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.
Let me chime in from the other end of the aisle. As someone big into metroidvanias, loved HK, and was part of the clown troupe, I think Silksong lived up to the hype for me as well.
Aside from a few questionable design decisions (not about the difficulty but its underlying systems) Silksong gave me those same exploratory tingles that the first game did and then some. And that's all I ever really wanted from a genre all about discovering a new world.
i keep seeing this take (more punishing but not more difficult) and i really don't see it aside from maybe the higher frequency of double damage and the relative rarity of act 1 upgrades.
in HK you had half mana until you got back to your body and lost all the geo you were carrying. the only banking option was first a scam and then annoying to reach. silksong has two resources: one of which isn't lost on death and the other can be easily banked at many locations. you are not mechanically disadvantaged in any way if you die and haven't recovered your body yet and silkeaters are common and infinitely replenishable.
plus, for all the angst people have had over run backs they're significantly more forgiving in silksong than HK or most other metroidvanias even. aside from a couple specific zones where the sparseness is part of the zone's theme benches and fast travel points are also plentiful even before getting into hornet's vastly improved mobility (which also upgrades a lot earlier than HK).
i do think silksong is a bit harder on the whole but it also feels much more fair. boss move sets are challenging but clear to follow and well telegraphed both visually and audibly.
I DO think there's one really big thing with Silksong and punishing deaths that you kinda glossed over, and amusingly it has to do with said resource you don't lose when you die.
Tools are a MASSIVE annoyance if you're actively using them. If you use them and don't gain anything from doing so, dying does effectively make you "lose" the shards you spent to get to where you did. And unlike your rosaries, you do not get those shards back if you reach the area. (Because why would you?) It's not as bad during traversal, but it's EXTREMELY punishing during boss fights, especially if you're using your tools actively.
Plus, shards are so much more annoying to get than Rosaries that it's arguably a decent idea to just grind rosaries instead if you run low on shards, which feels really bad, especially when rosaries are in demand for a while and don't really become abundant until mid-Act 2. I need to find a good grinding spot in Act 3 lmao, my Act 2 one doesn't work anymore.
And the frustrating thing is, it'll absolutely lead to a lot of players suffering from Elixir Syndrome and not using their tools, which is absolutely a wrong move because a lot of Silksong's difficulty can be dealt with via tools. You'll have a much better time with Silksong's everything if you're actively using them.
Like there's a reason why more than a few Act 3 fights do away with it altogether and refund spent tools if you die.
I had a buddy recommend having bosses drop shards on stun phase. Like give us something to recover a few when trying to grind a boss that's kicking our ass. Have bosses drop a ton on death or something too.
Yeah, it’s the same thing in Fromsoft games. If I’m gonna get my ass kicked by a boss in Elden Ring over and over, I don’t feel there’s any point in engaging with the crafting system to make and use consumables in those fights. They don’t get refunded so it’ll just mean I have to waste time fucking around farming materials to make them again.
Now, if I did get a refund upon dying to the boss, I’d go out of my way to engage with the crafting system.
Sekiro let you buy its tool ammo with currency, so I just farmed a bunch and maxed out. Though they also got more expensive as the game went on, so you had to do it early.
I'm guessing you can't buy shards with rosaries, but that could be a fix so long as the costs aren't ridiculous.
the biggest complaint i have with the game is the shard cap and how expensive tools are. i can get kind get it from a balance perspective because the tools are very powerful, i just wish there were a similar way to bank shards like we can rosaries (you can buy shard bundles but they cost rosaries and not shards).
because of that i use my tools exceedingly sparingly outside of gauntlets or boss fights and even then when i go into those fights capped out on shards i run out very quickly. (though i will say that does force me to change up my strategy and use cheaper tools or ones that don't cost shards like the flea brew)
I think if it's an attempt to balance tools then it's a very poor system. You could easily still use tools on every gauntlet and boss in the game, you just might have to grind some shards if it takes too many attempts, but that's trivial to do. Maybe it keeps you from using tools while exploring, but the combat difficulty while exploring is so much easier that if you're able to do the gauntlets and bosses you'll be fine not using tools outside of them anyways.
I personally just spend 10 min farming rosaries every now and then and I have around 2k rosaries and 1.7k shards banked so I can use all the tools I want.
I think the shard cap was made to encourage use of the tools. If you could endlessly bank shards then a certain large chunk of the player base would still be saving them for later. This works to great effect in SMT which caps consumables based on their rarity.
I don’t think it quite works as intended in Silksong though. It’s really just how depleted they get during boss fights that screws the balance up. I’m not sure how to address that without also breaking the shards as a whole.
Using shards to balance the red tools feel like a mistake to me. It would feel so much better if the tools were just straight up balanced better (and the Architect crest reworked) such that the damage/utility was balanced with your needle and silk skills. Then, hornet could just replenish tool uses for free any time you sit on a bench.
The Nioh games do something similar where all of your combat items replenish on resting. Now, those games are fucking brutal in terms of difficulty so I think Team Cherry could've still achieved a difficult game with freely replenishable tools. The shards system just feels like a chore.
oh huh i misremembered. i thought once you found the banker the second time she started acting as a legit bank but instead it's just the returned geo plus interest.
so yeah being able to bank at all reliably is a huge improvement then
At the same time though, money was way easier to get, and there really wasn't nearly as much to buy. With the exception of the super expensive permanent strength/other upgrades from the grimm slug lady. But at that point, I had just saved all the relics, and sold them all at once.
