> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun.
Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better about offering spectacle also. Some people play games mostly for skill mastery, others play games mostly for spectacle. This is a more nuanced distinction than "hardcore" vs "casual" - which fails to capture skill mastery extremists who are barely even gamers because they only play one game, or spectacle extremists who could hardly be called casual because they make gaming their entire life.
Most people care about both, but may care more about one side or another. Some games cater to one side or the other, and some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
Elden Ring is a great example of a game where the difficulty is largely self-imposed, if you play using all the tools the devs give you like summons, magic, certain weapons, etc the game becomes almost trivialized. Not saying that's a bad thing necessarily, in fact the opposite, I think FromSoft's "difficulty slider" replacement is one of the best ways of going about it, however I think the difficulty overall is overstated by the "real souls players" who hamper themselves so as to experience all of the mechanics.
Whenever a game of this kind has a massive launch, a bunch of criticism will come from people who are either unfamiliar with the genre or just plainly don't enjoy it. That said, there's a very legitimate conversation to be had about difficulty in Elden Ring's DLC - I love FROM games and I genuinely couldn't enjoy the final bosses of SOTE due to the amount of bullshit they throw at you.
In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.
Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.
You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck.
I'm sure it isn't luck but at the same time I watch these things and genuinely don't understand how they do it. Particularly the whole thing of seeing and reacting that quick.
It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough.
Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, process, and react within milliseconds. I definitely think there is a type of brain that can play games like these and another type that can't, and I'm in the latter.
> I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast
The trick to basically all of these games is not to actually try and look at the arrows. There are a lot of them, they are moving fast, your conscious mind can't actually track and respond to each one of them individually.
But with practice you can train your self to more-or-less automatically respond to the sequence - there are only a handful of variations, and you learn the patterns that they typically arrive in.
(For a little while I had too much free time on my hands, and was in the top-100 BeatSaber players)
I think you can train it, at least that's what I did with Stepmania in the early 2000s. I was watching in awe how people could manage to get perfect scores when I could hardly see the steps before they were at the bottom of the screen.
Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use.
Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.
How much effort do you put into trying before you quit?
I used to look at games like Hades and Returnal and see nothing but chaos. But with enough time on the sticks both games became instinctual and I was able to find a flow.
Yes, there's variation in potential range but most brands are capable of most things if you give them enough time to grow the necessary neurons and pathways.
I just timed DDR First Mix on the default settings on Boom Boom Dollar (135bpm). You have 2.67 seconds from the arrow first appearing to needing to input a step. 2,667 milliseconds. Reaction time is not your issue. DDR’s arrows actually move extremely slowly.
Bullet hell shooters are deterministic. Mob behaviour in Silksong is random. It is entirely possible for a boss in Silksong to spawn several mobs that all do inconvenient attacks at once, boxing you in.
Some of the optional bosses in Silksong (e.g. Savage Beastfly, mentioned in the article) do have that issue: high damage + high health + spawning mobs with uncoordinated random movement. It makes for a prolonged sequence which is ultimately unlearnable but must still be performed perfectly.
It’s not that bad, you are still able to control your position and nudge the spawned enemies away, and force the boss to kill these enemies for you. And even if you get cornered here and there there’s plenty of time and space in this fight to heal back.
Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.
I think that’s a slightly uncharitable take. Yes, it was originally DLC, and yes it is unforgiving, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the White Palace from the first game, and it’s not brutally punishing (you are quite agile and get good upgrades pretty early on).
I felt that the beginning of the game is pretty punishing, exactly because you don't have these movement abilities yet.
After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable.
Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity.
I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep to reset my mind, and learn pogo-ing for real.
That also was the lesson I needed to go forward: take your time, consciously clear the environment, and learn the movesets. I have a lot of hours in the original game, and was way too used to sprinting through the environment.
Most of the pogos don't require the full diagonal range, you can just trigger the attack when you're really close to the target, which makes it almost a regular downwards jump.
Everyone repeats this, but is there any information that confirms it?
Yes, it started as a DLC for Hollow Knight - but the devs have known for the past 5 years that it would be a standalone sequel. Is there any evidence that they designed it as "extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff", rather than approached it as a game on its own right?
A lot of people coming to Silksong having played Hollow Knight seems to be saying this, but also seem to have forgotten that pretty much exactly the same things were said about Hollow Knight when it first came out over eight years ago.
Almost like the collective memory of Hollow Knight's difficulty has dulled over time as people have, over the eight years, dare I say it, git good...
Are there things that are measurably more difficult? Perhaps. Common enemies can now do two masks worth of damage which before was relegated to boss specials, so environments feel more dangerous. This has always been a significant part of the early game, as an extra mask in Hollow Knight was significant enough to keep you safer from regular enemies, but in Silksong once you get hold of an extra mask you go from being able to be killed in three hits to...being able to be killed in three hits.
So I think there are things that make it feel tougher. At the same time though, all the same things were said before about the difficulty, about not knowing where to go (Silksong gives even fewer clues I'd say), but people persisted through areas, learnt boss patterns, and eventually just learnt the game up until P5.
And in a few years the collective memory of Silksong's early game difficulty will have gone as people adapted to it.
It's less that it's harder, but simply very annoying. It has so many broken, twisted concepts even from the beginning. This makes it really not fun to experience, which then makes it's harder to play.
It's obvious why Team Cherry didn't allow pre-sale reviews. It will be interesting to see how successful it will stay in a month, and next year.
At one point (2020) they did intend for the difficulty to be similar to Hollow Knight:
> So Team Cherry is not out to make a more difficult sequel, then: they're hoping for it to be a "comparable" test of skill to Hollow Knight, Pellen says, while Gibson explains that starting with the clean slate of an entirely new kingdom with its own lore and new characters is another way in which Silksong is designed to be "a perfect jumping-on point for new players. We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game — that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way."
The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting.
I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss.
It's just a time consuming chore.
Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.
I had a sobering experience with one of the Hollow Knight optional bosses, Nightmare King Grimm.
After a few tries, and getting demolished in a few seconds by its relentless onslaught of attacks that span much of the screen, I realized that I'm simply too old and too slow to beat this boss. No regrets, I've had a great run -- my gaming life started back in the days of analog TV Pong "consoles". But my reflexes just aren't what they once were; and there was a boss simply beyond my physical capabilities. So it goes.
To Hollow Knight's eternal credit, I just kept at it because the fight was so engrossing. There was a borderline meditative quality to it. The speed, the relentlessness. The rhythm of it. Sometimes I would just not fight back, only dodge and see how long I could last.
One time, confusingly, the boss started doing a move I had never seen before. Bosses aren't supposed to do that, right? They've got patterns and phases, they don't spawn new moves out of nowhere.
Yeah, so that was its death animation. I won and I never even realized I was winning.
Later another DLC added a boss challenge area where you can re-fight Nightmare King Grimm with only one hit point. You get hit once, you lose.
It took me two or three tries, tops.
Hollow Knight will always remain very special to me for having a higher opinion of what I can achieve than I did myself, and proving to me it was right about it.
(EDIT: Oh hey didn't even notice your username. Hi dude!)
I agree. I used to play Path of Exile a lot, recently joined the new league in Path of Exile 2 and the balancing is so bad you have to play a particular build to beat the campaign in a reasonable time. In a game that is all about build versatility...
Common responses from the playerbase: skill issue, build issue, etc. While the game clearly has a balancing issue (which is fair considering its not at v1.0 yet). Bosses should not outregenerate your damage. 90% of the playerbase is playing the same build.
Its just not fun following a particular guide just to play with the highest efficiency possible. What makes videogames fun to me (especially action rpgs) is the ability to make my own build.
Its also the reason why I do not play any multi-player games anymore. There are barely people who play for fun, everyone just wants to win win win.
I'm an unashamed, unabashed, could-not-care-less "casual" when it comes to games, which definitely shows up even more in multiplayer.
I played Minecraft with some online friends and I was off messing around, exploring, and doing nothing worthwhile, and got back to "base" where they had like.. monster farms and stuff?! Because they were trying to finish the newly released IDK.. expansion, ASAP?
It was a very clear "oh you and I are not here for the same reason" moment. :D
I've found the way minecraft has evolved over the past 14 years to be unsatisfying for this reason. Most of the games systems feel like they exist for the purpose of being exploited, and the rest of the systems encorage the player to interact with the former.
As an example, if I want to go exploring, I'm thinking I'm going to want food, so I'll want crops either to eat them directly or to breed livestock. If I want to do that in a way that doesn't require waiting I'll need bone meal. But at some point they changed it so you require more bone meal to fully grow. And now the game has funneled me into building a mob grinder when I actually wanted to explore.
Sure, there are mobs out there you can fight who drop those items, and that's more engaging, but "fun" and "effective" are so misaligned in the game currently that I find myself avoiding it. So much so that I end up mostly either playing really old versions that aren't this way (b1.7.3 in particular) or modpacks that do a better job of this kind of progression.
Yes! I also kind of hate feeling like I have to cheese the game to make progress at a reasonable speed.
BUT, I will say I do get a kick out of seeing the strategies and workarounds other people find that I would never even have bothered to try looking for.
Maybe I'm just lazy, or maybe I just feel like there's a way the game's meant to be played, and that's what I want to play. I'm also pretty allergic to games that make extensive uses of mods for the same reason.
Haha I barely touched the nether in Minecraft, still had a blast with my friends. Unfortunately nowadays they exclusively play competitive games so I can not join them anymore...
I also found the escape sequences in Ori to not be much fun at all. Though when I replayed both games a couple of months ago, somehow I did the sandworm on my first attempt -- which was a huge relief because that one induced so much rage on my first playthrough.
Same for me. I appreciate stories and standard gameplay loops more than bossfights.
I did stumble upon a game where I enjoy the bossfights though - in V Rising. There is a TON of bosses in the game, but the game is so full of quality of life stuff that even dying repeatedly is not a big deal.
I generally dislike when my time is a stake in the game. I have so little of it in the first place, I don't like risking it in this way.
I'll echo how good V Rising is. I don't even like this entire genre (base building grindy survival), but I had a blast in this game. I eventually gave up when managing my castle became too much of an annoying chore (omg I have to tear everything down and rebuild it all AGAIN because now I don't have enough space in the required room to place this new crafting bench or whatever ... OMG PLEASE NO) but the world exploration and combat and bosses was always super fun. I also loved how they allowed the player to scale the difficulty however they wanted. I wound up turning my game into "baby" mode by cranking the boss difficulty down just because I didn't want to keep replaying the bosses in my limited time. Had a blast!
Yeah, I play with my friend and we had good luck with the castle placement. First castle was of course in the first zone, and when we proceeded into the second, we settled in basically the very center of the map, a bit toward the top. That turned out to be a fine location, as on horseback, nothing was too far. Castle size as well, initially I built is to just fit the existing infra, but when I sensed that there are going to be additions, I built it a bit larger than it needed to be, and now we can fit everything, especially with the little in-house teleports.
I totally feel your way of beating the game on normal, and the bosses on easy. I did that with Persona 5 at points, and Unicorn Overlord as well. I really appreciate that games provide this option.
It all hinges the many interpretations of "time". For example, this comment takes 5 minutes from me, during a transition between two larger tasks. The gaming I described though is different. I don't even start a game if I don't have at least an hour or so.
Also, people often mean "energy" or "willpower" by "time". It's like a general, non-material cost of things. "I don't have the time for X" can many times be translated to "I can't imagine managing another context", "I don't want to commit to X", "I can't be assed to start doing X after everything I do in a day", etc. Time in these context is just a convenient scapegoat. This is also addressed by the idea “It’s not about “having” time. It’s about making time.”. For what they really want, people seem to "make time" for, even in the busiest schedules.
Yeah... you're right. Ultimately it's not that my time is precious, it's that I get no satisfaction of beating a boss. I hate how overpowered are with scripted stuff, for example, and how they break most game mechanics introduced so far. And so, my time spent seems to be wasted.
Looking at how other people describe their experience, it seems like the figuring out part brings them joy. I usually have that with the core game mechanics themselves. The "knowledge" I get seems useful here, because I get to apply it to the rest of the game, but learning the boss mechanics seems like a throwaway thing, and I think this bothers me.
I also don't enjoy replaying parts of the game, especially as a punishment, especially when the replayed part had nothing to do with the my failure itself - like clearing the trash before a boss, or replaying parts of the bossfight before the crucial part, or getting back to the boss' place from a checkpoint. Such a slog!
> Looking at how other people describe their experience, it seems like the figuring out part brings them joy
It's the pleasure of mastery. To me, the fun of a challenge like that is in gradually mastering something difficult and then being able to perform it perfectly. In fact, I'm sometimes a bit disappointed by the way that a boss fight ends when you get it right. The feeling of getting it right is my reward for the work I've put in, and I want that feeling to be drawn out. This is why I don't mind dying and restarting, at least in a good boss fight. The experience of being in the fight feels good and only gets better. That's why these games are rewarding to replay. It's like you're playing the hits or something.
My favourite boss fights are from Sekiro—there's a nice little video about it here¹ if you're interested in what other people love so much about tough boss fights.
The video moved something in me. I feel I hate being put down a bit too much. (Being made feel stupid, small, inadequate). I mostly counter this not by facing the problem itself, but by overpowering myself in another context - in games, via gear or levels. After winning these battles I don't feel victorious, I feel like I finally got away.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I hate that shit as well. It's one of the reasons why I feel no satisfaction after beating a boss. I had so many experiences where they have pulled a "Somehow, Palpatine returned" that I just don't trust the happiness sequence that usually follows a bossfight.
Yeah.. I've actually stopped playing games because of boss fights. In fairness, I generally don't like Single Player games, so the threshold for me to just quit one is actually pretty low, but an annoying Boss Fight is a surefire way to do so.
I played through Cyberpunk, and for each boss fight I just flipped the difficulty to the easiest possible setting. It's just not fun to me.
EDIT: apart from the bossfights in Cyberpunk, I actually did enjoy the game. Took me about 6 months to finish it though lol. (no DLC, and started about a year ago so when it was actually stable & playable).
I grew up in the era of boss rush segments towards the end of a game to add filler and absolutely hated them.
FWIW, I'm also much bigger fan of difficult levels over difficult bosses.
I also think that the level of perceived difficulty depending on the player plays a large part in the enjoyment. When I play a video game, I'm also imagining that I'm actually that character so every death essentially means that I was defeated in that world for real.
I absolutely hate games where one of the win conditions is to be forced to die numerous times to discover an otherwise inscrutable pattern.
I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end, which is enjoyable in its own right on top of the satisfaction of executing the technical challenge of playing it. A more akin analogy, in my opinion, would be “any musical instrument which has been artificially muted”—this could definitely still be fun, and indeed I’ve played my keyboard without sound before, but it really doesn’t compare.
A better analogy than music might be dance: The reward for dancing well is simply the feeling of dancing well. In a properly-designed game, the game feel of successfully completing the technical challenge is itself the reward. A dance that feels unpleasant probably won't be performed recreationally, and a game that doesn't feel fun to succeed at won't see much play.
> I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end...
You've clearly never heard me playing my horns!
I never found the end result of all that practice to be rewarding (as the kids seem to say these days), [0] and -brother- I tried for years and years. So, I switched hobbies to video games and have a leisure-time activity that I like a lot more.
[0] Those unfortunate enough to be within earshot were usually fairly unimpressed with the result, so this isn't just me shittalking myself.
I get that! (Edit: I mean this enthusiastically, like, I relate :) )
I think the point is, for me (and it looks like some others in the thread), beating bosses doesn't feel like "winning", it feels like completing a chore.
For me, for example, the part that feels like winning (in games in general) is stuff like investing the time to travel through all the areas of a game, completing many if not all the side quests, grinding to get to max level and/or earning all the best equipment, etc.
But learning the specific way to beat this one boss (often in a way that doesn't matter for the rest of the game because it's based on some timing or animation specific to that boss)? Yeah, that's a chore.
Mentally what you need to do is prioritize killing adds once you’ve memorized the avoidance of the boss pattern. Additionally, a heavy use of tools is immensely helpful in removing adds before it becomes overwhelming.
> This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky
I understand most people don't find it fun. Neither do I.
But saying it's not challenging is just plain wrong. If it were true then the best player would have the same chance to pass it as I do. And it's not the case.
game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss.
Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult".
For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes.
And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.
This is making me want to go back and try again to beat Hollow Knight (I got up to the Mantis Lords and that... teleporting warlock guy... looked it up, I'm thinking of Soul Master.) I'm pretty sure I remember things of this sort of difficulty level in it, too. The fights were brutally hard, but still felt fair.
Mantis lords is a fantastic boss fight, because it's really hard, but super fair.
There's an attack during which you can consistently heal, so once you recognize that it just becomes about mastering the reactions to each of their attacks faster and faster and faster as the fight goes on. It's sooo satisfying.
Have you tried turning the “Backer Credits” setting on? The game reportedly becomes substantially easier afterwards. Source - https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777
You don’t have to keep track of seven things at once. You need to keep track of your own character and react accordingly. I understand that the game is hard but it adds a ton of fun to my taste.
It's hard, but I think you are projecting your own experience here a bit. Many players are able to track these things and come up with strategies to minimize the impacts of the adds (changing loads, altering movement, planning encounters, etc.)
There's much more elegance to the design than you are giving it credit for, it just is expecting you engage with the entire toolkit.
I think if you place games in the category as tourism in so far as the "safari experience", then it makes decisions clearer that the difficulty is part of the experience as the artist's intention.
Silksong is not particularly that hard either with retrospect to the wider genre with staples like Megaman.
> some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
I disagree. I appreciate the skill that went into making Hollow Knight, but to me it felt too much like work, too repetitive, too grindy, too difficult. Not an enjoyable experience for me at all :(
It's unfair that you cut off the quote there. Because in the next paragraphs:
> And yet.
> I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down... This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.
I am in agreement with the author regarding Silksong. It's the author's understanding about games in general that seems to have a bit of a blind spot (despite being deep in other ways).
These games may be masterpieces but they don't come out of nowhere, there are many other games where skill mastery is much or even most of the appeal. I also somewhat wanted to pick on the line that the Mario games are the only other games that put as much care into how you traverse the world.
I guess somebody found a way to get the Silksong controversy onto Hackernews. Can't say I'm surprised.
My take is, it's a good game and I'm enjoying it. I suspect the only reason it's generating so many takes is that it was so spectacularly overhyped that it cannot possibly live up to how much it has been built up. And that enthusiasm, which started within a specific niche fanbase, has spilled out onto the internet at large in such a way that that is unsustainable.
I bet if we all wait a year, the back and forth will die down and we'll be left with a game that gets similar acclaim to Hollow Knight. People subconsciously think about hype on the same 1-10 scale as a review, but hype can drive a video game score well into the teens or 20s. Then even a 10 feels like a disappointment.
I have no idea what this game is, and I'm pretty insulated from gaming news, culture, etc.
The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere.
What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises.
How did it manage to do this? What's the formula? Or is there simply a lull in the cycle?
> The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme
Tiny correction (AFAIK): It was never really "delays" as there was no release date until ~3 weeks ago, when they announced it'd be released in a month. But yeah, development time was long.
it has been a rockier history than that - it was playable at E3 in 2019, and there have been multiple teased (but not specific) release dates along the way. e.g. the Wikipedia has some of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight:_Silksong
to be clear: I'm not complaining at all, I'd much rather have a good very-delayed sequel than a bad one. but the "it's releasing again" -> "it's delayed again" memes do have reasonable origins.
Sibling comments are giving good answers about Silksong in particular. But, a more general point to keep in mind is that gaming by revenue is an order of magnitude larger than movies. In that light it's a little strange that gaming news/events don't hit the general attention sphere more than they do.
>How did it manage to do this? What's the formula?
