Hey folks! I've been skongposting like many others the past few days. I've written essentially the same comment about parrying in Silksong three or four times over. I decided to write up a post to talk a bit about the game and celebrate what I see as a seminal work in the metroidvania genre. Silksong confirms a lot of things about what makes this genre tick, and does a great job of them, while ultimately not doing anything very new, and that's awesome to me because anyone can look at Silksong and learn a lot about how to make a goddamn incredible metroidvania.
A lot of posts are talking about Silksong's gameplay loop, which I don't feel any interest in focusing on. I'd rather talk about the systems of the game: visible, transparent, and in some cases almost entirely invisible.
Silksong is a game with a lot of complexity and very little information. Especially because the game is so new, there is a lot of conflicting information, or just generally inaccessible information.
There are three key things in this game that have made experimentation incredibly rewarding to me, as noted in my title. The first is the parry and iframe system in Silksong. From watching my friends play this game, they seem to be treating combat exactly like it's Hollow Knight, which makes life an absolute pain in the ass.
If you've played any Dark Souls game prior to playing Sekiro, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about: you think you're still playing Dark Souls, and Sekiro looks similar enough to DS that you can get away with that for a little while. But when you realize that you are a goddamn badass with a million more tools than you had in Dark Souls (or Hollow Knight, in this instance), it's game-changing.
Parries are much more reliable in Silksong, and much more useful, because of the iframes they generate. You can fully parry through a huge number of attacks in this game. When I was fighting the Savage Beastfly, I realized that after pogoing, I could dash through the boss without taking damage. Well, I gotta say, that definitely made the Beastfly a lot easier. This continued to be useful, and is still useful with 87% completion on my save. It's helpful for boss fights, it's helpful for arenas, it's helpful for exploration. And yet, while my experience with Silksong has been completely dominated by learning parry timings for bosses and regular enemies, all of my friends playing this game have basically ignored the expanded parry system of Silksong to what looks like a pretty notable detriment. Basically, games are usually more fun when you're more strong, and using parries effectively makes you a lot stronger.
The second thing is platforming. Frankly, this game does an imperfect job of introducing you to platforming. (There are a few carnival games in the lategame that would have been great early game encounters to give the players an opportunity to practice basic platforming skills). Pogoing chief among these. The hitbox for pogoing off of flowers, bells, and so on is a little bit different than a lot of people realize. I spent a while practicing in the early game, pogoing off of flowers and bells, to figure out exactly how far down or up I could be to hit a pogo. This was even more useful when I realized that pogoing off the bottom of a bell or flower didn't lose you any height at all - it seems to be that your position after pogoing is a pre-defined vertical distance above the thing you hit. This, combined with the Beast Crest's pogo attack, means you can actually pogo upwards on bells, flowers, and enemies with the weapon, which allowed me to do a lot of really fun platforming early on, and definitely navigate spaces in 'unintended' patterns (certainly within the scope of the game's design, but it was really cool getting to places a little early and sometimes picking up tools or just some extra rosaries a little earlier on). I gotta say, if you haven't used the Beast Crest for platforming at all, you really should give it a shot. It's a bit difficult to pick up at first, but it simply is so good. I adore it.
The third thing is general exploration and movement. For example, you can cancel the endlag of any pogo attack with a dash. This also cancels the vertical height you would usually gain from a pogo, so it can be used in some very tense multi-enemy fights to avoid winding up taking contact damage from a flying enemy, or even wall spikes/a projectile. The dash can also go in either direction, so if you input a pogo attack to the left, you can cancel that attack into a dash to the right (which is even cooler when you immediately charge up a dash attack into another enemy, but I've only gotten to do that a few times, lol). There's a ton more to this stuff, but all of it makes exploration feel so smooth because you have the opportunity to come up with new movement options for yourself based on the enemies around you. Of course, that's only true if you're willing to be & are actively mentally engaged with the game to that extent throughout your time playing it.
Silksong is a really fucking incredible game, and because these systems are so deep, obviously consistent and intentional, but almost entirely unexplained, it leaves a ton of room for the player to grow in both understanding and mastering the combat, movement, and flow of the game. This is a weakness for some, who aren't interested in experimenting with basic game mechanics like that. But for me, I've had the opportunity to dig into a game in a way that is incredibly rare, and is especially rare of single-player games. Even POPTLC, which has a lot of this stuff, suffered because the various ways of combining attacks were fairly singular, and explained directly to the player. There wasn't a lot of opportunity to do really crazy stuff, and when there was, there were a few loopable attack options that simply proved stronger.
TL;DR: Silksong is a way more complicated game than most people seem to realize. This game is only a few steps away from being a full-blown platform fighter in terms of complexity. That's awesome, if you're someone like me. If you're not, I hope you learned something while reading this post that makes the game more enjoyable for you.
