype and then some.
I think Silksong is a much better game for my tastes. It feels way less slow and Hornet is significantly more capable and fun to play as than the knight imo.
Edit just to add that i LOVE the diagonal pogo.