The formula is making incredible art that you're passionate about, giving or selling it to alot of people, and getting lucky enough that word of mouth takes over from there. In other words, there is no formula.
It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It had a long seven-year development cycle, with "Silksong release announcement at (upcoming event)" becoming a meme, leaving people wondering if it would ever come out. Last month the developers randomly dropped a release trailer with "by the way it's coming out in 3 weeks". It came out and has been a hot topic because, while an excellent game, it's significantly harder than the original, causing a lot of debate.
> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time.
I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.
Also, and this is just my personal opinion, but I'm about a dozen hours into it, and so far I haven't found it THAT much harder than the original. Maybe it's because I've played Hollow Knight and gotten used to the controls by now, but I remember struggling a lot with lots of parts of Hollow Knight, about as much as I'm struggling with Silksong. Enough people have been saying it so I suspect I might just be misremembering.
Excellent game in general, by the way, really enjoying Silksong so far.
> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.
You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.
> You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.
To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive proof that something is widely considered to be among the best games of all time. My guess is that most people think of categories of "best" media in much much smaller terms, and the only people allowing so many things in their categories are people like the American Film Institute and other people who like making lists.
It's hard to judge games which came out relatively recently against all the games which came before. I also think there's an abnormal level of hype around Hollow Knight. It's an excellent game which was received well, but I think on the grand scale of games I would be quite surprised if it cracked the top fifteen of most critics' choices of best games of the past decade. Within the Metroidvania genre I'd expect it to be a very different story.
You are welcome to your opinion. If you don't like Hollow Knight, that's fine. I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.
> I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.
My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living.
I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though.
> You are welcome to your opinion.
For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there.
100 games over 40 years is not a lot. There's 23 games over the past decade on that list, Hollow Knight being one of them. If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best"[0] in your book, you are entitled to think that. I'm just pointing out that most people believe it was one of the best. You can argue that you are right and the 500,000 concurrent Silksong players on Steam, plus the millions more on Switch/PS/XBox, are wrong, but frankly you're unlikely to convince me.
[0] By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
You continue to miss my point, as your comment about concurrent player count indicates. I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.
> If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best" in your book, you are entitled to think that.
That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source?
> By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.
> That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source?
There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.
> I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.
I don't agree at all. It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong. This doesn't mean you have to like it, personally. I can acknowledge that Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last Of Us are both widely regarded as two of the best games of all time, even though I personally found them both boring.
> There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.
Okay, but that's an argument that it's considered one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can understand my confusion.
> It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong.
*shrug* I don't think it's that weird. This certainly isn't something I'm coming up with on the fly. I've felt like this for a long time, as have the authors of the many articles complaining about the meaninglessness of the even larger number of "best of" lists.
> This doesn't mean you have to like it
You've made several comments which make it sound like I'm arguing this because I don't like the game. I'd appreciate you not doing that both because I did quite like it and because it implies that my feelings about the game are biasing my argument. I'd make this same argument if you'd used that Wikipedia article to support your feelings about Red Dead Redemption 2. I'd probably personally consider that one of the best games I've ever played[0] but would object to using its presence in that article as proof that it was widely considered to be one of the best of all time.
[0] Honestly I'm still not sure if I should compare it to other games I've played or put it in its own category of interactive movie. It was incredibly good, but the parts I think of as being the best are the performances and the technical achievement and clever landscaping of the game world.
I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X. To go back to sports analogies, this entire comment thread has been analogous to:
Person: "Who was Kobe Bryant, why does anyone care that he died?"
Me: "He was one of the best basketball players of all time."
You: "No he wasn't. Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, and LeBron James are better."
Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games, because it's not my #1 all-time favorite game[0]. However, in the context of "why does anyone care about the sequel to Hollow Knight?" it's fair to say that many people consider it one of the best games of all time. It doesn't really matter that you, personally, may rank it behind 10, 15, or even 50 games.
> I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X.
> Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games
A) I haven't chosen a specific number. I've even been deliberately hazy about the range because that's how I hear most people discuss their "best ofs" and favorites.
B) As per my previous message I wish you'd stop acting like I'm fabricating this argument just to exclude Hollow Knight. My objection is with your reasoning. I've tried to be as clear as possible about this.
C) You have to bound your category of what qualifies as "the best" somehow, even roughly, because otherwise the term loses what little meaning it had in the first place. I tried to make this point earlier, though maybe I didn't do it well enough:
>> I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.
If you want to say it's widely considered one of the best of all time, that implies some very large percentage of the general public or critics would say "I think X[0] is one of the best games of all time". If you asked a random person to list which games they personally believed to be the best games, they'd probably only come up with a handful. I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.
[0] you can take this to mean either an arbitrary game or the Egosoft one :p
> I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.
You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".
> The games are included on at least six separate best-of lists from different publications (inclusive of all time periods, platforms and genres), as chosen by their editorial staff.
> You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".
I, in fact, did not miss that. If you look at that article, it references over 90 lists. By my count, a bit under half of the lists were written after the release of Hollow Knight. Of those lists, Hollow Knight appears in only seven of them, which is tied for the lowest number of appearances of any game in that list released in 2017 onward other than Baldur's Gate 3, which was released in the last year the list has entries for.
> i.e. there already is agreement across all time.
Eh, fewer than a fifth of lists with what appear to usually be 30-100 games each doesn't seem like good evidence of agreement to me. There are degrees of agreement, and I think "widely" implies a pretty high one.
I think GamingBolt having Hollow Knight on their 2022 list at #14, but then it being completely absent from their 2023 and 2024 lists is testimony of how silly these lists are in the first place.
Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made. I'm one of the people. I grew up in the SNES era, and I think Hollow Knight is an all around better game than every SNES platformer I've played, including Super Metroid which it's directly comparable to.
> Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made.
Why do you think I don't believe that? It's undeniably popular and was critically acclaimed. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that that Wikipedia article didn't support your assertion that it was widely regarded as one of the best of all time. Just because there are many people who think it's one of the best doesn't mean that most people (or even a large percentage of them) think it is.
I appreciate the response! I have no defense against the charge of pedantry. I do stand by my points, but I definitely didn’t need to argue it for so long
Hollow Knight was released when a greater portion of the mainstream was going into gaming so that was one of their first encounters of a "great game" hence the rave reviews. It's recency bias clouded by initial unfamiliarity of a genre's appeal that is misconstrued as a sole game's features.
If you ask people who more acquainted with metroidvanias it's not going to be topping their lists.
What Metroidvanias do you think are better? I've played a ton of Metroidvanias and I completely disagree. Hollow Knight has excellent combat and arguably the best map layout in any Metroidvania. The only Metroidvanias I consider its peers are Super Metroid and Rabi-Ribi.
Not the person you're replying to, but I personally preferred Ori and the Blind Forest a lot, both in terms of movement and story, but also in terms of the satisfaction of the backtracking and world as a whole. I felt like Hollow Knight did a poor job of nudging players in the right direction, and found the combat to be a bit more finicky than I care for from the genre. I'm not a huge fan of the art style either, at least as far as the environments are concerned.
The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age.
I was just gonna say this was one of the most annoying parts to the original hollow night - the environments kind of blurred together after a little while, and I found myself backtracking more than I would've liked.
While I wouldn't necessarily consider it better, the sequel to "Ori and the Blind Forest", "Ori and the Will of the Wisps" is easily on the same level as Hollow Knight.
Ori + its sequel are not on the same level as HK, in my opinion. The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay. The sequel drastically improved the combat, but the map is significantly worse; it's essentially just a "hub and spoke" where you go to one of 4 (IIRC) separate disconnected areas, grab the powerup which does more or less nothing in the other areas, use it to finish the area and beat the boss, rinse and repeat until the finale.
That being said, they are still very good games; excellent atmosphere, artwork and presentation, some genuinely haunting, creepy, and awe-inspiring areas. But I think Hollow Knight is a tier above them.
> The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay
Personally I find combat to be one of the less important aspects of Metroidvanias. I prefer the main source of difficulty coming from platforming around environmental hazards.
I felt like exploration in Hollow Knight was a bit too broad, and lead to too much unnecessary backtracking. Backtracking is a balance. It's a staple of Metroidvanias, but if the backtracking search space is large enough and places aren't distinctive enough then the search for a previously insurmountable obstacle can start feeling like looking for a needle in a haystack. That was my experience in Hollow Knight, and something I felt like the first Ori game did better.
I mean, fair enough I guess, but there's a lot of games on that list. I don't think you would go around saying "LittleBigPlanet is widely regarded as one of the best of all time" just because it appears in that article. A lot of publications has done click-baity "top 100 games of all time".
> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time.
There is intense debate in the community to know if it should figure amongst the best of its genre (metroidvania).
It’s absolutely not in contention for best game of all time. It’s not even in the top 3 of its release year which includes Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Cuphead and Divinity 2. To give but one point, the Game of the Year award went to BotW while Cuphead beat HK as best indie.
You are welcome to your opinion. This has been addressed in the very deep sibling thread, but broadly speaking, it has been widely acknowledged that Hollow Knight is one of the best games of all time.[0] This does not mean most people believe Hollow Knight is the #1 game of all time (or even its release year), or that every single person likes Hollow Knight. It is an explanation as to why Silksong received an enormous amount of hype.
As I said in the parallel thread, you can argue that Michael Jordan and LeBron James are better than Kobe Bryant (and I would agree, and frankly few would argue otherwise), but that does not invalidate the statement "Kobe Bryant is one of the best basketball players of all time."
It does mean that a majority or a large percentage of people believe it's one of the best of all time though. That Wikipedia article is a bad example for reasons I've explained in the sibling thread and which you haven't yet addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186805
It started as a meme by a small but loyal Hollow Knight fan base on reddit. They had this ongoing joke about waiting for Silksong to release. As subreddits do, they were repeating the same joke for years. For some reason, this admittedly pretty lame joke escaped into mainstream. That is basically all there is to it.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago.
Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, sometimes dying with the boss only needing one more hit to die, and I'm frustrated with myself because knowing he only needed to get hit one more time started making me greedy with my attacks, and so I take big hits to the face and don't back off to heal.
But what makes them fun is the dopamine rush when I finally succeed. A couple times, it felt damn near orgasmic. I've been playing video games for probably around 35 years and nothing felt as good as when I finally downed Morgott.
When I was in college, I bought Demon's Souls and also started the most difficult semester I'd had yet with 3 classes deeply into my CS major. I was terrified of what lay ahead of academically, so I procrastinated by playing Demon's Souls.
Yes, Demon's Souls was hard, but eventually I somehow I started passing dungeons and beating bosses. The rush that I got from that gave me what I needed mentally to persevere through my classes: by the end of the semester I had A+s in 2 and an A in the other. I don't think I've had a better semester since. Beating big demons in video games made me feel like I could beat my own big demons in real life.
Lots of others feel the same way about Souls-like games; there are many video essays on Youtube that cover how Souls-likes got them through depression and other things.
This is so real, Dark Souls has helped me immensely in keeping my concentration up for work and other things in life. It's very good at teaching you lessons that translate to real life.
I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it" but rather "I hope there aren't more bs like this".
Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.
IMO, while Genichiro and sword/spear-wielding enemies are mostly fun, non-humanoid & gank bosses suck so bad.
Those bosses felt way too frustrating to me because they force you to unlearn the entire deflect gameplay, turning it into an annoying, slow-paced & somewhat janky fight.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
I haven't played Silksong yet and I know difficulty is rather subjective, but is it really that difficult compared to the realm of punishing platformers like NES Ninja Gaiden, Cuphead, Spelunky 2, the dark world portions of Super Meat Boy, etc?
I played the first Hollow Knight and didn't find it particularly hard. (not easy, but definitely not Dark Souls level punishing).
Silksong starts very difficult compared to Hollow Knight, largely because there are many early foes that will deal 2 masks of damage. Those sorts of big attacks were generally reserved for mid to late bosses in Hollow Knight, and it caught even skilled players off guard. Hornet has a lot of mobility though, and a much easier time dodging out of the way, so once you adapt to her playstyle (be patient, dodge, and punish only when you know it's safe) the difficulty settles down and the game feels pretty fair.
As usual, you're gaining all sorts of tools and abilities along the way, and a few areas you can technically access early are best saved for later, when you have better gear. Some players aren't super thrilled with arena challenges, which this game has more of: suddenly 3-4 enemies in a small room all at once. I enjoy the meta challenge though: which tools can thin the crowd? Which minions should I focus to make the rest of the group manageable? If I can avoid taking damage, I can cast spells to thin the crowd much more effectively, etc etc.
With everything doing 2 points of damage, including environmental hazards, the player is at effectively 2.5 hitpoints for a large majority of Act 1, as opposed to 5 in Hollow Knight. This changes the feeling of the game from "oh, a challenge, let's see what will happen and I'll learn" to "shit, a new room, I don't want to explore because I'll just get killed, where was the last bench, can I even get back here?"
The other big difference, I think, is that Hollow Knight starts you out with a very straightforward downward attack that you can use as a pogo to mitigate a lot of damage/environmental hazards.
Hornet's 45º downwards attacks are significantly harder to aim/time, and pogo chains (where they are even possible) take a lot of practice
I found both HK and Silksong roughly similar to Dark Souls in much the same way.
Above all, all three games demand and reward precision and timing, and to some extent figuring out enemy movement and attack patterns. None of the games demand much in terms of speed or reaction time.
In many ways it's much more forgiving than your traditional "hard" platformers.
I find Silksong to be easier than at least Cuphead and Super Meat Boy, but I could totally see how one who isn't experienced with platformers may find it frustratingly challenging.
I think my hardest gaming achievements have been Pantheon of Hallownest, Malenia in Elden Ring, and 106% Super Meat Boy. Silksong is nowhere near as hard as any of those… but I think I’m about 2/3 of the way through, so who knows what’s in store for the true endgame.
Have yet to run into a truly brutal boss like the last few Pantheon participants in HK.
Silksong is infinitely more forgiving then Spelunky 2. The game just doesn't stop you from going into the harder areas of the map early in your playthrough.
I played Hollow Knight. I don’t recall if I defeated a single boss. I must have done a couple but several of the first you were meant to defeat remained unchallenged.
There are non boss fights that get more elaborate as you go, and let you pick up some new skills and abilities.
Another one like this that shouldn’t have been was Orie and the blind forest. If you play it on story mode, which I did because it was great eye candy and I just wanted to see it all, there a spot in the middle of act 2 where you have to land several double wall jumps in rapid succession with nearby spikes. Someone at that studio needs to be beaten about the shoulder with a clue bat about wtf “story mode” means. I never got to see the story and was too mad to watch someone else play it on youtube.
I’m fairly sure that my problem with both was the same. Only partly fat fingers and part was that certain movements don’t work identically on all controllers. Some things are counterintuitively easier on a D pad than a thumb joystick. It’s just not as crisp to go from one input to another 90 or 180° opposite. If your game mechanics are built on that, then some ports will be much harder to play.
You should either not port them, or adjust the timing grace period up on that hardware.
Regarding controls, I have to play precise 2D games with a d-pad or I get immediately frustrated— that said, it was odd playing most of Celeste that way and then having to switch back to the thumbstick for the section at the end with the bubble comets.
I was just wondering about control setup and latency as a major factor in a game with very strict timing requirements. Last time I played was on a TV (over HDMI in game mode though), with a wireless Xbox controller. I wonder how much easier I'd have found it on a 240Hz monitor with a wired controller?
My first play through of Elden Ring was a pseudo challenge run - capped at 125RL (pvp meta) and dual UGS style. No ash of war usage. No guides for bosses.
Malenia took me over a month, and probably over 500 deaths and I had to relax the ash of war usage (still limited by my very low FP)
The entire end game was brutal as this was before the buff for UGS animation speeds and most boss openings were shorter than anything than a crouch poke but I loved every minute of it. Just like learning to play something new on an instrument just cos you can't nail it in one try, one week or even one month doesn't mean you won't eventually get it.
One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like. The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress. I always play better on mute (but that's no fun)
I somehow missed Malenia. I'm level 125 (not doing the PVP meta, just happen to be this level) and was pounding my face against Radagon and the Elden Beast. I downed Radagon on my first attempt, then after like 10 more tries couldn't get him again.
I avoided reading the Elden Ring wiki as much as possible. I decided to open it up and found how to get to Malenia, so I'll be fighting my way over there and gaining a few more levels before trying Radagon and Elden Beast again.
> The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress.
The feints are what really get me. Some of the wind-ups for attacks feel like an eternity, or at the very least, extremely unnatural, making it very hard to time a dodge.
I recently learned that Margit has a "feint" that is actually a stance - that's why his wind up feels like it takes forever.
I was interested to find out that Margit is one of the most technically fun and difficult fights to nohit run because his flow chart is actually the most complex of all the bosses. But most players can brute force their way through him.
Malenia was a lot of fun, especially without summons
>One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like
They used to give you unlimited time to deal with difficulty and always gave the alternative of rolling back and getting more levels. That's until Nightreign -- you are almost always under time pressure.
Forget Malenia -- everdark Libra is the current standard of the most diabolical Souls experience. The time is against you, the music is maddening. You either clear the summons in under 20 seconds or you get another stacked debuff and the goat is casting.
Can't wait for the Depth version to be released this Thursday.
Lots of people say this but they can unfortunately never articulate why that works in Elden Ring. Making a game that is insanely difficult will not be enough to give you that feeling of accomplishment. If that's all it took there's be thousands of games that gave you that feeling. And yet there aren't. So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.
> So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.
Actually, there is:
Knowing the difference between a game being difficult versus punishing. Here's a 12 year old, 7-minute video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
(EDIT: If it helps, consider changing "punishing" to "unfair")
The TL;DW is that punishing games are not fun because they often rely on cheap things like unavoidable damage, actions not being telegraphed, inconsistency of rules, long iteration times (ie, unskippable cutscenes, excessively long boss fights where you're redoing the same first 10 minutes over again). Punishing games are poorly designed by people that want to defeat the player, rather than allowing the player to overcome the challenge.
In Elden Ring, all damage is avoidable. Every attack is telegraphed. Boss fights aren't really that long, and if you die, the walk back to try again is always short and doesn't rely on fighting through waves of enemies. Some fights have cutscenes either at the start of the fight or during a transition to a second phase, but they're skippable.
It's still a challenging game. Some boss hits will eliminate over 60% of your HP in a single hit, but those attacks are telegraphed and you're supposed to dodge them.
But to a certain extent, ER is a "choose-your-own-difficulty" game. You can grind out higher levels to get your stats up if you want to give yourself more of an edge. The people complaining about Margit (A very early boss) being super hard were probably under-leveled. I got him to 1% HP on my second try (Seriously, his health bar was a single pixel wide), and got him down on my 5th.
Elden Ring, and Dark Souls before it are hard but fair. That separates it from lesser games.
Each boss has a moveset puzzle, where you have to figure out how to beat it, and to win it's not just enough to find the solution; the execution matters as well.
Other games usually just add boss HP or damage, instead of interesting movesets.
I wish I could go back and experience soulslikes for the first time! They really are a treat if you experience them as you describe (not everyone feels that way, but I certainly do).
You're in luck because that subgenre has exploded in popularity and there are a lot of good ones out there if you want to keep playing them these days. Elden Ring is one of the best though for sure.
> You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As a result, I suspect many of the people who enjoyed Hollow Knight will actually bounce off Silksong precisely because it is so hard, and they simply won't have the tenacity.
I think this is an overstatement. I've put about 16 hours into Silksong so far, I've pretty much completed around 8-10 zones or so, unlocked most of the abilities and stuff.
I don't think Silksong is that much more difficult than HK. Honestly it's been so long since I played HK that I'm not even sure it's more difficult at all but it probably is. If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy. And aside from that and maybe a couple other spots it's been fairly alright in terms of difficulty IMO.
Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those - yet.
Maybe it gets crazy later on, but that wasn't the claim in the article. The article claims you can hardly access anything without extreme effort and I don't think that's true at all.
I had no trouble going through Silksong (and I'm having a blast!), but there were _a lot_ of times when I thought that this would be really hard for people who are new to the series.
> Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those
If you are a type of player that plays HK, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, then yes Silksong isn't brutally hard.
But I think the game is brutally hard for majority of people who hasn't played any of those. I think HK had a better difficulty ramp for beginners.
Yeah sure but they will play the game and struggle and learn just like everyone else has. HK/Silksong are not games for someone who just wants to chill and breeze through. They are difficult on purpose. People who don't want difficulty can play other games.
I'm not particularly good at this, by the way. Before Silksong I haven't picked up my playstation controller since Elden Ring came out. I've been pressing the wrong buttons and running/jumping/dashing into enemies over and over. I've been struggling. That's what I signed up for when I bought the game.
I agree with you. These games are difficult on purpose and its a lot of fun is in rewarding the player with getting good. But if it is too difficult from the get-go, newer players will bounce off the game.
What I would have liked in Silksong is for the devs to remove some of the "frustrating" part just at the start: more free benches, less hp for some enemies, less flying enemies in platforming parts etc. Once the users have unlocked abilities and are used to the movement (and hooked in!), crank up the difficulty to what it is now.
It is most definitely not an overstatement. I have over 425 hours in Hollow Knight. I stopped playing Silksong in 8 because it felt like unfun masochism.
> If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy.
That's probably a significant part, too. Silksong is more open than HK, where the lack of abilities put a natural wall around the areas which are too hard at that point of time. But in SK you can easily stumble into areas where you are not supposed to be, which can be frustrating.
What's also frustrating is not knowing if I've walked into an area that is hard because I'm not really supposed to be there yet or if it's hard because I'm just trash at the game. I ran in circles for way too long at the start of the game because I kept thinking I was going the wrong way due to entering a different named zone without finding any objective in the first zone and also due to the enemies in that new zone feeling awkward to fight, like I was missing an ability.
That's kind of just how the genre is. You don't really know where to go and what to do, that's part of what makes it magical. You just explore. If you hit a dead end you turn around and go somewhere else. If you get to a spot that's really hard it's up to you whether you want to push on or look around elsewhere. That's why I turned around when I saw the big guard, I figured I have easier places to check out first. And then I found new zones and new abilities and stuff and then I went back.
Yeah, that might be a potential improvement. They did put a really big and mean doorman outside which worked on me, but putting another obstacle there as well like an air vent or climbable wall might have been better.
You can go there before you even get the hover ability, and I totally see how that would be demoralizing.
Yes, that doorman is a pretty bad Idea, because you can beat him. And beating him is not even a matter of skill or ability, but more about luck and whether you can figure out the trick fast enough before you are losing motivation.
Wait, I didn't have to go to Hunter's March? I thought there was nowhere else to go, however the sudden change in difficulty made me feel I must have missed an area.
Yup! I saw the big guy guarding the entrance and noped out of there, only recently went back - with hover, dash, wall climb etc, different moveset (no directional downslash).
I think I went through the narrow to the balloon place, then maybe back through the marrow or something up to Bellheart, deep docks etc.
Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.
I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.
Fluid and natural are pretty different concepts, perhaps "intuitive" better maps to what you mean? Humans aren't that fluid, certainly wouldn't be when it comes to vaulting, jumping etc.
Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.
When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.
> FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that.
That seems like a strange comment in a thread about a 2d platformer. Nothing moves like a 2d platformer character either. So both don't move "naturally" and both feel good to many people?
Tell me more about how a game where I'm playing as some kind of demigod space marine who is fighting literal demons in literal hell has "unnatural movement". What, pray tell, is the doom slayers natural movement supposed to be? And how are we supposed to tell from behind our keyboard and mouse?
Bah. Doom2016 has some of the absolute best (meaning fun) movement in the business and it is the absolute definition of fluid.
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high.
Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.
Oh man I forgot to mention Quake, but yeah rocket jumping on Quake was maybe my first experience with awesome movement and I spent a lot of time perfecting rocket jumping in Q3DM6. Quake might have even been the first 3D game or atleast FPS ever to have that kind of fast & skillful movement?
Never let realism get in the way of fun, to paraphrase GabeN :) The whole Earth gets taken over by demons from hell isn't super realistic either, that's not why I play it.
I see a mention of Celeste, I give an upvote. What a great game, and a perfect showcase of what the OP writes about too. The movement is Celeste is so fluid and expressive, which is super important because the game is crazy hard so the movement has to feel great, otherwise the game would be annoying to play.
Yeah, agreed on all counts. I know it's divisive, but the movement in Doom Eternal was incredible. Double dash creating some amazing levels that would have been unthinkable in Doom 2016.
I'm a huge fan of pixel perfect platformers. Chalk Cuphead and Super Meat Boy up on the list of games with a very natural connection between player coordination and game mechanics.
Titanfall was one of my favorite games ever, largely because of the movement. (I even hated using the eponymous Titans, because they take away your ability to run on walls!)
That's why I struggled with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. They subtly broke the movement and some hitboxes, and I could never get the proper hang of it.
There are probably a bunch of videos in this genre, but I found [0] to be a particularly good explanation of why Hollow Knight felt so good. If you’re experienced at game design none of this is probably news to you, but if you’re unfamiliar with terms like “coyote time”, “jump buffering” etc., this video is a great introduction to how video games break physical realism to provide a better-feeling experience, and how tuning this is critical to getting a game which feels great. Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
> Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
But Silksong feels terrible. Its movement is awful and difficult to control. Hollow Knight felt smooth. Silksong is the opposite of that.
This very post is mixing its message:
>> The secret to why this game is like crack is the movement. The movement is so buttery smooth that simply getting back to the boss that just ripped you to shreds is a complex, skillful, and fundamentally enjoyable experience.
>> So am I having fun? I certainly don't feel joy in my heart when I fall into the lava for the seventeenth time because I missed a jump (if lava was a boss it would easily take the top spot for the number of times it killed me).
Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
Interestingly, there is coyote time in Silksong, but not enough that you can reliably do dash-jumps. It's just that occasionally you'll notice a jump starting from the wrong location, a little to the side of and below the edge you wanted to leap off of. Much more often, you'll notice that you hit the jump button but the jump never went off, which is the exact problem coyote time is supposed to solve.
> Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
I would describe that as a skill issue. And I think Silksong feels great. I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Regarding coyote time I haven't noticed it myself but what you describe just seems like the margins are thin. You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier but there's lots of people who enjoy it for what it is.
To me it's an amazing game, absolutely incredible.
>You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier
I mean, the ones for Hollow knight felt wider. I think the main issue is that The Knight moved much slower and you had to time dashes anyway. Hornet's sprint has much fewer coyote frames compared to her and the Knight's dash.
I am unsure if I am just terrible at this game or more of a casual gamer with poor reflexes now, but Silksong feels particularly unforgiving. I did all the jumping puzzles in the most recent Prince of Persia game and figured out almost all of the puzzles and bosses in Metroid Dread after practice (lots of trial and error) without resorting to walk throughs, Silksong just revels in punishing you for making mistakes and forcing you to work to get back to where you just died.
This article concludes with the thought "if you liked Hollow Knight, you won't like Silksong".
That is the same conclusion that I and my brother both came to. The game is bizarrely punitive, from the very beginning, for no reason. It's as if they thought of it as being the next Hollow Knight expansion after Godhome, providing an additional challenge for the people who have beaten every pantheon with all bindings. ("The new challenge is: all of your controls now do something different!")
But it's a sequel. Supposedly. Most sequels are aiming to appeal at least as much to players who enjoyed the first game as they do to a hypothetical new audience.
Is it really that bad? The beginning definitely ramps things up, but I don't think anyone who beat Hollow knight would call Silksong "punitive", at least not for the 10 hours I've played so far. The area I struggled in the most was clearly one I wasn't "supposed" to go into yet, but otherwise the difficulty curve is only slightly steeper than HK's early game.
Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.
It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.
Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.
10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).
I won't play action games without an easy mode anymore. I've beaten all Dark Souls games and I just got tired of proving myself over and over. Nowadays I just want mild challenge and the certainty I will win after trying a couple of times.
I really appreciated that TUNIC had infinite stamina and infinite life options under the accessibility settings. I would not have completed the game without the infinite stamina. And that would have been unfortunate because the way the game unfolds is incredible. Such a cool design for a game.
Definitely! A story mode in a game lets everybody play through the same way that a braille or audio edition of Ulysses makes the text of Joyce's book available to people who can't see.
Dead Cells did this. I was about to give up, because I am old and I want to play games not grind one part of a game. But I found an assist mode menu that lets you tweak making it easier, with no penalty, and a nice message from the devs explaining they just want their game to be enjoyed. I got about double enjoyment time out of it by just making it easier a bit.
On the other hand, you have games like Borderlands that force you to finish the game once (or even twice) to unlock an "acceptable" level of difficulty (via lazy bullet sponge metamorphosis).
Same with Bioshock Infinite that needed a hack to unlock "1999 mode" or Bloodstained its harder difficulty (still easy, though).
Balance and fair difficulty really are some of the hardest and most important things to get right in video games.
There are plenty of games with no difficulty settings at all that are easier than, say, Touhou Kinjoukyou’s easy mode. Elden Ring, for instance. Why is the presence of an ‘easy mode’ even a significant factor here?
Mods already exists which can make game more forgiving. Limiting damage to one is great start. Don't be ashamed to use them on Silksong, developers went hardcore for this one.
I aborted my 3 Hollow Knight attempts because of boss runbacks. Is there a mod that, I don’t know, adds benches before bosses or something? Then I might finally finish the game. I do enjoy hard-but-fair boss fights after all.
I'm not familiar with the the named platformer titles beyond word of mouth and I may not have the free time to become so for a while but anecdotally I found some years ago that the movement controls in the games Titanfall, Doom (2016) and Titanfall 2 produced the same feeling of flow between the hands and brain the author articulates. It may come to pass that games will one day be benchmarked by neurological metrics in the superior parietal lobule and ACC of their players next to their frames per second, load times, ping stability, 1% lows and memory scaling.
Titanfall 2 had excellent movement! The only games I’ve played that surpass it are the tribes games, which just have a whole new level of fluid movement for 3d games.
Don't so easily dismiss the opinions of others. For certain individuals it is indeed the hardest game they've ever played. I've cleared Steelsoul 100% in the OG Hollow Knight and would argue that Silksong is definitely the more difficult of the two.
Silksong is objectively hard, and if you're trying to argue otherwise you're either the mythical "god gamer" or just trolling. The game is unapologetically hard and punishing right from the beginning. The very second boss you encounter already hits you for 2 masks (which effectively means 3 hits and you're dead), and each time you try to fight him you first have to run back for a minute before you reach him. He even does 2 masks of contact damage. Heck, even some normal enemies you encounter in the first two hours deal 2 damage. The original Hollow Knight bosses didn't do 2 masks damage until half way through the game.
Don't get me wrong, I still love the game and consider it pretty much a masterpiece, but many people believe (myself included) the game could have a better difficulty curve from the beginning and be less punishing (just give me a freaking bench before each boss so I don't have to run through 10 screens to have another try at it) while still maintaining the overall difficulty and challenge.
But this: "Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game"" is an immense exaggeration, I could understand this for, maybe, IWBTG.
"The game is unapologetically hard and punishing right from the beginning." -- sorry i just dont agree with that. Mosshome is really basic. My 11 year old kid is already in citadel. Yes the game is hard but i think the community is forgetting how hard the original HK was, not to mention when Dark Souls came out it was notorious! But yes I agree silksong has its moments. Moorwing made me feel at a complete loss for a while, first time i've felt that since I was fighting Ornstein and Smough in DS1. Last Judge was also pretty difficult but felt balanced and learnable.
I guess more than anything it's just been cool to see the community come together on silksong.
It's also obscene in this day and age I can't upgrade my weapon to out damage the boss if I feel I need to. One of my pet peeves is having game designers feel like their design supersedes how I want to play.
If I absolutely do not want to play a boss; for whatever reason, I should be allowed to find an alternative way to get through that area. If grinding endlessly for damage is the alternative, fine. But at least there is one.
I found Act I not harsh but full of frustating elements. Traps in piss you off locations, 90% of flying enemies who dodge and are tanky for some reason. Like that one particular fly which spawns in exact precise location in runback to boss for you to collide, unless you are sprinting. Bullshit like this.
Act II get's better as you unlock more movement and the lore develops. There is some unique stuff there. Boses are also fine for me, random summons are annoying but that's what you have tools for, kill them immediatelly.
I’m curious about those traps. I used to hate Soulslikes, Elden Ring made it click, and I binged them all on PC. Traps became part of some twisted humor, I started waiting for the (literal) punchline. I missed traps, or as I started calling them, »FromSoft bullshit«, when there weren’t any for a while. I’m super careful and alert in all games now.
I wonder whether Silksong’s traps scratch that itch, or whether they’re just annoying.
Interesting how different impressions can be. Elegance is not really how I would describe movement in Silksong. Yes, the animation is smooth, but the actual movement and its controls are very crude and twisted. It's in the realm of those annoying games which feel very unnatural, unintuitive.
I'm a big Metroidvania fan and could never get into Hollow Knight for this reason. But I also played it around the same time as the first Ori game, so maybe it's a tough comparison.
First Hollow Knight is already better in that aspect, even though animation is less smooth IIRC. Personally, I prefer the Ori-Games in terms of movements, especially the second game.
But gaming is big, and inside as also outside the genre there are many games with great movement and controls. It depends on how much of an alternative you really want, just the movement, or the whole game..
I'm partial to super smash brothers melee. I feel like no other game has come close in making me feel so in control of my character.
That being said, it is kind of difficult to get into. Finding a good GC controller can be hard, and playing online is rough because everyone is so good these days.
> Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money.
This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.
I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.
Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.
Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.
I've been watching this process with a keen eye as a technical consultant, and one thing I've learnt is that naive models of large organisations as Profit=Revenue-Costs is totally inadequate for enterprise sales. Yes, it is true that saving money anywhere will improve profits, but you can only sell that to an individual who's personal KPI needles move because of this! If the cost is in dept X but the profit is recorded in dept Y, then don't bother. You won't get a sale, even if it's tens of millions of dollars of saved costs or increased revenue. At best, you can find their common manager and try to sell it to that person, but even that has pits of failure you can all too easily fall into.
Yes. But that's like saying "a racecar would gain a competitive advantage by being faster."
Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)
A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.
Given how much some companies spend on their cloud services bills without batting an eye, I definitely believe this. They care about making more money, not so much about spending less, even though both are ways to increase profits.
yes, and I think one big reason enterprise might not buy your product even if it is guaranteed to make/save $X is $ is often NOT most important thing to the people make buying decision, specially when it is not your own money to save or gain
This is very true. Look no farther than the perennial problem of department heads spending all their budget to keep their budget. Decision makers rarely care about saving money in isolation.
I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.
- Sell to the champion.
- Sell to the rest of the org.
- Sell to procurement.
- Sell to the implementation project team.
- Sell to the users and get adoption up.
Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.
This is what I’ve seen; it’s hard work, and if you fail to make any one of those sales, it can all fall apart. And you didn’t even mention getting your foot in the door in the first place. I used to chat with our business development guy in the lunchroom. He spent hours on the phone every day getting told no. It took a ton of work just to get from “no” to “maybe later,” and that’s when they didn’t just hang up in him. I think he understood what made our company tick better than anybody else, better than the CEO.
> going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.
Can confirm. At one point in my career (after reflection on the situation) I realized I had been made a champion by a subsidiary of IBM for one of their products. I found myself in some really bizarre meetings with our execs and their executive sales people that left me feeling like a puppet that was made to tell our CEO that we needed this. They really took us apart, It was all very slimy.
I've played a couple hours of silksong. I don't get the hype. Its a fine game, but I really think people are over hyping it. The internet hype loop on this game is turning me off on it. It's a nice metroidvania game.
It is extremely over hyped. The first game was already regularly over hyped. The community is famous for treating as some sort of masterpiece and reacting very strongly to any form of criticism.
Then you have a lot of opinion in the mix. I strongly disagree with the article for exemple on both the extreme difficulty, the game is difficult but manageable, the enjoyment, plenty of questionable design decisions are there purely to spite the player and it’s a game which often confuses wasting your time and being frustrating with being difficult, and the supposed elegance of the movement.
Silksong is really weirdly tuned in that it has mechanics which will actually only bother you and make your experience more painful if you are already struggling while being completely invisible if you are flying through. And the punishment will be grinding, so wasting your time, not actually forcing players to encounter things which would make them better. Amusingly for a game so long in the making, I think it suffers from a significant lack of play testing.
I used to think the same when I was around 15-18 hours in.
Now I'm finally reaching 100% completion and frankly, it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released. It has a lot of hype, but I think it somehow lived up to it.
For reference I do think the original Hollow Knight is a bit overrated, right now I reckon Nine Sols has it beat, but this? The game has SO MUCH to offer, SO SO much, with so much care for detail that I just can't think of any other game in the genre that is better.
> it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released
Which is exactly how I felt about HK - I never thought I’d see Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night shuffle aside to make room at the top, but the genre definition is now a triumvirate, and the newcomer is hybridized with soulslike elements. It’s been a fantastic renaissance for the genre imo.
I’ve had multiple friends insist that I absolutely have to play this game. But I just know I won’t like it because I don’t like any of the other games that are like it. This game seems to be the labubu of gamers in terms of social media hysterics.
I would recommend giving Hollow Knight a try, I think it has very good accesibility and I know many people who typically don't like these kind of games that did find Hollow Knight enjoyable. Silksong is a beast though, I love it but very few people I would actually recommend this game to.
Hollow Knight also has a robust ecosystem of mods these days, which gives you a lot of scope to tune the difficulty to where you are comfortable with it.
I'll just say: yes, I love the movement too. It's extremely good.
And I just got a speed upgrade (on top of the liquid speed upgrade) with the wanderer crest and it's too much and I love it. Every encounter is a mad flurry of damage on both sides, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it and it's a blast.
Very happy with my purchase. Every win feels earned, most deaths feel like my fault, which is exactly what I like in Souls-likes.
Most people struggle with this boss, I stopped counting how many times it killed me but I spent probably close to 2 hours fighting it. The fight is just unfair. And when I finally beat it I didn't even feel satisfied, just glad it's finally over and I can move on.
Think the article makes a good distinction between games being hard because they're bugged and not designed well enough, so your expectations are broken and you're frustrated by how (game) life is unfair vs. a perfected design with precise match between your skill and results
> movement is so finely tuned and so precise that I know deep in my bones that any hit or death is entirely on me. Of course, that in turn makes tangible improvement extremely visible. You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious
In that game, it's basically ~30 boss fights in a row (don't know the exact number). There are 4 paths through the game A->(B or C)->D->(E or F). So if you take path B you fight different bosses than path C. Same for E and F. One of those last paths has 2 endings with one more boss fight on one path.
You have limited lives so making it to the end of the game requires effectively memorizing the boss patterns. So, your description fits.
> You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious
But I'm guessing Contra Hard Corps does not stick up to Eldin Ring. So what's Edlin Ring's special sauce?
Contra has a primitive gameplay (like the basic movement/jump design), so the complexity of interaction is lower, and a couple of boss fights I've watched is literally moving the player in 5 different positions and just shooting around, maybe with a couple of jumps in between, so also nothing as complex.
And a sequence of 30 bosses is too spread out to be comparable to a single condensed boss fight.
Besides that, I don't knows how buggy those bosses are, so can't compare how much of the difficulty is positive
But in general, it doesn't have to be different? The author describes a common principle of separating "good/rewarding" difficulty from bad, any game can be improved by removing invisible hitboxes that frustrate you...