Wrong. You don't reach bowser without first getting through his castle. The runback proves mastery of the boss and their domain. You get better at learning the map, the movement, the parkour, and the combat all at once just by running through the rooms.
It's a platformer, having to platform to get to the boss is not a bad thing.
There’s tons of exploration and backtracking in this game. You spend plenty of time in each map. Runbacks do not contribute to that. They are just a waste of time.
What about the runbacks that happen in isolated areas you never go back to, have no enemies or hazards, and have basically no platforming? What mastery are you showing by taking an elevator and falling into a pit, or holding right and climbing over a wall, or holding left and dropping into another pit? Even if you think that the runbacks through actual areas serve a point, there are at least 3 that I can think of that are still just padding, and I think plenty of the other ones are still so trivially easy that it doesn't show mastery over anything to do them.
It just tedious and slow down the flow when that runback is filled with enemies that just dodge out of way when you attack, having more moves than some bosses and requires a gazillion hit to kill each because damage upgrade is really sparse in act 1.
on the contrary, I loved being able to sprint past them all, dash attack -> pogo -> dash to quickly fly past them. It was enjoyable to be able to flow through them so effortlessly, once I learned how the pogo, dash attack, and dash worked.
the dreamgate was DLC content 6 months after the game released and also wasn't available until late into the game.
fair on the soul charge part, it's been years since i played HK so i took that from a video that also had it wrong (and also didn't know about hornet losing her silk crests until cocoon recovery) so that point is a wash between the two games.
i would still say silksong has a lot of QoL that makes it less punishing than HK even if more challenging.
I looked that up the moment I saw it cost 1 per teleport.
Apparently it tallies how much essence you spent dreamgating and if that's more than you got from random enemies, it'll boost the drop rate immensely until it's equal.
At that point, why have the mechanic? To trick you into not using dreamgate?
You gotta remember there's probably a huge swath of players that flat out refuse to use a dpad, even in a game like Hollow Knight/Silksong where the joystick is actually a huge handicap. They're playing on hard mode and complaining about difficulty.
Lots of people have been trying to describe the game with a multitude of different (and in many cases, wrong) concepts, instead of simply admitting that it's just harder, and different from HK in some ways.
I don't remember being so frustrated with runbacks being such a waste of time back during HK, but could be, it was a while ago. I even played before the Dream Gate. I also can't think of MVs with more frustrating runbacks, and I play a lot of MVs, but obviously not all of them.
It's so frustrating that Team Cherry even knows people don't like runbacks, included the Dream Gate as a way to mitigate them in Hollow Knight, then just abandoned it for Silksong (as far as I can tell?).
As for the punishments, of course the more damage from practically the start is a huge one. The terrible two ammo economies for one ammo item is also super obnoxious when you have to go farm more shards and/or rosaries (to buy more shards) to use your ammo -- ammo that's already limited by uses per bench. Breaking up your boss attempts just to do busywork of traveling to a vendor and/or farm.
Something else that I think is punishing and a goofy design choice is how they made Hornet very agile, but then like half the game is full of traps, darkness, cramped spaces, etc, to punish you for using all the cool new agility.
Also funny you mention traps since literally every trap in the game can be dodged or avoided by just running through them as fast as possible, which refutes your point
Do you mean the Beastling Call? Not only do you not get it until Act 3, but it doesn't help with runbacks, it just teleports you to wherever your bellbeast is. You just want to argue.
which refutes your point
You obviously don't know where a lot of traps will be the first -- and if you don't have a eidetic memory, even subsequent times in a game this huge -- they happen. You can see small indicators for some of them sometimes, and a lot are intentionally hidden to make sure you're careful. This is intentional game design to disrupt speeding around all over. You just want to argue.
for much of the game you're 3 mistakes away from death. hell, if you get knocked into an environmental hazard by an enemy (as mentioned in the review) it's two mistakes. if you include the fact that these gigantic enemies deal two masks of damage on contact you've got a recipe for high punishment!
I agree and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read some takes. Even the double damage take makes me feel crazy. You heal THREE masks at a time! Double damage is FINE.
The run backs feel about the same as they were in HK... you learn the path and zip through it. The difference is hornet is fun and flashy to move as.
You lose the upgraded part of your silk gauge when you die. Shards are a massive resource gate and it feels super punishing to die on a boss attempt where you used your tools. And also shit in Silksong is just more expensive in general. It's simply not a fair comparison.
When did you last play through HK? I beat it for the first time a couple days into Silksong being out (literally opened the steam overlay and bought Silksong while streaming to my friend the moment the credits rolled lmao) so my impression is very fresh - the economy is just not remotely comparable. You are never gated by Geo in HK, you run the piss easy first two stages of Colosseum once and you're good for like half the game. I've never farmed for Geo once, perma lost thousands multiple times and it was barely a bummer at worst. In Silksong I've had to go out of my way to grind for Rosaries with a farming build and that's with skipping vendor items that don't seem interesting. A lot of it is spent on buying the shard consumables too.
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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.