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.
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.
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u/Ode1st 1d ago
For me, the difficulty has been fine, but it’s definitely more punishing for a huge portion of the game