The player controller in that Contra game is extremely simple. Movement snaps and stops instantly, and the animation are simple. You stand, run left or right at a constant velocity, jump, and shoot in one of 5 directions.
Giving your character more movement possibilities tickles the brain with the complexity, enables more fluid and aesthetic movements on the screen, and increases the possible difficulty of platforming sections and boss fights.
Silksong has a very complex movement controller. The player has mass, can grab edges and climb up, and unlocks additional abilities as they play. Now they can dash, run, doing a running jump, wall jump, stall a fall with a float, and more. Attacks come in many flavors, with different styles enabling attacks of different speeds and distances and strengths, with different considerations to manage.
More complex controls take more investment for players to learn and are more rewarding. An extreme example of this is found in games like Monster Hunter, where each of a dozen different weapons controls very differently and takes many hours to become proficient in.
Elden Ring does not have an excessively complex movement system. You walk, run, jump, dodge, and have a handful of fast and slow attacks for a given weapon. It finds success through incredible world and level design and its difficult and rewarding bosses. The game loop is exploration, fighting difficult foes, and slowly growing stronger-- both through game mechanics of gear and stats, and through personal mastery of combat.
Soulslike games revolve around players gambling directly with arbitrary amounts of time-- when you die you drop your money, and if you die again before reaching that grave it's gone permanently. They make you bid the only resource that you care about: your hard-won progress over time.
Complexity and stakes deepen the intellectual and emotional enjoyment of a game.
I disagree with the author saying silksong breaks the definition of a game because what it offers is challenge instead of "fun"
Thats like saying shawshank redemption isnt really a movie because its not fun like the original charlie chaplain films
I think the vast majority of games are meant to be digital toys, the way early movies were mostly cheap entertainment. But just like movies evolved as an art and artists began to become more comfortable with the medium, games will also become more artistic and less like toys.
The interactive nature of games is so innovative in the art world that it hasnt really caught on how to use it. But its evolving. Dark souls, the spiritual ancestor to silksong and pther soulslikes, is harder and that was a response to games like call of duty which felt like they were just trying to get the player through the level with as little friction as possible, with the pakyers actions being an inconvenience the game has to overcome so as to give them their dopamine hit. Dark souls responded to that by respecting the player and trusting them with a challenge they can be proud of solving.
This idea of one peice responding to another is exactly how art works. And the fact that the interactivity of the medium is what is being played with in these peices is a sign that we are moving towards art evolving to embrace interactivity like it did video
Another example is DDLC. That game did amazing things with making the narrative meta that non interactive media simply cant do. A character in a movie turning to face tue camera and addressing the viewer is trippy for sure, but a character telling you your steam username is way fucking trippier, and sells the meta aspect way better
Games arent just toys, they can be art. Art just hasnt evolved enough yet, but its on its way
I think Hollow Knight and Silksong are mostly special for their art style, the movement feel is pretty average.
Among 2D platformers in general, I think the medal for best movement feel goes to the Fancy Pants Adventure series. (You can still play it online on sites that have Flash replacements, start with the 4th game because it has everything.) But that's a deliberately easy game, you just run through the levels and have fun.
Among difficult precision platformers, I'd say the N/N+/N++ series has the best movement. (The first game is also still playable online.) Be careful, this one is like a drug, it has a huge number of levels and it's really hard to stop playing.
The thing that makes HK and Silksong stand out to me is the full picture. Everything is well done. The movement feels great, the combat feels great, the exploration feels great, the progression feels great, the boss fights are awesome, the art and music are amazing, the characters are fun and the story is engaging, it just has everything.
These people are extremely talented and put years of effort into this game to make it perfect, impatient fans be damned and it shows.
Just tried both the ones you mentioned and I have to say I absolutely hate the movement. It is extremely floaty, meaning there is a ton of acceleration and deceleration. Maybe that's the point, but it's not what I enjoy at all. Same reason I didn't enjoy the Ori games.
Yeah, N++ is super floaty, there's A LOT of inertia. It might feel off at the beginning, but when you get the hang of it, it's just beautiful. It's the opposite of twitchy. You work to preserve the momentum through jumps and corners and evasion maneuvers, it's got that sleek race-y feel. I get it, it's not for everyone, but for me it's bonkers good.
I'd also put Super Meat Boy up there for good platforming feel. But yeah, Fancy Pants is fantastic, it's what I always wanted Sonic games to feel like.
If you haven't triend Sundered yet I recommend it. If you go with the unlock path that specializes in movement abilities then the game gets really wild by the end.
I remember reading an essay (probably from here?) about how a great way to build a game is to build it around a "toy" -- something that is pleasurable to simply interact with, even without objectives. I can't find it anymore -- the closest I can find is https://medium.com/@keerthiko/toys-to-games-25d35b40425d but I don't think it was that, although it's based on the book "The Art Of Game Design" which may have been a common inspiration.
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
Yes, movement in SSBM is so satisfying. Nothing else comes close for me. All other games just feel boring in comparison. A classic example for those who haven't seen it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpOaQxrsaqI
This is interesting to me because I separately came up with the "toy" idea in trying to figure out for myself exactly what a "game" is, anyway. Many popular things marketed as "games" really are toys by this standard, in the sense that you have to build your own win conditions around them. I'm thinking here of pretty much the entire simulation genre, as well as even very niche and complex things like Dwarf Fortress.
I'm sure many others have separately come up with this idea, too.
It's promotional material, but I enjoyed what the Get To Work devs put together to show how they built the game up from kind of the same approach (all on youtube)
You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours. The game is taxing and bashing your head against the wall for several hours will just mean you get sloppier and prolong the losing streak.
Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference. Dying over and over again from increasingly sloppy mistakes is not anyone's idea of fun.
This is generally true for any mechanically taxing skill. If you push yourself for too long you get tired, and when you get tired you get worse. Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
> You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours.
I agree, unfortunately I'm not even grinding the boss, I am grinding the path to the boss.
> Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
Which is why I stopped playing the game instead of letting it waste my time, like many others :)
> Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference.
It it is not like I, or every other person struggling with playing the game, have been continuously doing the same boss, for extensively long game sessions. I only have 8 hours evenly spread across the last 5 days.
I've also explored up to Graymoor at this point and picked up a few of the upgrades there, I don't think that is actually the issue here.
Unfortunately basically every encounter up to this point has the same runback tedium to it. So unless one one-tries a boss, which at least did happen twice to me, there seems to be no real way to avoid this tedium because of progression locks.
For comparison, I've played Elden Ring and the DLC, I've never had this much frustration there, because for the most part the struggle was with the bosses, not the perceived busy work of getting to them.
But it doesn't really matter, a good chunk of the players seem to enjoy it, the game doesn't need to appeal to everyone.
Something I think people don't realize is why there's a runback. Primarily, it's there to teach you how to counter enemy attacks, especially common ones, and it helps you stockpile money so you don't need to farm for it. Usually, on the runback, there's enemies that drop rosaries. If you kill them every time, you'll get really good at fighting them and you'll get money each time, so the more you die to the boss, the more money you build up, which means when you do finally beat the boss, you'll have lots of money saved up, and can buy some stuff.
And don't feel bad if you are at 1 health and you have tons of money and you save scum and quit to go back to the bench and try again so you don't lose the money - it's okay, having to grind that money again is silly.
In Act 1, there's usually a bench fairly close by. Runbacks are often also easy, don't even try to eliminate the enemies, just sprint and jump over them (timing matters of course).
Are there actually long runbacks in Silksong? I'm not that far in, but so far they've all been maybe 2 screens long at most which you can cross really quickly.
There are several runbacks that are quite painful. I'm on the last bit of the game now and while I've overall very much enjoyed it there's more than a few spots where I thought "this is just tedious".
I mean, what does long mean in the grand scheme of things? Is a minute or two long?
I think, no, in a vacuum they are fine, at least up to where I got. But even a short thing can get annoying if you need to do it often enough, which is at least my problem, and apparently also that of other players that don't mind the difficulty.
It's relative to the boss for me. If the runback is 2x the time of an early fight, it sucks. I know it incentivises learning, but some bosses really do wipe you in a couple of hits at the beginning - a number of times.
> The only other videogames that have this much focus on movement alone are the Mario 3D platformers — Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, and Mario Odyssey.
Right. Cause you know all the games that exist. I know it's meant as a superlative and not to be interpreted literally but I hate this type of statements.
Well I have, I don't think there is as much focus on movement there. Ori relies a lot on the grapple dash, there's way WAY less freedom in terms of movement, which is what the writer is going for when talking about 3d mario games, which are known for that.
This gaming household had two huge teenager fans of Hollow Knight, with t-shirts and hoodies merch. Us adults didn't see what the big deal was about but we are not their demographic. My wife tried it and found it too demanding for a middle-aged person. I watched a few minutes of Silksong over my kid's shoulder yesterday and commented that it looks a lot like Hollow Knight and I could see their eyes roll at me from behind them... as their character died for the 3rd time to some [admittedly cool looking] boss throwing needles at them. Oh to be a teenager again with lightning fast reflexes...
In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like?
In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me.
edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is all about difficulty and enjoyment regardless!). Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN? Guys (and gals) please realize I'm not saying you are wrong to like Hollow Knight or Silksong, just adding a data point to the fact some of us don't like punishingly difficult games.
Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
> Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN?
To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.
(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)
Yeah, and how does drive-by downvoting encourage intellectually stimulating discussion?
I think my opinion was fair and interesting, and also on-topic, since TFA goes into a discussion about how a repetitive, punishingly difficult game such as Silksong shouldn't be engaging but it is (for the author), to which I replied: games as hard and "feels like work" like Hollow Knight turn me off. Difficulty is definitely the problem.
My wording, "am I the only one [...]" invited discussion of the kind we are supposed to welcome here, is it not? And we welcome discussions of art which are inherently subjective.
In the same boat here - I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. I mean, it's an ok game, and I get that some people may like it, why not; but the repeated claims of it being the best of all time, to me totally baffling. Already the respawning of the critters, and the grind to get some coins to get such a basic game feature as a map, two early aspects that I definitely don't like, and personally find somewhat disrespectful to my time.
You absolutely don't have to grind geo to buy maps, or really anything (except three very specific charms) in Hollow Knight. Just kill stuff as you go exploring. However, if you don't like the game's combat, then the game is definitely not for you.
> I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it.
That's very easy to explain. It's a Kickstarter effect.
Boardgamegeek is a website that, among other things, aggregates ratings of board games into a big master list of which games are the best, kind of like imdb.
The list has been corrupted by Kickstarter - it turns out that, when a game with a Kickstarter campaign comes out, everyone who reviews it is someone who backed the Kickstarter, and those people are personally invested in the idea that their game is good. You have to wait for quite a while before a Kickstarter game's rating can be usefully compared with a normal game's.
The waiting period for Silksong seems to have had a similar effect on the people who bought it right away.
Nope! Alot of people just really love the game. I'm one of them! I only heard about the game after its release, and the first time I played it was in during the end of 2017. The only expectations I had for it were that it was a difficult exploration game. What captivated me was the music, the level design, getting lost before realizing what exploration options were available to me - I could go on forever about the game.
Same here. Hollow Knight was simply wonderful - the graphics, the music, the characters, the boss fight designs, the melancholic feeling of the world. It's hard to say whether it was my best gaming experience ever because there's stiff competition, but it's definitely in the nominees. And I only heard about it way after the Kickstarter campaign.
> Nope! Alot of people just really love the game. I'm one of them! I only heard about the game after its release, and the first time I played it was in during the end of 2017.
Considering it released a couple of days ago, I don't see how this can be true.
So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.
The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."
You’re not the only one. Hollow Knight is a gorgeous game but it’s difficult to the point of becoming unenjoyable.
I persevered and beat it out of pride, not because I was having fun (some bosses took me more than 100 attempts to finally beat, that’s not fun, it’s a chore). About a year later I did it again just to prove to myself it hadn’t just been a fluke. But after that - no more. And I’m certainly not buying Silksong, I won’t give money to creators who hate their gamers so much.
I hated Elden Ring because it felt way too hard and the movement & animations feel very slow. I died to bosses like 100s of times and just quit. HK didn't feel hard at all though, most bosses i beat within like 2-3 tries, maybe 10 tries at most for a few. But yeah I'm not a fan of frustratingly hard games either, it just feels like a tedious chore. It's funny how small tweaks can change what different people find hard I guess.
Same! But it all boils down to what kind of player you are and what you seek in games.
Even though the context is/was online multiplayer games, I still think Bartle's player types are a great starting point to better understand why you play games. And people do not necessarily have one and that's it but you can figure out which one is the main one.
For instance, I've got friends who play to feel mastery over a game: they'll grind it, suffer, put the time, just to then be really good at it. For others that's an absolute waste of time.
Other friends just absolutely like to spend hours competing with others and being better than them, from playing CoD, WoW battlegrounds and such. They study the changelogs to know what changed to get the edge over an opponent who didn't. It's fun to win for them.
Others think that games are mainly to be shared, they do coop, spend more time chatting than actually playing but still love the time. They don't necessarily finish games as that's not the point.
Then you have people who love exploring, both the world and the game content, so these are the ones playing the story completely, going to do sidequests and such. The extreme of this is the completionist, who's mainly drawn to do everything and anything, regardless whether it actually unlocks anything interesting new.
And more but the point of my long comment is that it's ok if you don't enjoy HK, or Dark Souls, etc. While I appreciate the craft, I personally don't enjoy dying a million times just to beat a silly digital thing. I want the just right amount of difficulty so that I can escape death a few times, defeat it and move on with my exploration.
And games go at waves, you had tons of competitive games a few years ago, now it's a lot of skill-based souls-like bastard games who hate you for even picking them up.
So, don't feel bad and go play Clair Obscure with enemy mods on and enjoy the sublime storyline, world and soundtrack. It's your game, you bought it, so enjoy it as you please.
Just to comment on the downvotes, I think this (a comment to the effect of "I don't like it" being downvoted) is an understandable if unfortunate consequence of modern internet culture not taking "it's just not for everyone" as a conclusion (especially if this is due to something being too hard).
To make something exclusionary, especially if this has a whiff of elitism, is taken by some to be a moral failing. Every complaint that could be read as saying that a work is like that, therefore, raises the spectre of activists or dedicated rabble-rousers using it as ammo to get the developers to ruin it for those who do enjoy it, be it by actually simplifying the game for everyone, devaluing the sense of achievement by introducing an "easy mode", or just changing direction with future expansions.
This has in fact happened with many games I play(ed), live-service games seeming particularly susceptible. The incentive to shout down any complaints about difficulty therefore exists.
There are at least two of us :) I like exploration and I like bloodborne, elden ring, dark souls 3, demon’s souls, dark souls - in that order. Thus, I don’t mind difficult bosses and obscure storytelling.
I’ve clocked 10h in HK but I can’t get over these fuzzy hitboxes (I say it as souls veteran!), shallow fighting system and difficult platforming.
To be clear, I'm not saying Hollow Knight is bad, I'm saying it was too difficult for me so I abandoned it, and will not buy the sequel because I don't have time to suffer. I want to enjoy videogames.
A good example of how the experience of something can be so different between people. I also feel the need to write an article about it, but I'm not done yet...
At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.
But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.
Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game),
but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.
They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.
What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.
And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!
That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.
At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.
At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?"
And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.
At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"
The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?
Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
Challenging fun is the kind that defers satisfaction to near the end of the process - so the more challenge there is, the more uneven the satisfaction is likely to be. It's the same satisfaction one experiences with language fluidity, and being able to "converse" with the mechanics. That is the cause of an essential problem in the design of such games: enjoying the game means becoming literate in what the game is doing. Some people are hooked on the pattern recognition particular to that form of challenge and find it easy to progress and satisfying to win. Others have difficulty maintaining attention, get frustrated quickly and quit. This is evident in reviews of UFO50, the anthology of "authentically fake retro games" from the makers of Spelunky. Most of the games in UFO50 are difficult in more-or-less the same ways that games of the NES era were, with some intentional anachronisms. People find games they love and games they hate in the collection, but their opinions on which ones, and how hard they are, are all over the map and in vigorous disagreement. It is an excellent litmus test for what kind of gamer you are.
The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.
A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.
UFO50 is voluntarily retro and purposefully use poor design as a kind of homage to video game progress and as a way to foster nostalgia. Part of the pleasure is seeing the changes between the games pretending to be older and the newer ones. Plus, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t made with the idea that most players would finish all the games. Part of the pleasure is sampling the large collection, closing games you don’t like until you find one that sticks. UFO50 objectively contains games which are not that good next to real gems but it is particularly brillant as a collection. Plus independently of how it plays, it’s interesting in itself as a kind of experience. That’s indie at its best.
Silksong is supposed to be a modern game and excels at some parts but the issue is that some design decisions are just, well, bad. I agree with the person you are replying to that it’s not particularly respectful of its player’s time for exemple forcing you to grind and slog repeatedly through uninteresting parts to actually play the fun parts. This is notably something FromSoft entirely solved a long time ago. To me that’s entirely orthogonal to being difficult. It’s an enjoyable game but a flawed one which makes for a tarnished experience.
> you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania
This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages exploration: when you die, the game wants you to go back to the same place over and over, instead of going a different way or trying something new.
The shade also makes the places you died in actively harder. It’s a baffling design decision. Compare it to Dark Souls, where souls aren’t even that valuable (because you level up often enough, and single levels aren’t important). Plus, when you die twice, everything is gone, and you get total freedom. It hurt the first three times, then I realized souls are cheap and stopped worrying. I never finished Hollow Knight for such reasons. Loved the first half, then decided runbacks aren’t what I want to spend my limited time on.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun.
Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better about offering spectacle also. Some people play games mostly for skill mastery, others play games mostly for spectacle. This is a more nuanced distinction than "hardcore" vs "casual" - which fails to capture skill mastery extremists who are barely even gamers because they only play one game, or spectacle extremists who could hardly be called casual because they make gaming their entire life.
Most people care about both, but may care more about one side or another. Some games cater to one side or the other, and some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
After reactions to Elden Ring, I can't blindly trust people saying a game is not enjoyable because it is too "difficult".
Elden Ring is a great example of a game where the difficulty is largely self-imposed, if you play using all the tools the devs give you like summons, magic, certain weapons, etc the game becomes almost trivialized. Not saying that's a bad thing necessarily, in fact the opposite, I think FromSoft's "difficulty slider" replacement is one of the best ways of going about it, however I think the difficulty overall is overstated by the "real souls players" who hamper themselves so as to experience all of the mechanics.
Whenever a game of this kind has a massive launch, a bunch of criticism will come from people who are either unfamiliar with the genre or just plainly don't enjoy it. That said, there's a very legitimate conversation to be had about difficulty in Elden Ring's DLC - I love FROM games and I genuinely couldn't enjoy the final bosses of SOTE due to the amount of bullshit they throw at you.
In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.
Spoilers:
Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.
> you just have to get lucky.
You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck.
[0] Touhou is probably the definitive example here. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU
I'm sure it isn't luck but at the same time I watch these things and genuinely don't understand how they do it. Particularly the whole thing of seeing and reacting that quick.
It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough.
Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, process, and react within milliseconds. I definitely think there is a type of brain that can play games like these and another type that can't, and I'm in the latter.
> I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast
The trick to basically all of these games is not to actually try and look at the arrows. There are a lot of them, they are moving fast, your conscious mind can't actually track and respond to each one of them individually.
But with practice you can train your self to more-or-less automatically respond to the sequence - there are only a handful of variations, and you learn the patterns that they typically arrive in.
(For a little while I had too much free time on my hands, and was in the top-100 BeatSaber players)
I think you can train it, at least that's what I did with Stepmania in the early 2000s. I was watching in awe how people could manage to get perfect scores when I could hardly see the steps before they were at the bottom of the screen.
Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use.
Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.
How much effort do you put into trying before you quit?
I used to look at games like Hades and Returnal and see nothing but chaos. But with enough time on the sticks both games became instinctual and I was able to find a flow.
Yes, there's variation in potential range but most brands are capable of most things if you give them enough time to grow the necessary neurons and pathways.
I just timed DDR First Mix on the default settings on Boom Boom Dollar (135bpm). You have 2.67 seconds from the arrow first appearing to needing to input a step. 2,667 milliseconds. Reaction time is not your issue. DDR’s arrows actually move extremely slowly.
Bullet hell shooters are deterministic. Mob behaviour in Silksong is random. It is entirely possible for a boss in Silksong to spawn several mobs that all do inconvenient attacks at once, boxing you in.
Some of the optional bosses in Silksong (e.g. Savage Beastfly, mentioned in the article) do have that issue: high damage + high health + spawning mobs with uncoordinated random movement. It makes for a prolonged sequence which is ultimately unlearnable but must still be performed perfectly.
It’s not that bad, you are still able to control your position and nudge the spawned enemies away, and force the boss to kill these enemies for you. And even if you get cornered here and there there’s plenty of time and space in this fight to heal back.
I believe that our brains are not the same in such aspects and some people can, and some just can't.
Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.
I think that’s a slightly uncharitable take. Yes, it was originally DLC, and yes it is unforgiving, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the White Palace from the first game, and it’s not brutally punishing (you are quite agile and get good upgrades pretty early on).
I felt that the beginning of the game is pretty punishing, exactly because you don't have these movement abilities yet.
After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable. Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity.
I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep to reset my mind, and learn pogo-ing for real.
That also was the lesson I needed to go forward: take your time, consciously clear the environment, and learn the movesets. I have a lot of hours in the original game, and was way too used to sprinting through the environment.
Most of the pogos don't require the full diagonal range, you can just trigger the attack when you're really close to the target, which makes it almost a regular downwards jump.
Yeah, this was the big insight for me.
And to add, gliding down to allow yourself more time to adjust. It seemed too good to be true first, now I think working exactly as intended.
Everyone repeats this, but is there any information that confirms it?
Yes, it started as a DLC for Hollow Knight - but the devs have known for the past 5 years that it would be a standalone sequel. Is there any evidence that they designed it as "extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff", rather than approached it as a game on its own right?
A lot of people coming to Silksong having played Hollow Knight seems to be saying this, but also seem to have forgotten that pretty much exactly the same things were said about Hollow Knight when it first came out over eight years ago.
Almost like the collective memory of Hollow Knight's difficulty has dulled over time as people have, over the eight years, dare I say it, git good...
Are there things that are measurably more difficult? Perhaps. Common enemies can now do two masks worth of damage which before was relegated to boss specials, so environments feel more dangerous. This has always been a significant part of the early game, as an extra mask in Hollow Knight was significant enough to keep you safer from regular enemies, but in Silksong once you get hold of an extra mask you go from being able to be killed in three hits to...being able to be killed in three hits.
So I think there are things that make it feel tougher. At the same time though, all the same things were said before about the difficulty, about not knowing where to go (Silksong gives even fewer clues I'd say), but people persisted through areas, learnt boss patterns, and eventually just learnt the game up until P5.
And in a few years the collective memory of Silksong's early game difficulty will have gone as people adapted to it.
It's less that it's harder, but simply very annoying. It has so many broken, twisted concepts even from the beginning. This makes it really not fun to experience, which then makes it's harder to play.
It's obvious why Team Cherry didn't allow pre-sale reviews. It will be interesting to see how successful it will stay in a month, and next year.
At one point (2020) they did intend for the difficulty to be similar to Hollow Knight:
> So Team Cherry is not out to make a more difficult sequel, then: they're hoping for it to be a "comparable" test of skill to Hollow Knight, Pellen says, while Gibson explains that starting with the clean slate of an entirely new kingdom with its own lore and new characters is another way in which Silksong is designed to be "a perfect jumping-on point for new players. We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game — that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way."
https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidvania/comments/oebdg6/the_ho...
The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting.
I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss.
It's just a time consuming chore.
Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.
I had a sobering experience with one of the Hollow Knight optional bosses, Nightmare King Grimm.
After a few tries, and getting demolished in a few seconds by its relentless onslaught of attacks that span much of the screen, I realized that I'm simply too old and too slow to beat this boss. No regrets, I've had a great run -- my gaming life started back in the days of analog TV Pong "consoles". But my reflexes just aren't what they once were; and there was a boss simply beyond my physical capabilities. So it goes.
To Hollow Knight's eternal credit, I just kept at it because the fight was so engrossing. There was a borderline meditative quality to it. The speed, the relentlessness. The rhythm of it. Sometimes I would just not fight back, only dodge and see how long I could last.
One time, confusingly, the boss started doing a move I had never seen before. Bosses aren't supposed to do that, right? They've got patterns and phases, they don't spawn new moves out of nowhere.
Yeah, so that was its death animation. I won and I never even realized I was winning.
Later another DLC added a boss challenge area where you can re-fight Nightmare King Grimm with only one hit point. You get hit once, you lose.
It took me two or three tries, tops.
Hollow Knight will always remain very special to me for having a higher opinion of what I can achieve than I did myself, and proving to me it was right about it.
(EDIT: Oh hey didn't even notice your username. Hi dude!)
Sun?!
The very same. XD Hope you've been okay, it's been a while!
Well what are the odds! :D I'm good!
I agree. I used to play Path of Exile a lot, recently joined the new league in Path of Exile 2 and the balancing is so bad you have to play a particular build to beat the campaign in a reasonable time. In a game that is all about build versatility...
Common responses from the playerbase: skill issue, build issue, etc. While the game clearly has a balancing issue (which is fair considering its not at v1.0 yet). Bosses should not outregenerate your damage. 90% of the playerbase is playing the same build.
Its just not fun following a particular guide just to play with the highest efficiency possible. What makes videogames fun to me (especially action rpgs) is the ability to make my own build.
Its also the reason why I do not play any multi-player games anymore. There are barely people who play for fun, everyone just wants to win win win.
I'm an unashamed, unabashed, could-not-care-less "casual" when it comes to games, which definitely shows up even more in multiplayer.
I played Minecraft with some online friends and I was off messing around, exploring, and doing nothing worthwhile, and got back to "base" where they had like.. monster farms and stuff?! Because they were trying to finish the newly released IDK.. expansion, ASAP?
It was a very clear "oh you and I are not here for the same reason" moment. :D
I've found the way minecraft has evolved over the past 14 years to be unsatisfying for this reason. Most of the games systems feel like they exist for the purpose of being exploited, and the rest of the systems encorage the player to interact with the former.
As an example, if I want to go exploring, I'm thinking I'm going to want food, so I'll want crops either to eat them directly or to breed livestock. If I want to do that in a way that doesn't require waiting I'll need bone meal. But at some point they changed it so you require more bone meal to fully grow. And now the game has funneled me into building a mob grinder when I actually wanted to explore.
Sure, there are mobs out there you can fight who drop those items, and that's more engaging, but "fun" and "effective" are so misaligned in the game currently that I find myself avoiding it. So much so that I end up mostly either playing really old versions that aren't this way (b1.7.3 in particular) or modpacks that do a better job of this kind of progression.
Yes! I also kind of hate feeling like I have to cheese the game to make progress at a reasonable speed.
BUT, I will say I do get a kick out of seeing the strategies and workarounds other people find that I would never even have bothered to try looking for.
Maybe I'm just lazy, or maybe I just feel like there's a way the game's meant to be played, and that's what I want to play. I'm also pretty allergic to games that make extensive uses of mods for the same reason.
Haha I barely touched the nether in Minecraft, still had a blast with my friends. Unfortunately nowadays they exclusively play competitive games so I can not join them anymore...
I also found the escape sequences in Ori to not be much fun at all. Though when I replayed both games a couple of months ago, somehow I did the sandworm on my first attempt -- which was a huge relief because that one induced so much rage on my first playthrough.
Same for me. I appreciate stories and standard gameplay loops more than bossfights.
I did stumble upon a game where I enjoy the bossfights though - in V Rising. There is a TON of bosses in the game, but the game is so full of quality of life stuff that even dying repeatedly is not a big deal.
I generally dislike when my time is a stake in the game. I have so little of it in the first place, I don't like risking it in this way.
I'll echo how good V Rising is. I don't even like this entire genre (base building grindy survival), but I had a blast in this game. I eventually gave up when managing my castle became too much of an annoying chore (omg I have to tear everything down and rebuild it all AGAIN because now I don't have enough space in the required room to place this new crafting bench or whatever ... OMG PLEASE NO) but the world exploration and combat and bosses was always super fun. I also loved how they allowed the player to scale the difficulty however they wanted. I wound up turning my game into "baby" mode by cranking the boss difficulty down just because I didn't want to keep replaying the bosses in my limited time. Had a blast!
Yeah, I play with my friend and we had good luck with the castle placement. First castle was of course in the first zone, and when we proceeded into the second, we settled in basically the very center of the map, a bit toward the top. That turned out to be a fine location, as on horseback, nothing was too far. Castle size as well, initially I built is to just fit the existing infra, but when I sensed that there are going to be additions, I built it a bit larger than it needed to be, and now we can fit everything, especially with the little in-house teleports.
I totally feel your way of beating the game on normal, and the bosses on easy. I did that with Persona 5 at points, and Unicorn Overlord as well. I really appreciate that games provide this option.
Well crud, two recommendations? This is starting to feel compelling. Onto my wishlist it goes.
I solo'd my way through all the available Sunkenland content a few months ago so base building grindy survival is probably kind of my jam.
It’s interesting how many people with little time still manage to make time to comment on how little time they have in news article comment threads.
It all hinges the many interpretations of "time". For example, this comment takes 5 minutes from me, during a transition between two larger tasks. The gaming I described though is different. I don't even start a game if I don't have at least an hour or so.
Also, people often mean "energy" or "willpower" by "time". It's like a general, non-material cost of things. "I don't have the time for X" can many times be translated to "I can't imagine managing another context", "I don't want to commit to X", "I can't be assed to start doing X after everything I do in a day", etc. Time in these context is just a convenient scapegoat. This is also addressed by the idea “It’s not about “having” time. It’s about making time.”. For what they really want, people seem to "make time" for, even in the busiest schedules.
Yeah. Although maybe I can't say my time is that precious because I'm somehow pretty happy to grind through hours of quests.
Heck, I even seem to like job-like games (Hardspace Shipbreaker was amazing to me).
I guess the "if you don't pass this, start over!" aspect of boss fights is the thing that irks me.
Yeah... you're right. Ultimately it's not that my time is precious, it's that I get no satisfaction of beating a boss. I hate how overpowered are with scripted stuff, for example, and how they break most game mechanics introduced so far. And so, my time spent seems to be wasted.
Looking at how other people describe their experience, it seems like the figuring out part brings them joy. I usually have that with the core game mechanics themselves. The "knowledge" I get seems useful here, because I get to apply it to the rest of the game, but learning the boss mechanics seems like a throwaway thing, and I think this bothers me.
I also don't enjoy replaying parts of the game, especially as a punishment, especially when the replayed part had nothing to do with the my failure itself - like clearing the trash before a boss, or replaying parts of the bossfight before the crucial part, or getting back to the boss' place from a checkpoint. Such a slog!
> Looking at how other people describe their experience, it seems like the figuring out part brings them joy
It's the pleasure of mastery. To me, the fun of a challenge like that is in gradually mastering something difficult and then being able to perform it perfectly. In fact, I'm sometimes a bit disappointed by the way that a boss fight ends when you get it right. The feeling of getting it right is my reward for the work I've put in, and I want that feeling to be drawn out. This is why I don't mind dying and restarting, at least in a good boss fight. The experience of being in the fight feels good and only gets better. That's why these games are rewarding to replay. It's like you're playing the hits or something.
My favourite boss fights are from Sekiro—there's a nice little video about it here¹ if you're interested in what other people love so much about tough boss fights.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W4li9yfY3o
The video moved something in me. I feel I hate being put down a bit too much. (Being made feel stupid, small, inadequate). I mostly counter this not by facing the problem itself, but by overpowering myself in another context - in games, via gear or levels. After winning these battles I don't feel victorious, I feel like I finally got away.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I really appreciate it.
I think we are 100% on the same page, but I wanna share one last pet peeve for the road. :D
You beat the boss! BUT WAIT!!! It's not actually dead!
And then you say "wow, no way!" ironically as you watch its health bar refill.
Who could ever have expected this?!
Yeah, I hate that shit as well. It's one of the reasons why I feel no satisfaction after beating a boss. I had so many experiences where they have pulled a "Somehow, Palpatine returned" that I just don't trust the happiness sequence that usually follows a bossfight.
Yeah.. I've actually stopped playing games because of boss fights. In fairness, I generally don't like Single Player games, so the threshold for me to just quit one is actually pretty low, but an annoying Boss Fight is a surefire way to do so.
I played through Cyberpunk, and for each boss fight I just flipped the difficulty to the easiest possible setting. It's just not fun to me.
EDIT: apart from the bossfights in Cyberpunk, I actually did enjoy the game. Took me about 6 months to finish it though lol. (no DLC, and started about a year ago so when it was actually stable & playable).
Yeah, boss fights in Cyberpunk didn't even fit the vibe. Kinda forced in.
I grew up in the era of boss rush segments towards the end of a game to add filler and absolutely hated them.
FWIW, I'm also much bigger fan of difficult levels over difficult bosses.
I also think that the level of perceived difficulty depending on the player plays a large part in the enjoyment. When I play a video game, I'm also imagining that I'm actually that character so every death essentially means that I was defeated in that world for real.
I absolutely hate games where one of the win conditions is to be forced to die numerous times to discover an otherwise inscrutable pattern.
Your post could be reworded to talk about learning just any musical instrument.
I think learning to play a musical instrument would actually give me more satisfaction because it would open more doors towards creativity.
But it's all personal of course. :) Some people like boss fights (or Souls-like games) and I'm happy for them.
I just would be happy with a "bypass this" button.
I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end, which is enjoyable in its own right on top of the satisfaction of executing the technical challenge of playing it. A more akin analogy, in my opinion, would be “any musical instrument which has been artificially muted”—this could definitely still be fun, and indeed I’ve played my keyboard without sound before, but it really doesn’t compare.
A better analogy than music might be dance: The reward for dancing well is simply the feeling of dancing well. In a properly-designed game, the game feel of successfully completing the technical challenge is itself the reward. A dance that feels unpleasant probably won't be performed recreationally, and a game that doesn't feel fun to succeed at won't see much play.
> I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end...
You've clearly never heard me playing my horns!
I never found the end result of all that practice to be rewarding (as the kids seem to say these days), [0] and -brother- I tried for years and years. So, I switched hobbies to video games and have a leisure-time activity that I like a lot more.
[0] Those unfortunate enough to be within earshot were usually fairly unimpressed with the result, so this isn't just me shittalking myself.
I felt this way two days & 2 hours of playtime ago. Now I'm a bit better with the controls, beat lace & am using hunter's march to farm rosaries.
I think I'd be bored if it were easier. I don't want to 'press A to win'.
> I don't want to 'press A to win'.
I get that! (Edit: I mean this enthusiastically, like, I relate :) )
I think the point is, for me (and it looks like some others in the thread), beating bosses doesn't feel like "winning", it feels like completing a chore.
For me, for example, the part that feels like winning (in games in general) is stuff like investing the time to travel through all the areas of a game, completing many if not all the side quests, grinding to get to max level and/or earning all the best equipment, etc.
But learning the specific way to beat this one boss (often in a way that doesn't matter for the rest of the game because it's based on some timing or animation specific to that boss)? Yeah, that's a chore.
[dead]
Mentally what you need to do is prioritize killing adds once you’ve memorized the avoidance of the boss pattern. Additionally, a heavy use of tools is immensely helpful in removing adds before it becomes overwhelming.
Where it says "you just have to get lucky", there's clearly a typo. The correct text reads, "you just have to get good."
> This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky
I understand most people don't find it fun. Neither do I.
But saying it's not challenging is just plain wrong. If it were true then the best player would have the same chance to pass it as I do. And it's not the case.
skill issue
game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss.
dont give up, use your brain, hacker
so much this
Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult".
For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes.
And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.
This is making me want to go back and try again to beat Hollow Knight (I got up to the Mantis Lords and that... teleporting warlock guy... looked it up, I'm thinking of Soul Master.) I'm pretty sure I remember things of this sort of difficulty level in it, too. The fights were brutally hard, but still felt fair.
Mantis lords is a fantastic boss fight, because it's really hard, but super fair.
There's an attack during which you can consistently heal, so once you recognize that it just becomes about mastering the reactions to each of their attacks faster and faster and faster as the fight goes on. It's sooo satisfying.
Have you ever seen a bullet hell shooter?
Have you tried turning the “Backer Credits” setting on? The game reportedly becomes substantially easier afterwards. Source - https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777
Rare to see Dunkey mentioned on HN, lovely.
You don’t have to keep track of seven things at once. You need to keep track of your own character and react accordingly. I understand that the game is hard but it adds a ton of fun to my taste.
It's hard, but I think you are projecting your own experience here a bit. Many players are able to track these things and come up with strategies to minimize the impacts of the adds (changing loads, altering movement, planning encounters, etc.)
There's much more elegance to the design than you are giving it credit for, it just is expecting you engage with the entire toolkit.
You can just attack the projectiles though. You don't have to dodge them.
I believe you have given up and found out that the game is not for you.
That's not a bad thing, it's just you finding out things about yourself. Move on to another game and let other players have fun with this one.
Regards, Someone who has never player HK and doesn't plan to
I believe you have given up and found out that the game is not for you.
That's not a bad thing, it's just you finding out things about yourself. Move on to another game and let other players have fun with this one.
Regards, Someone who has never player HK and doesn't plan to
Did you reply to that wrong post?
Indeed I have, not sure how that happened. Thanks!
I think if you place games in the category as tourism in so far as the "safari experience", then it makes decisions clearer that the difficulty is part of the experience as the artist's intention.
Silksong is not particularly that hard either with retrospect to the wider genre with staples like Megaman.
Is Mega Man a metroidvania? I could kinda see it.
> some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
I disagree. I appreciate the skill that went into making Hollow Knight, but to me it felt too much like work, too repetitive, too grindy, too difficult. Not an enjoyable experience for me at all :(
"Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game"."
Someone get that article writer a copy of Battletoads.
It's unfair that you cut off the quote there. Because in the next paragraphs:
> And yet.
> I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down... This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.
I am in agreement with the author regarding Silksong. It's the author's understanding about games in general that seems to have a bit of a blind spot (despite being deep in other ways).
These games may be masterpieces but they don't come out of nowhere, there are many other games where skill mastery is much or even most of the appeal. I also somewhat wanted to pick on the line that the Mario games are the only other games that put as much care into how you traverse the world.
I guess somebody found a way to get the Silksong controversy onto Hackernews. Can't say I'm surprised.
My take is, it's a good game and I'm enjoying it. I suspect the only reason it's generating so many takes is that it was so spectacularly overhyped that it cannot possibly live up to how much it has been built up. And that enthusiasm, which started within a specific niche fanbase, has spilled out onto the internet at large in such a way that that is unsustainable.
I bet if we all wait a year, the back and forth will die down and we'll be left with a game that gets similar acclaim to Hollow Knight. People subconsciously think about hype on the same 1-10 scale as a review, but hype can drive a video game score well into the teens or 20s. Then even a 10 feels like a disappointment.
> I bet if we all wait a year, the back and forth will die down and we'll be left with a game that gets similar acclaim to Hollow Knight.
Sounds great, because I think it doesn't get much better than that.
I have no idea what this game is, and I'm pretty insulated from gaming news, culture, etc.
The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere.
What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises.
How did it manage to do this? What's the formula? Or is there simply a lull in the cycle?
8 Years ago an indie studio released Hollow Knight, and it became a critically acclaimed game.
~ a year later the team announced a DLC called silksong but silksong grew so much that they decided to turn it to a full sequel.
The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme
> The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme
Tiny correction (AFAIK): It was never really "delays" as there was no release date until ~3 weeks ago, when they announced it'd be released in a month. But yeah, development time was long.
it has been a rockier history than that - it was playable at E3 in 2019, and there have been multiple teased (but not specific) release dates along the way. e.g. the Wikipedia has some of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight:_Silksong
to be clear: I'm not complaining at all, I'd much rather have a good very-delayed sequel than a bad one. but the "it's releasing again" -> "it's delayed again" memes do have reasonable origins.
Sibling comments are giving good answers about Silksong in particular. But, a more general point to keep in mind is that gaming by revenue is an order of magnitude larger than movies. In that light it's a little strange that gaming news/events don't hit the general attention sphere more than they do.
> gaming by revenue is an order of magnitude larger than movies.
Gaming might make more money, but celebrity news dominates the attention sphere.
It's also heavily weighted by gender, age, and socioeconomic status. Pop culture has wider, more even penetration.
Granted, there is waning generational attention being put into film.
>How did it manage to do this? What's the formula?
The formula is making incredible art that you're passionate about, giving or selling it to alot of people, and getting lucky enough that word of mouth takes over from there. In other words, there is no formula.
It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It had a long seven-year development cycle, with "Silksong release announcement at (upcoming event)" becoming a meme, leaving people wondering if it would ever come out. Last month the developers randomly dropped a release trailer with "by the way it's coming out in 3 weeks". It came out and has been a hot topic because, while an excellent game, it's significantly harder than the original, causing a lot of debate.
> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time.
I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.
Also, and this is just my personal opinion, but I'm about a dozen hours into it, and so far I haven't found it THAT much harder than the original. Maybe it's because I've played Hollow Knight and gotten used to the controls by now, but I remember struggling a lot with lots of parts of Hollow Knight, about as much as I'm struggling with Silksong. Enough people have been saying it so I suspect I might just be misremembering.
Excellent game in general, by the way, really enjoying Silksong so far.
> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.
You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
> You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.
To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive proof that something is widely considered to be among the best games of all time. My guess is that most people think of categories of "best" media in much much smaller terms, and the only people allowing so many things in their categories are people like the American Film Institute and other people who like making lists.
It's hard to judge games which came out relatively recently against all the games which came before. I also think there's an abnormal level of hype around Hollow Knight. It's an excellent game which was received well, but I think on the grand scale of games I would be quite surprised if it cracked the top fifteen of most critics' choices of best games of the past decade. Within the Metroidvania genre I'd expect it to be a very different story.
You are welcome to your opinion. If you don't like Hollow Knight, that's fine. I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.
> I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.
My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living.
I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though.
> You are welcome to your opinion.
For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there.
100 games over 40 years is not a lot. There's 23 games over the past decade on that list, Hollow Knight being one of them. If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best"[0] in your book, you are entitled to think that. I'm just pointing out that most people believe it was one of the best. You can argue that you are right and the 500,000 concurrent Silksong players on Steam, plus the millions more on Switch/PS/XBox, are wrong, but frankly you're unlikely to convince me.
[0] By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
> 100 games over 40 years is not a lot.
You continue to miss my point, as your comment about concurrent player count indicates. I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.
> If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best" in your book, you are entitled to think that.
That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source?
> By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.
> That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source?
There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.
> I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.
I don't agree at all. It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong. This doesn't mean you have to like it, personally. I can acknowledge that Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last Of Us are both widely regarded as two of the best games of all time, even though I personally found them both boring.
> There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.
Okay, but that's an argument that it's considered one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can understand my confusion.
> It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong.
*shrug* I don't think it's that weird. This certainly isn't something I'm coming up with on the fly. I've felt like this for a long time, as have the authors of the many articles complaining about the meaninglessness of the even larger number of "best of" lists.
> This doesn't mean you have to like it
You've made several comments which make it sound like I'm arguing this because I don't like the game. I'd appreciate you not doing that both because I did quite like it and because it implies that my feelings about the game are biasing my argument. I'd make this same argument if you'd used that Wikipedia article to support your feelings about Red Dead Redemption 2. I'd probably personally consider that one of the best games I've ever played[0] but would object to using its presence in that article as proof that it was widely considered to be one of the best of all time.
[0] Honestly I'm still not sure if I should compare it to other games I've played or put it in its own category of interactive movie. It was incredibly good, but the parts I think of as being the best are the performances and the technical achievement and clever landscaping of the game world.
I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X. To go back to sports analogies, this entire comment thread has been analogous to:
Person: "Who was Kobe Bryant, why does anyone care that he died?"
Me: "He was one of the best basketball players of all time."
You: "No he wasn't. Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, and LeBron James are better."
Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games, because it's not my #1 all-time favorite game[0]. However, in the context of "why does anyone care about the sequel to Hollow Knight?" it's fair to say that many people consider it one of the best games of all time. It doesn't really matter that you, personally, may rank it behind 10, 15, or even 50 games.
[0] That title belongs to Doom 2.
> I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X.
> Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games
A) I haven't chosen a specific number. I've even been deliberately hazy about the range because that's how I hear most people discuss their "best ofs" and favorites.
B) As per my previous message I wish you'd stop acting like I'm fabricating this argument just to exclude Hollow Knight. My objection is with your reasoning. I've tried to be as clear as possible about this.
C) You have to bound your category of what qualifies as "the best" somehow, even roughly, because otherwise the term loses what little meaning it had in the first place. I tried to make this point earlier, though maybe I didn't do it well enough:
>> I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.
If you want to say it's widely considered one of the best of all time, that implies some very large percentage of the general public or critics would say "I think X[0] is one of the best games of all time". If you asked a random person to list which games they personally believed to be the best games, they'd probably only come up with a handful. I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.
[0] you can take this to mean either an arbitrary game or the Egosoft one :p
> I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.
You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".
> The games are included on at least six separate best-of lists from different publications (inclusive of all time periods, platforms and genres), as chosen by their editorial staff.
i.e. there already is agreement across all time.
> You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".
I, in fact, did not miss that. If you look at that article, it references over 90 lists. By my count, a bit under half of the lists were written after the release of Hollow Knight. Of those lists, Hollow Knight appears in only seven of them, which is tied for the lowest number of appearances of any game in that list released in 2017 onward other than Baldur's Gate 3, which was released in the last year the list has entries for.
> i.e. there already is agreement across all time.
Eh, fewer than a fifth of lists with what appear to usually be 30-100 games each doesn't seem like good evidence of agreement to me. There are degrees of agreement, and I think "widely" implies a pretty high one.
I think GamingBolt having Hollow Knight on their 2022 list at #14, but then it being completely absent from their 2023 and 2024 lists is testimony of how silly these lists are in the first place.
Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made. I'm one of the people. I grew up in the SNES era, and I think Hollow Knight is an all around better game than every SNES platformer I've played, including Super Metroid which it's directly comparable to.
> Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made.
Why do you think I don't believe that? It's undeniably popular and was critically acclaimed. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that that Wikipedia article didn't support your assertion that it was widely regarded as one of the best of all time. Just because there are many people who think it's one of the best doesn't mean that most people (or even a large percentage of them) think it is.
You're right. I guess I just think you're being really pedantic, and that pedantry is what I was reacting to.
I appreciate the response! I have no defense against the charge of pedantry. I do stand by my points, but I definitely didn’t need to argue it for so long
Hollow Knight was released when a greater portion of the mainstream was going into gaming so that was one of their first encounters of a "great game" hence the rave reviews. It's recency bias clouded by initial unfamiliarity of a genre's appeal that is misconstrued as a sole game's features.
If you ask people who more acquainted with metroidvanias it's not going to be topping their lists.
What Metroidvanias do you think are better? I've played a ton of Metroidvanias and I completely disagree. Hollow Knight has excellent combat and arguably the best map layout in any Metroidvania. The only Metroidvanias I consider its peers are Super Metroid and Rabi-Ribi.
Not the person you're replying to, but I personally preferred Ori and the Blind Forest a lot, both in terms of movement and story, but also in terms of the satisfaction of the backtracking and world as a whole. I felt like Hollow Knight did a poor job of nudging players in the right direction, and found the combat to be a bit more finicky than I care for from the genre. I'm not a huge fan of the art style either, at least as far as the environments are concerned.
The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age.
I was just gonna say this was one of the most annoying parts to the original hollow night - the environments kind of blurred together after a little while, and I found myself backtracking more than I would've liked.
While I wouldn't necessarily consider it better, the sequel to "Ori and the Blind Forest", "Ori and the Will of the Wisps" is easily on the same level as Hollow Knight.
Ori + its sequel are not on the same level as HK, in my opinion. The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay. The sequel drastically improved the combat, but the map is significantly worse; it's essentially just a "hub and spoke" where you go to one of 4 (IIRC) separate disconnected areas, grab the powerup which does more or less nothing in the other areas, use it to finish the area and beat the boss, rinse and repeat until the finale.
That being said, they are still very good games; excellent atmosphere, artwork and presentation, some genuinely haunting, creepy, and awe-inspiring areas. But I think Hollow Knight is a tier above them.
> The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay
Personally I find combat to be one of the less important aspects of Metroidvanias. I prefer the main source of difficulty coming from platforming around environmental hazards.
I felt like exploration in Hollow Knight was a bit too broad, and lead to too much unnecessary backtracking. Backtracking is a balance. It's a staple of Metroidvanias, but if the backtracking search space is large enough and places aren't distinctive enough then the search for a previously insurmountable obstacle can start feeling like looking for a needle in a haystack. That was my experience in Hollow Knight, and something I felt like the first Ori game did better.
I mean, fair enough I guess, but there's a lot of games on that list. I don't think you would go around saying "LittleBigPlanet is widely regarded as one of the best of all time" just because it appears in that article. A lot of publications has done click-baity "top 100 games of all time".
“metroidvania”, not “metro”
Corrected, thanks.
> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time.
There is intense debate in the community to know if it should figure amongst the best of its genre (metroidvania).
It’s absolutely not in contention for best game of all time. It’s not even in the top 3 of its release year which includes Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Cuphead and Divinity 2. To give but one point, the Game of the Year award went to BotW while Cuphead beat HK as best indie.
You are welcome to your opinion. This has been addressed in the very deep sibling thread, but broadly speaking, it has been widely acknowledged that Hollow Knight is one of the best games of all time.[0] This does not mean most people believe Hollow Knight is the #1 game of all time (or even its release year), or that every single person likes Hollow Knight. It is an explanation as to why Silksong received an enormous amount of hype.
As I said in the parallel thread, you can argue that Michael Jordan and LeBron James are better than Kobe Bryant (and I would agree, and frankly few would argue otherwise), but that does not invalidate the statement "Kobe Bryant is one of the best basketball players of all time."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
It does mean that a majority or a large percentage of people believe it's one of the best of all time though. That Wikipedia article is a bad example for reasons I've explained in the sibling thread and which you haven't yet addressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186805
It started as a meme by a small but loyal Hollow Knight fan base on reddit. They had this ongoing joke about waiting for Silksong to release. As subreddits do, they were repeating the same joke for years. For some reason, this admittedly pretty lame joke escaped into mainstream. That is basically all there is to it.
Well that, and someone made a long-running “daily news” on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@dailysilksongnews
I enjoyed Hollow Knight an awful lot, and checked-watched DSN nearly every day since it started. But I never visited the subreddit.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago.
Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, sometimes dying with the boss only needing one more hit to die, and I'm frustrated with myself because knowing he only needed to get hit one more time started making me greedy with my attacks, and so I take big hits to the face and don't back off to heal.
But what makes them fun is the dopamine rush when I finally succeed. A couple times, it felt damn near orgasmic. I've been playing video games for probably around 35 years and nothing felt as good as when I finally downed Morgott.
When I was in college, I bought Demon's Souls and also started the most difficult semester I'd had yet with 3 classes deeply into my CS major. I was terrified of what lay ahead of academically, so I procrastinated by playing Demon's Souls.
Yes, Demon's Souls was hard, but eventually I somehow I started passing dungeons and beating bosses. The rush that I got from that gave me what I needed mentally to persevere through my classes: by the end of the semester I had A+s in 2 and an A in the other. I don't think I've had a better semester since. Beating big demons in video games made me feel like I could beat my own big demons in real life.
Lots of others feel the same way about Souls-like games; there are many video essays on Youtube that cover how Souls-likes got them through depression and other things.
This is so real, Dark Souls has helped me immensely in keeping my concentration up for work and other things in life. It's very good at teaching you lessons that translate to real life.
I’d argue that souls-likes build perseverance which helps with IRL success.
80s/90s kids dealt with this with almost all their games
I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it" but rather "I hope there aren't more bs like this".
Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.
Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.
IMO, while Genichiro and sword/spear-wielding enemies are mostly fun, non-humanoid & gank bosses suck so bad.
Those bosses felt way too frustrating to me because they force you to unlearn the entire deflect gameplay, turning it into an annoying, slow-paced & somewhat janky fight.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
I haven't played Silksong yet and I know difficulty is rather subjective, but is it really that difficult compared to the realm of punishing platformers like NES Ninja Gaiden, Cuphead, Spelunky 2, the dark world portions of Super Meat Boy, etc?
I played the first Hollow Knight and didn't find it particularly hard. (not easy, but definitely not Dark Souls level punishing).
Silksong starts very difficult compared to Hollow Knight, largely because there are many early foes that will deal 2 masks of damage. Those sorts of big attacks were generally reserved for mid to late bosses in Hollow Knight, and it caught even skilled players off guard. Hornet has a lot of mobility though, and a much easier time dodging out of the way, so once you adapt to her playstyle (be patient, dodge, and punish only when you know it's safe) the difficulty settles down and the game feels pretty fair.
As usual, you're gaining all sorts of tools and abilities along the way, and a few areas you can technically access early are best saved for later, when you have better gear. Some players aren't super thrilled with arena challenges, which this game has more of: suddenly 3-4 enemies in a small room all at once. I enjoy the meta challenge though: which tools can thin the crowd? Which minions should I focus to make the rest of the group manageable? If I can avoid taking damage, I can cast spells to thin the crowd much more effectively, etc etc.
With everything doing 2 points of damage, including environmental hazards, the player is at effectively 2.5 hitpoints for a large majority of Act 1, as opposed to 5 in Hollow Knight. This changes the feeling of the game from "oh, a challenge, let's see what will happen and I'll learn" to "shit, a new room, I don't want to explore because I'll just get killed, where was the last bench, can I even get back here?"
The other big difference, I think, is that Hollow Knight starts you out with a very straightforward downward attack that you can use as a pogo to mitigate a lot of damage/environmental hazards.
Hornet's 45º downwards attacks are significantly harder to aim/time, and pogo chains (where they are even possible) take a lot of practice
I found both HK and Silksong roughly similar to Dark Souls in much the same way.
Above all, all three games demand and reward precision and timing, and to some extent figuring out enemy movement and attack patterns. None of the games demand much in terms of speed or reaction time.
In many ways it's much more forgiving than your traditional "hard" platformers.
I find Silksong to be easier than at least Cuphead and Super Meat Boy, but I could totally see how one who isn't experienced with platformers may find it frustratingly challenging.
I think my hardest gaming achievements have been Pantheon of Hallownest, Malenia in Elden Ring, and 106% Super Meat Boy. Silksong is nowhere near as hard as any of those… but I think I’m about 2/3 of the way through, so who knows what’s in store for the true endgame.
Have yet to run into a truly brutal boss like the last few Pantheon participants in HK.
Silksong is infinitely more forgiving then Spelunky 2. The game just doesn't stop you from going into the harder areas of the map early in your playthrough.
I played Hollow Knight. I don’t recall if I defeated a single boss. I must have done a couple but several of the first you were meant to defeat remained unchallenged.
There are non boss fights that get more elaborate as you go, and let you pick up some new skills and abilities.
Another one like this that shouldn’t have been was Orie and the blind forest. If you play it on story mode, which I did because it was great eye candy and I just wanted to see it all, there a spot in the middle of act 2 where you have to land several double wall jumps in rapid succession with nearby spikes. Someone at that studio needs to be beaten about the shoulder with a clue bat about wtf “story mode” means. I never got to see the story and was too mad to watch someone else play it on youtube.
I’m fairly sure that my problem with both was the same. Only partly fat fingers and part was that certain movements don’t work identically on all controllers. Some things are counterintuitively easier on a D pad than a thumb joystick. It’s just not as crisp to go from one input to another 90 or 180° opposite. If your game mechanics are built on that, then some ports will be much harder to play.
You should either not port them, or adjust the timing grace period up on that hardware.
Regarding controls, I have to play precise 2D games with a d-pad or I get immediately frustrated— that said, it was odd playing most of Celeste that way and then having to switch back to the thumbstick for the section at the end with the bubble comets.
Precision platformers are generally _much_ easier with the d-pad. Since hitting some such parts in Silksong, I've exclusively switched over to it.
Meanwhile I'm still pushing with thumb stick and sometimes miscasting skill or doing a side slash instead of downward.
It would take many hours to get used to dpad so I'm sticking to what I know, but it's definitely not ideal.
I don’t know of an easy way to fix that on the Switch. The keys are where the keys are.
Yup, Hunter's March converted me to d-pad.
I was just wondering about control setup and latency as a major factor in a game with very strict timing requirements. Last time I played was on a TV (over HDMI in game mode though), with a wireless Xbox controller. I wonder how much easier I'd have found it on a 240Hz monitor with a wired controller?
My first play through of Elden Ring was a pseudo challenge run - capped at 125RL (pvp meta) and dual UGS style. No ash of war usage. No guides for bosses.
Malenia took me over a month, and probably over 500 deaths and I had to relax the ash of war usage (still limited by my very low FP)
The entire end game was brutal as this was before the buff for UGS animation speeds and most boss openings were shorter than anything than a crouch poke but I loved every minute of it. Just like learning to play something new on an instrument just cos you can't nail it in one try, one week or even one month doesn't mean you won't eventually get it.
One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like. The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress. I always play better on mute (but that's no fun)
I somehow missed Malenia. I'm level 125 (not doing the PVP meta, just happen to be this level) and was pounding my face against Radagon and the Elden Beast. I downed Radagon on my first attempt, then after like 10 more tries couldn't get him again.
I avoided reading the Elden Ring wiki as much as possible. I decided to open it up and found how to get to Malenia, so I'll be fighting my way over there and gaining a few more levels before trying Radagon and Elden Beast again.
> The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress.
The feints are what really get me. Some of the wind-ups for attacks feel like an eternity, or at the very least, extremely unnatural, making it very hard to time a dodge.
I recently learned that Margit has a "feint" that is actually a stance - that's why his wind up feels like it takes forever.
I was interested to find out that Margit is one of the most technically fun and difficult fights to nohit run because his flow chart is actually the most complex of all the bosses. But most players can brute force their way through him.
Malenia was a lot of fun, especially without summons
>One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like
They used to give you unlimited time to deal with difficulty and always gave the alternative of rolling back and getting more levels. That's until Nightreign -- you are almost always under time pressure.
Forget Malenia -- everdark Libra is the current standard of the most diabolical Souls experience. The time is against you, the music is maddening. You either clear the summons in under 20 seconds or you get another stacked debuff and the goat is casting.
Can't wait for the Depth version to be released this Thursday.
Still not tried Nightreign - might have to take a look!
Lots of people say this but they can unfortunately never articulate why that works in Elden Ring. Making a game that is insanely difficult will not be enough to give you that feeling of accomplishment. If that's all it took there's be thousands of games that gave you that feeling. And yet there aren't. So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.
> So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.
Actually, there is:
Knowing the difference between a game being difficult versus punishing. Here's a 12 year old, 7-minute video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
(EDIT: If it helps, consider changing "punishing" to "unfair")
The TL;DW is that punishing games are not fun because they often rely on cheap things like unavoidable damage, actions not being telegraphed, inconsistency of rules, long iteration times (ie, unskippable cutscenes, excessively long boss fights where you're redoing the same first 10 minutes over again). Punishing games are poorly designed by people that want to defeat the player, rather than allowing the player to overcome the challenge.
In Elden Ring, all damage is avoidable. Every attack is telegraphed. Boss fights aren't really that long, and if you die, the walk back to try again is always short and doesn't rely on fighting through waves of enemies. Some fights have cutscenes either at the start of the fight or during a transition to a second phase, but they're skippable.
It's still a challenging game. Some boss hits will eliminate over 60% of your HP in a single hit, but those attacks are telegraphed and you're supposed to dodge them.
But to a certain extent, ER is a "choose-your-own-difficulty" game. You can grind out higher levels to get your stats up if you want to give yourself more of an edge. The people complaining about Margit (A very early boss) being super hard were probably under-leveled. I got him to 1% HP on my second try (Seriously, his health bar was a single pixel wide), and got him down on my 5th.
Elden Ring, and Dark Souls before it are hard but fair. That separates it from lesser games.
Each boss has a moveset puzzle, where you have to figure out how to beat it, and to win it's not just enough to find the solution; the execution matters as well.
Other games usually just add boss HP or damage, instead of interesting movesets.
I wish I could go back and experience soulslikes for the first time! They really are a treat if you experience them as you describe (not everyone feels that way, but I certainly do).
You're in luck because that subgenre has exploded in popularity and there are a lot of good ones out there if you want to keep playing them these days. Elden Ring is one of the best though for sure.
> You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As a result, I suspect many of the people who enjoyed Hollow Knight will actually bounce off Silksong precisely because it is so hard, and they simply won't have the tenacity.
I think this is an overstatement. I've put about 16 hours into Silksong so far, I've pretty much completed around 8-10 zones or so, unlocked most of the abilities and stuff.
I don't think Silksong is that much more difficult than HK. Honestly it's been so long since I played HK that I'm not even sure it's more difficult at all but it probably is. If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy. And aside from that and maybe a couple other spots it's been fairly alright in terms of difficulty IMO.
Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those - yet.
Maybe it gets crazy later on, but that wasn't the claim in the article. The article claims you can hardly access anything without extreme effort and I don't think that's true at all.
I had no trouble going through Silksong (and I'm having a blast!), but there were _a lot_ of times when I thought that this would be really hard for people who are new to the series.
> Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those
If you are a type of player that plays HK, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, then yes Silksong isn't brutally hard.
But I think the game is brutally hard for majority of people who hasn't played any of those. I think HK had a better difficulty ramp for beginners.
Yeah sure but they will play the game and struggle and learn just like everyone else has. HK/Silksong are not games for someone who just wants to chill and breeze through. They are difficult on purpose. People who don't want difficulty can play other games.
I'm not particularly good at this, by the way. Before Silksong I haven't picked up my playstation controller since Elden Ring came out. I've been pressing the wrong buttons and running/jumping/dashing into enemies over and over. I've been struggling. That's what I signed up for when I bought the game.
I agree with you. These games are difficult on purpose and its a lot of fun is in rewarding the player with getting good. But if it is too difficult from the get-go, newer players will bounce off the game.
What I would have liked in Silksong is for the devs to remove some of the "frustrating" part just at the start: more free benches, less hp for some enemies, less flying enemies in platforming parts etc. Once the users have unlocked abilities and are used to the movement (and hooked in!), crank up the difficulty to what it is now.
It is most definitely not an overstatement. I have over 425 hours in Hollow Knight. I stopped playing Silksong in 8 because it felt like unfun masochism.
As someone with similar stats, that's a huge loss on your part then, you'll love silksong, stick with it.
Did you go to Hunter's March? That place is a nightmare early, much easier later on.
> If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy.
That's probably a significant part, too. Silksong is more open than HK, where the lack of abilities put a natural wall around the areas which are too hard at that point of time. But in SK you can easily stumble into areas where you are not supposed to be, which can be frustrating.
What's also frustrating is not knowing if I've walked into an area that is hard because I'm not really supposed to be there yet or if it's hard because I'm just trash at the game. I ran in circles for way too long at the start of the game because I kept thinking I was going the wrong way due to entering a different named zone without finding any objective in the first zone and also due to the enemies in that new zone feeling awkward to fight, like I was missing an ability.
That's kind of just how the genre is. You don't really know where to go and what to do, that's part of what makes it magical. You just explore. If you hit a dead end you turn around and go somewhere else. If you get to a spot that's really hard it's up to you whether you want to push on or look around elsewhere. That's why I turned around when I saw the big guard, I figured I have easier places to check out first. And then I found new zones and new abilities and stuff and then I went back.
Yeah, that might be a potential improvement. They did put a really big and mean doorman outside which worked on me, but putting another obstacle there as well like an air vent or climbable wall might have been better.
You can go there before you even get the hover ability, and I totally see how that would be demoralizing.
Yes, that doorman is a pretty bad Idea, because you can beat him. And beating him is not even a matter of skill or ability, but more about luck and whether you can figure out the trick fast enough before you are losing motivation.
As someone who completed most of the HK main story, I've decided to stop playing silksong during act 1 because I'm just not having fun
That's alright, you do you.
Wait, I didn't have to go to Hunter's March? I thought there was nowhere else to go, however the sudden change in difficulty made me feel I must have missed an area.
Yup! I saw the big guy guarding the entrance and noped out of there, only recently went back - with hover, dash, wall climb etc, different moveset (no directional downslash).
I think I went through the narrow to the balloon place, then maybe back through the marrow or something up to Bellheart, deep docks etc.
Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.
I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.
FPS characters have invisible crab legs.
Fluid and natural are pretty different concepts, perhaps "intuitive" better maps to what you mean? Humans aren't that fluid, certainly wouldn't be when it comes to vaulting, jumping etc.
Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.
When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.
> FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that.
That seems like a strange comment in a thread about a 2d platformer. Nothing moves like a 2d platformer character either. So both don't move "naturally" and both feel good to many people?
Tell me more about how a game where I'm playing as some kind of demigod space marine who is fighting literal demons in literal hell has "unnatural movement". What, pray tell, is the doom slayers natural movement supposed to be? And how are we supposed to tell from behind our keyboard and mouse?
Bah. Doom2016 has some of the absolute best (meaning fun) movement in the business and it is the absolute definition of fluid.
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high.
Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.
Funny, because the most fluid movement I have ever seen and experienced comes from a (25yo) FPS game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvAbbye-oCY
Oh man I forgot to mention Quake, but yeah rocket jumping on Quake was maybe my first experience with awesome movement and I spent a lot of time perfecting rocket jumping in Q3DM6. Quake might have even been the first 3D game or atleast FPS ever to have that kind of fast & skillful movement?
Never let realism get in the way of fun, to paraphrase GabeN :) The whole Earth gets taken over by demons from hell isn't super realistic either, that's not why I play it.
I see a mention of Celeste, I give an upvote. What a great game, and a perfect showcase of what the OP writes about too. The movement is Celeste is so fluid and expressive, which is super important because the game is crazy hard so the movement has to feel great, otherwise the game would be annoying to play.
Surprisingly overlapping set with games I’ve played and enjoyed a lot! Dead Cells was another that has a lot in common.
Yeah, agreed on all counts. I know it's divisive, but the movement in Doom Eternal was incredible. Double dash creating some amazing levels that would have been unthinkable in Doom 2016.
I'm a huge fan of pixel perfect platformers. Chalk Cuphead and Super Meat Boy up on the list of games with a very natural connection between player coordination and game mechanics.
Titanfall was one of my favorite games ever, largely because of the movement. (I even hated using the eponymous Titans, because they take away your ability to run on walls!)
Titanfall 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games of all time. I'm still chasing that high. It's a shame that Respawn went all-in on Apex.
That's why I struggled with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. They subtly broke the movement and some hitboxes, and I could never get the proper hang of it.
Blind Forest though? Chef's kiss
There are probably a bunch of videos in this genre, but I found [0] to be a particularly good explanation of why Hollow Knight felt so good. If you’re experienced at game design none of this is probably news to you, but if you’re unfamiliar with terms like “coyote time”, “jump buffering” etc., this video is a great introduction to how video games break physical realism to provide a better-feeling experience, and how tuning this is critical to getting a game which feels great. Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Vxt8uud5o_4
> Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
But Silksong feels terrible. Its movement is awful and difficult to control. Hollow Knight felt smooth. Silksong is the opposite of that.
This very post is mixing its message:
>> The secret to why this game is like crack is the movement. The movement is so buttery smooth that simply getting back to the boss that just ripped you to shreds is a complex, skillful, and fundamentally enjoyable experience.
>> So am I having fun? I certainly don't feel joy in my heart when I fall into the lava for the seventeenth time because I missed a jump (if lava was a boss it would easily take the top spot for the number of times it killed me).
Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
Interestingly, there is coyote time in Silksong, but not enough that you can reliably do dash-jumps. It's just that occasionally you'll notice a jump starting from the wrong location, a little to the side of and below the edge you wanted to leap off of. Much more often, you'll notice that you hit the jump button but the jump never went off, which is the exact problem coyote time is supposed to solve.
> Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
I would describe that as a skill issue. And I think Silksong feels great. I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Regarding coyote time I haven't noticed it myself but what you describe just seems like the margins are thin. You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier but there's lots of people who enjoy it for what it is.
To me it's an amazing game, absolutely incredible.
>You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier
I mean, the ones for Hollow knight felt wider. I think the main issue is that The Knight moved much slower and you had to time dashes anyway. Hornet's sprint has much fewer coyote frames compared to her and the Knight's dash.
Get the Wanderer crest, once you have that, your moveset is almost identical to the original Hollow Knight. It makes a big difference.
I am unsure if I am just terrible at this game or more of a casual gamer with poor reflexes now, but Silksong feels particularly unforgiving. I did all the jumping puzzles in the most recent Prince of Persia game and figured out almost all of the puzzles and bosses in Metroid Dread after practice (lots of trial and error) without resorting to walk throughs, Silksong just revels in punishing you for making mistakes and forcing you to work to get back to where you just died.
For the record, I didn't enjoy Hollow Knight much either. It felt too repetitive and difficult to me...
This article concludes with the thought "if you liked Hollow Knight, you won't like Silksong".
That is the same conclusion that I and my brother both came to. The game is bizarrely punitive, from the very beginning, for no reason. It's as if they thought of it as being the next Hollow Knight expansion after Godhome, providing an additional challenge for the people who have beaten every pantheon with all bindings. ("The new challenge is: all of your controls now do something different!")
But it's a sequel. Supposedly. Most sequels are aiming to appeal at least as much to players who enjoyed the first game as they do to a hypothetical new audience.
Is it really that bad? The beginning definitely ramps things up, but I don't think anyone who beat Hollow knight would call Silksong "punitive", at least not for the 10 hours I've played so far. The area I struggled in the most was clearly one I wasn't "supposed" to go into yet, but otherwise the difficulty curve is only slightly steeper than HK's early game.
Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.
It is that bad, at least for me. I enjoyed the first 8 hours of Silksong, but it turned very quickly after that because the punishments were just completely outweighing the rewards. No health upgrade in that time, no meaningful combat upgrade, and just an endless amount of bullshit.
Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.
10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).
> Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
They are similar, but different on annoying details.
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Author here! Reading some of the comments, I feel compelled to emphasize that despite my flowery language in the post, I really really like Silksong
I won't play action games without an easy mode anymore. I've beaten all Dark Souls games and I just got tired of proving myself over and over. Nowadays I just want mild challenge and the certainty I will win after trying a couple of times.
I want either an easy mode or just let me skip a boss battle after a few tries.
There’s also an accessibility aspect to it. Accommodation for players who may have different physical capabilities is just the right thing to do.
I really appreciated that TUNIC had infinite stamina and infinite life options under the accessibility settings. I would not have completed the game without the infinite stamina. And that would have been unfortunate because the way the game unfolds is incredible. Such a cool design for a game.
Does James Joyce's Ulysses need an easy mode too?
Cheat codes were the original technique for this and they’re probably fine even today.
Definitely! A story mode in a game lets everybody play through the same way that a braille or audio edition of Ulysses makes the text of Joyce's book available to people who can't see.
sparknotes exists for a reason
Dead Cells did this. I was about to give up, because I am old and I want to play games not grind one part of a game. But I found an assist mode menu that lets you tweak making it easier, with no penalty, and a nice message from the devs explaining they just want their game to be enjoyed. I got about double enjoyment time out of it by just making it easier a bit.
On the other hand, you have games like Borderlands that force you to finish the game once (or even twice) to unlock an "acceptable" level of difficulty (via lazy bullet sponge metamorphosis).
Same with Bioshock Infinite that needed a hack to unlock "1999 mode" or Bloodstained its harder difficulty (still easy, though).
Balance and fair difficulty really are some of the hardest and most important things to get right in video games.
There are plenty of games with no difficulty settings at all that are easier than, say, Touhou Kinjoukyou’s easy mode. Elden Ring, for instance. Why is the presence of an ‘easy mode’ even a significant factor here?
Mods already exists which can make game more forgiving. Limiting damage to one is great start. Don't be ashamed to use them on Silksong, developers went hardcore for this one.
I aborted my 3 Hollow Knight attempts because of boss runbacks. Is there a mod that, I don’t know, adds benches before bosses or something? Then I might finally finish the game. I do enjoy hard-but-fair boss fights after all.
Yes, there is a mod for Hollow Knight called Benchwarp that lets you place benches wherever you want and fast travel between them.
So far Silksong seems to be much better about placing benches near to bosses than Hollow Knight was
I can't play dark souls and eden ring without a fov mod, so I can't go online and summon if a boss gets too difficult. Sadly pointless for me.
I agree. The game got much more fun once I installed some nice QoL and damage reduction mods.
I'm not familiar with the the named platformer titles beyond word of mouth and I may not have the free time to become so for a while but anecdotally I found some years ago that the movement controls in the games Titanfall, Doom (2016) and Titanfall 2 produced the same feeling of flow between the hands and brain the author articulates. It may come to pass that games will one day be benchmarked by neurological metrics in the superior parietal lobule and ACC of their players next to their frames per second, load times, ping stability, 1% lows and memory scaling.
Titanfall 2 had excellent movement! The only games I’ve played that surpass it are the tribes games, which just have a whole new level of fluid movement for 3d games.
Cute article but skong isn’t as hard as op makes it out to be. I wonder if he’s played any soulsborne games or even hollow knight. Git gud!!!
Don't so easily dismiss the opinions of others. For certain individuals it is indeed the hardest game they've ever played. I've cleared Steelsoul 100% in the OG Hollow Knight and would argue that Silksong is definitely the more difficult of the two.
Silksong is objectively hard, and if you're trying to argue otherwise you're either the mythical "god gamer" or just trolling. The game is unapologetically hard and punishing right from the beginning. The very second boss you encounter already hits you for 2 masks (which effectively means 3 hits and you're dead), and each time you try to fight him you first have to run back for a minute before you reach him. He even does 2 masks of contact damage. Heck, even some normal enemies you encounter in the first two hours deal 2 damage. The original Hollow Knight bosses didn't do 2 masks damage until half way through the game.
Don't get me wrong, I still love the game and consider it pretty much a masterpiece, but many people believe (myself included) the game could have a better difficulty curve from the beginning and be less punishing (just give me a freaking bench before each boss so I don't have to run through 10 screens to have another try at it) while still maintaining the overall difficulty and challenge.
It Is hard, sure.
But this: "Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game"" is an immense exaggeration, I could understand this for, maybe, IWBTG.
"The game is unapologetically hard and punishing right from the beginning." -- sorry i just dont agree with that. Mosshome is really basic. My 11 year old kid is already in citadel. Yes the game is hard but i think the community is forgetting how hard the original HK was, not to mention when Dark Souls came out it was notorious! But yes I agree silksong has its moments. Moorwing made me feel at a complete loss for a while, first time i've felt that since I was fighting Ornstein and Smough in DS1. Last Judge was also pretty difficult but felt balanced and learnable.
I guess more than anything it's just been cool to see the community come together on silksong.
It's also obscene in this day and age I can't upgrade my weapon to out damage the boss if I feel I need to. One of my pet peeves is having game designers feel like their design supersedes how I want to play.
If I absolutely do not want to play a boss; for whatever reason, I should be allowed to find an alternative way to get through that area. If grinding endlessly for damage is the alternative, fine. But at least there is one.
But you can heal 3 masks of damage in about the same amount of time it takes to heal 1 mask in HK ...
The very first boss in Hollow Knight, False Knight, does two masks of damage.
No, he doesn’t. Check for yourself at around 30:30 min mark: https://youtu.be/JNdJ5ozN8cU?feature=shared
You're probably thinking of Failed Champion, the Dream variant.
Ok, this is as close as I'm ever gonna get to having a real reason to post this on HN, so here goes:
"Git Gud" by Viva La Dirt League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs
Praise the sun!
Played all the soulsborne and 100%-ed HK. Except the last pantheon, I couldn't ever beat ascended moth
Elden Ring is easier than Silksong. Summons are easy mode.
i dont know about that, elden ring has some extremely difficult moments.
This reminds me how my wife kept asking if I was enjoying Cuphead, because she hear a non-stop stream of curses from the other room.
I found Act I not harsh but full of frustating elements. Traps in piss you off locations, 90% of flying enemies who dodge and are tanky for some reason. Like that one particular fly which spawns in exact precise location in runback to boss for you to collide, unless you are sprinting. Bullshit like this.
Act II get's better as you unlock more movement and the lore develops. There is some unique stuff there. Boses are also fine for me, random summons are annoying but that's what you have tools for, kill them immediatelly.
I’m curious about those traps. I used to hate Soulslikes, Elden Ring made it click, and I binged them all on PC. Traps became part of some twisted humor, I started waiting for the (literal) punchline. I missed traps, or as I started calling them, »FromSoft bullshit«, when there weren’t any for a while. I’m super careful and alert in all games now.
I wonder whether Silksong’s traps scratch that itch, or whether they’re just annoying.
This game has plenty of traps, including booby trapped save spot after a dificult section which has claimed many lives.
> unless you are sprinting
So… why not just sprint?
You need to figure that part out. It's a jump platform in the middle of sandworms, not just straight runway.
Interesting how different impressions can be. Elegance is not really how I would describe movement in Silksong. Yes, the animation is smooth, but the actual movement and its controls are very crude and twisted. It's in the realm of those annoying games which feel very unnatural, unintuitive.
I'm a big Metroidvania fan and could never get into Hollow Knight for this reason. But I also played it around the same time as the first Ori game, so maybe it's a tough comparison.
What's the best alternative?
Alternative for what exactly?
which game has the most elegant movement system (as a better alternative)?
First Hollow Knight is already better in that aspect, even though animation is less smooth IIRC. Personally, I prefer the Ori-Games in terms of movements, especially the second game.
But gaming is big, and inside as also outside the genre there are many games with great movement and controls. It depends on how much of an alternative you really want, just the movement, or the whole game..
I'm partial to super smash brothers melee. I feel like no other game has come close in making me feel so in control of my character.
That being said, it is kind of difficult to get into. Finding a good GC controller can be hard, and playing online is rough because everyone is so good these days.
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> Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money.
This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.
I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.
Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.
Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.
I've been watching this process with a keen eye as a technical consultant, and one thing I've learnt is that naive models of large organisations as Profit=Revenue-Costs is totally inadequate for enterprise sales. Yes, it is true that saving money anywhere will improve profits, but you can only sell that to an individual who's personal KPI needles move because of this! If the cost is in dept X but the profit is recorded in dept Y, then don't bother. You won't get a sale, even if it's tens of millions of dollars of saved costs or increased revenue. At best, you can find their common manager and try to sell it to that person, but even that has pits of failure you can all too easily fall into.
... Couldn't companies gain a competitive edge by fixing their internal structures and aligning the KPI needles?
Yes. But that's like saying "a racecar would gain a competitive advantage by being faster."
Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)
A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.
Given how much some companies spend on their cloud services bills without batting an eye, I definitely believe this. They care about making more money, not so much about spending less, even though both are ways to increase profits.
yes, and I think one big reason enterprise might not buy your product even if it is guaranteed to make/save $X is $ is often NOT most important thing to the people make buying decision, specially when it is not your own money to save or gain
This is very true. Look no farther than the perennial problem of department heads spending all their budget to keep their budget. Decision makers rarely care about saving money in isolation.
I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.
- Sell to the champion. - Sell to the rest of the org. - Sell to procurement. - Sell to the implementation project team. - Sell to the users and get adoption up.
Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.
Easy!
This is what I’ve seen; it’s hard work, and if you fail to make any one of those sales, it can all fall apart. And you didn’t even mention getting your foot in the door in the first place. I used to chat with our business development guy in the lunchroom. He spent hours on the phone every day getting told no. It took a ton of work just to get from “no” to “maybe later,” and that’s when they didn’t just hang up in him. I think he understood what made our company tick better than anybody else, better than the CEO.
> going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.
Can confirm. At one point in my career (after reflection on the situation) I realized I had been made a champion by a subsidiary of IBM for one of their products. I found myself in some really bizarre meetings with our execs and their executive sales people that left me feeling like a puppet that was made to tell our CEO that we needed this. They really took us apart, It was all very slimy.
I've played a couple hours of silksong. I don't get the hype. Its a fine game, but I really think people are over hyping it. The internet hype loop on this game is turning me off on it. It's a nice metroidvania game.
It is extremely over hyped. The first game was already regularly over hyped. The community is famous for treating as some sort of masterpiece and reacting very strongly to any form of criticism.
Then you have a lot of opinion in the mix. I strongly disagree with the article for exemple on both the extreme difficulty, the game is difficult but manageable, the enjoyment, plenty of questionable design decisions are there purely to spite the player and it’s a game which often confuses wasting your time and being frustrating with being difficult, and the supposed elegance of the movement.
Silksong is really weirdly tuned in that it has mechanics which will actually only bother you and make your experience more painful if you are already struggling while being completely invisible if you are flying through. And the punishment will be grinding, so wasting your time, not actually forcing players to encounter things which would make them better. Amusingly for a game so long in the making, I think it suffers from a significant lack of play testing.
I used to think the same when I was around 15-18 hours in.
Now I'm finally reaching 100% completion and frankly, it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released. It has a lot of hype, but I think it somehow lived up to it.
For reference I do think the original Hollow Knight is a bit overrated, right now I reckon Nine Sols has it beat, but this? The game has SO MUCH to offer, SO SO much, with so much care for detail that I just can't think of any other game in the genre that is better.
> it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released
Which is exactly how I felt about HK - I never thought I’d see Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night shuffle aside to make room at the top, but the genre definition is now a triumvirate, and the newcomer is hybridized with soulslike elements. It’s been a fantastic renaissance for the genre imo.
I’ve had multiple friends insist that I absolutely have to play this game. But I just know I won’t like it because I don’t like any of the other games that are like it. This game seems to be the labubu of gamers in terms of social media hysterics.
I would recommend giving Hollow Knight a try, I think it has very good accesibility and I know many people who typically don't like these kind of games that did find Hollow Knight enjoyable. Silksong is a beast though, I love it but very few people I would actually recommend this game to.
Hollow Knight also has a robust ecosystem of mods these days, which gives you a lot of scope to tune the difficulty to where you are comfortable with it.
Here's some of Celeste's movement design: https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_forgiveness...
It was strange not reading the name of Celeste when the article wrote about “the only other videogames that have this much focus on movement alone”.
I'll just say: yes, I love the movement too. It's extremely good.
And I just got a speed upgrade (on top of the liquid speed upgrade) with the wanderer crest and it's too much and I love it. Every encounter is a mad flurry of damage on both sides, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it and it's a blast.
Very happy with my purchase. Every win feels earned, most deaths feel like my fault, which is exactly what I like in Souls-likes.
I like how the game took inspiration from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – https://x.com/h_wallacepires/status/1963958435487088678
Savage Beastfly killed me 43 times in a row. :/
Most people struggle with this boss, I stopped counting how many times it killed me but I spent probably close to 2 hours fighting it. The fight is just unfair. And when I finally beat it I didn't even feel satisfied, just glad it's finally over and I can move on.
Heck, there's even a dedicated subreddit for hating on this boss: https://www.reddit.com/r/fucksavagebeastfly/
I too had trouble with this boss but eventually made it. The fact it summons little friends is the problem, so hard to dodge 2+ the boss!
After 10+ deaths just go somewhere else. It's optional boss.
Noooo, the 44th attempt felt amazing and I needed my crest :D
Think the article makes a good distinction between games being hard because they're bugged and not designed well enough, so your expectations are broken and you're frustrated by how (game) life is unfair vs. a perfected design with precise match between your skill and results
> movement is so finely tuned and so precise that I know deep in my bones that any hit or death is entirely on me. Of course, that in turn makes tangible improvement extremely visible. You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious
How is this different than a game like Sega Genesis Contra Hard Corps? (Asking with genine curiousity).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzJyBQKDaeQ
In that game, it's basically ~30 boss fights in a row (don't know the exact number). There are 4 paths through the game A->(B or C)->D->(E or F). So if you take path B you fight different bosses than path C. Same for E and F. One of those last paths has 2 endings with one more boss fight on one path.
You have limited lives so making it to the end of the game requires effectively memorizing the boss patterns. So, your description fits.
> You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious
But I'm guessing Contra Hard Corps does not stick up to Eldin Ring. So what's Edlin Ring's special sauce?
Contra has a primitive gameplay (like the basic movement/jump design), so the complexity of interaction is lower, and a couple of boss fights I've watched is literally moving the player in 5 different positions and just shooting around, maybe with a couple of jumps in between, so also nothing as complex.
And a sequence of 30 bosses is too spread out to be comparable to a single condensed boss fight.
Besides that, I don't knows how buggy those bosses are, so can't compare how much of the difficulty is positive
But in general, it doesn't have to be different? The author describes a common principle of separating "good/rewarding" difficulty from bad, any game can be improved by removing invisible hitboxes that frustrate you...
The player controller in that Contra game is extremely simple. Movement snaps and stops instantly, and the animation are simple. You stand, run left or right at a constant velocity, jump, and shoot in one of 5 directions.
Giving your character more movement possibilities tickles the brain with the complexity, enables more fluid and aesthetic movements on the screen, and increases the possible difficulty of platforming sections and boss fights.
Silksong has a very complex movement controller. The player has mass, can grab edges and climb up, and unlocks additional abilities as they play. Now they can dash, run, doing a running jump, wall jump, stall a fall with a float, and more. Attacks come in many flavors, with different styles enabling attacks of different speeds and distances and strengths, with different considerations to manage.
More complex controls take more investment for players to learn and are more rewarding. An extreme example of this is found in games like Monster Hunter, where each of a dozen different weapons controls very differently and takes many hours to become proficient in.
Elden Ring does not have an excessively complex movement system. You walk, run, jump, dodge, and have a handful of fast and slow attacks for a given weapon. It finds success through incredible world and level design and its difficult and rewarding bosses. The game loop is exploration, fighting difficult foes, and slowly growing stronger-- both through game mechanics of gear and stats, and through personal mastery of combat.
Soulslike games revolve around players gambling directly with arbitrary amounts of time-- when you die you drop your money, and if you die again before reaching that grave it's gone permanently. They make you bid the only resource that you care about: your hard-won progress over time.
Complexity and stakes deepen the intellectual and emotional enjoyment of a game.
I disagree with the author saying silksong breaks the definition of a game because what it offers is challenge instead of "fun"
Thats like saying shawshank redemption isnt really a movie because its not fun like the original charlie chaplain films
I think the vast majority of games are meant to be digital toys, the way early movies were mostly cheap entertainment. But just like movies evolved as an art and artists began to become more comfortable with the medium, games will also become more artistic and less like toys.
The interactive nature of games is so innovative in the art world that it hasnt really caught on how to use it. But its evolving. Dark souls, the spiritual ancestor to silksong and pther soulslikes, is harder and that was a response to games like call of duty which felt like they were just trying to get the player through the level with as little friction as possible, with the pakyers actions being an inconvenience the game has to overcome so as to give them their dopamine hit. Dark souls responded to that by respecting the player and trusting them with a challenge they can be proud of solving.
This idea of one peice responding to another is exactly how art works. And the fact that the interactivity of the medium is what is being played with in these peices is a sign that we are moving towards art evolving to embrace interactivity like it did video
Another example is DDLC. That game did amazing things with making the narrative meta that non interactive media simply cant do. A character in a movie turning to face tue camera and addressing the viewer is trippy for sure, but a character telling you your steam username is way fucking trippier, and sells the meta aspect way better
Games arent just toys, they can be art. Art just hasnt evolved enough yet, but its on its way
I think Hollow Knight and Silksong are mostly special for their art style, the movement feel is pretty average.
Among 2D platformers in general, I think the medal for best movement feel goes to the Fancy Pants Adventure series. (You can still play it online on sites that have Flash replacements, start with the 4th game because it has everything.) But that's a deliberately easy game, you just run through the levels and have fun.
Among difficult precision platformers, I'd say the N/N+/N++ series has the best movement. (The first game is also still playable online.) Be careful, this one is like a drug, it has a huge number of levels and it's really hard to stop playing.
The thing that makes HK and Silksong stand out to me is the full picture. Everything is well done. The movement feels great, the combat feels great, the exploration feels great, the progression feels great, the boss fights are awesome, the art and music are amazing, the characters are fun and the story is engaging, it just has everything.
These people are extremely talented and put years of effort into this game to make it perfect, impatient fans be damned and it shows.
Just tried both the ones you mentioned and I have to say I absolutely hate the movement. It is extremely floaty, meaning there is a ton of acceleration and deceleration. Maybe that's the point, but it's not what I enjoy at all. Same reason I didn't enjoy the Ori games.
Yeah, N++ is super floaty, there's A LOT of inertia. It might feel off at the beginning, but when you get the hang of it, it's just beautiful. It's the opposite of twitchy. You work to preserve the momentum through jumps and corners and evasion maneuvers, it's got that sleek race-y feel. I get it, it's not for everyone, but for me it's bonkers good.
I'd also put Super Meat Boy up there for good platforming feel. But yeah, Fancy Pants is fantastic, it's what I always wanted Sonic games to feel like.
Link to the original N if you haven't played it: https://www.kongregate.com/games/MetanetSoftware/n
(Mandatory addiction hazard notice)
Oh man I forgot about N+, that game was incredible. Super cool to see there's a new N++.
If you haven't triend Sundered yet I recommend it. If you go with the unlock path that specializes in movement abilities then the game gets really wild by the end.
I remember reading an essay (probably from here?) about how a great way to build a game is to build it around a "toy" -- something that is pleasurable to simply interact with, even without objectives. I can't find it anymore -- the closest I can find is https://medium.com/@keerthiko/toys-to-games-25d35b40425d but I don't think it was that, although it's based on the book "The Art Of Game Design" which may have been a common inspiration.
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
Yes, movement in SSBM is so satisfying. Nothing else comes close for me. All other games just feel boring in comparison. A classic example for those who haven't seen it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpOaQxrsaqI
This article from 2005 has the toy idea. It has stuck with me.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/how-to-prototyp...
Thanks, that was a fun read!
This is interesting to me because I separately came up with the "toy" idea in trying to figure out for myself exactly what a "game" is, anyway. Many popular things marketed as "games" really are toys by this standard, in the sense that you have to build your own win conditions around them. I'm thinking here of pretty much the entire simulation genre, as well as even very niche and complex things like Dwarf Fortress.
I'm sure many others have separately come up with this idea, too.
It's promotional material, but I enjoyed what the Get To Work devs put together to show how they built the game up from kind of the same approach (all on youtube)
Sounds like Tynan Sylvester’s game design book (Tynan Sylvester created Rimworld)
It's a streamer game. Meant for people to watch the streamer go through the attrition. It's not fun. I'm sorry I can't get a refund on PlayStation
Silksong became a lot better for me once I gained the power up that allowed me to dash, sprint, and jump.
I definitely have issues with the in-game economy, so to just not worry about it, I've been farming enemies to build up a stock pile of cash.
Farming has helped me get better at my movement, and it is very, very fun.
The movement itself reminds me of super smash brother melee, the dashing on ground and in air feels like wave dashing and air dodging.
The hitbox image seems odd to me. My understanding was that darksouls actually has very good hitboxes.
Dying 30 times to a boss isn;t that bad…
Is it if this constitutes an hour of two of your time, most of which is not actually fighting the boss, but walking back to it?
You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours. The game is taxing and bashing your head against the wall for several hours will just mean you get sloppier and prolong the losing streak.
Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference. Dying over and over again from increasingly sloppy mistakes is not anyone's idea of fun.
This is generally true for any mechanically taxing skill. If you push yourself for too long you get tired, and when you get tired you get worse. Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
> You arguably shouldn't be grinding a boss for several hours.
I agree, unfortunately I'm not even grinding the boss, I am grinding the path to the boss.
> Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
Which is why I stopped playing the game instead of letting it waste my time, like many others :)
> Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference.
It it is not like I, or every other person struggling with playing the game, have been continuously doing the same boss, for extensively long game sessions. I only have 8 hours evenly spread across the last 5 days.
I've also explored up to Graymoor at this point and picked up a few of the upgrades there, I don't think that is actually the issue here.
Unfortunately basically every encounter up to this point has the same runback tedium to it. So unless one one-tries a boss, which at least did happen twice to me, there seems to be no real way to avoid this tedium because of progression locks.
For comparison, I've played Elden Ring and the DLC, I've never had this much frustration there, because for the most part the struggle was with the bosses, not the perceived busy work of getting to them.
But it doesn't really matter, a good chunk of the players seem to enjoy it, the game doesn't need to appeal to everyone.
Something I think people don't realize is why there's a runback. Primarily, it's there to teach you how to counter enemy attacks, especially common ones, and it helps you stockpile money so you don't need to farm for it. Usually, on the runback, there's enemies that drop rosaries. If you kill them every time, you'll get really good at fighting them and you'll get money each time, so the more you die to the boss, the more money you build up, which means when you do finally beat the boss, you'll have lots of money saved up, and can buy some stuff.
And don't feel bad if you are at 1 health and you have tons of money and you save scum and quit to go back to the bench and try again so you don't lose the money - it's okay, having to grind that money again is silly.
In Act 1, there's usually a bench fairly close by. Runbacks are often also easy, don't even try to eliminate the enemies, just sprint and jump over them (timing matters of course).
Are there actually long runbacks in Silksong? I'm not that far in, but so far they've all been maybe 2 screens long at most which you can cross really quickly.
There are several runbacks that are quite painful. I'm on the last bit of the game now and while I've overall very much enjoyed it there's more than a few spots where I thought "this is just tedious".
A great motivation to get it right this time. :)
True enough! XD
I mean, what does long mean in the grand scheme of things? Is a minute or two long?
I think, no, in a vacuum they are fine, at least up to where I got. But even a short thing can get annoying if you need to do it often enough, which is at least my problem, and apparently also that of other players that don't mind the difficulty.
It's relative to the boss for me. If the runback is 2x the time of an early fight, it sucks. I know it incentivises learning, but some bosses really do wipe you in a couple of hits at the beginning - a number of times.
Ulysses was such a great novel when I installed some mods to make it easier.
But it wasn't Ulysses.
There are more brutal games out there, like the whole "I wanna be" series
Great, I can finally find out what my friends have been talking about all week.
> The only other videogames that have this much focus on movement alone are the Mario 3D platformers — Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, and Mario Odyssey.
Right. Cause you know all the games that exist. I know it's meant as a superlative and not to be interpreted literally but I hate this type of statements.
As soon as I read that I thought: this reviewer hasn’t played the Ori series.
Well I have, I don't think there is as much focus on movement there. Ori relies a lot on the grapple dash, there's way WAY less freedom in terms of movement, which is what the writer is going for when talking about 3d mario games, which are known for that.
Silksong is really about BDSM
This gaming household had two huge teenager fans of Hollow Knight, with t-shirts and hoodies merch. Us adults didn't see what the big deal was about but we are not their demographic. My wife tried it and found it too demanding for a middle-aged person. I watched a few minutes of Silksong over my kid's shoulder yesterday and commented that it looks a lot like Hollow Knight and I could see their eyes roll at me from behind them... as their character died for the 3rd time to some [admittedly cool looking] boss throwing needles at them. Oh to be a teenager again with lightning fast reflexes...
Am I the only one who didn't like Hollow Knight?
In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like?
In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me.
edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is all about difficulty and enjoyment regardless!). Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN? Guys (and gals) please realize I'm not saying you are wrong to like Hollow Knight or Silksong, just adding a data point to the fact some of us don't like punishingly difficult games.
Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!
> Different strokes for different folks
Agreed!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
> Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN?
To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.
(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)
Yeah, and how does drive-by downvoting encourage intellectually stimulating discussion?
I think my opinion was fair and interesting, and also on-topic, since TFA goes into a discussion about how a repetitive, punishingly difficult game such as Silksong shouldn't be engaging but it is (for the author), to which I replied: games as hard and "feels like work" like Hollow Knight turn me off. Difficulty is definitely the problem.
My wording, "am I the only one [...]" invited discussion of the kind we are supposed to welcome here, is it not? And we welcome discussions of art which are inherently subjective.
In the same boat here - I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. I mean, it's an ok game, and I get that some people may like it, why not; but the repeated claims of it being the best of all time, to me totally baffling. Already the respawning of the critters, and the grind to get some coins to get such a basic game feature as a map, two early aspects that I definitely don't like, and personally find somewhat disrespectful to my time.
You absolutely don't have to grind geo to buy maps, or really anything (except three very specific charms) in Hollow Knight. Just kill stuff as you go exploring. However, if you don't like the game's combat, then the game is definitely not for you.
> I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it.
That's very easy to explain. It's a Kickstarter effect.
Boardgamegeek is a website that, among other things, aggregates ratings of board games into a big master list of which games are the best, kind of like imdb.
The list has been corrupted by Kickstarter - it turns out that, when a game with a Kickstarter campaign comes out, everyone who reviews it is someone who backed the Kickstarter, and those people are personally invested in the idea that their game is good. You have to wait for quite a while before a Kickstarter game's rating can be usefully compared with a normal game's.
The waiting period for Silksong seems to have had a similar effect on the people who bought it right away.
Nope! Alot of people just really love the game. I'm one of them! I only heard about the game after its release, and the first time I played it was in during the end of 2017. The only expectations I had for it were that it was a difficult exploration game. What captivated me was the music, the level design, getting lost before realizing what exploration options were available to me - I could go on forever about the game.
Same here. Hollow Knight was simply wonderful - the graphics, the music, the characters, the boss fight designs, the melancholic feeling of the world. It's hard to say whether it was my best gaming experience ever because there's stiff competition, but it's definitely in the nominees. And I only heard about it way after the Kickstarter campaign.
> Nope! Alot of people just really love the game. I'm one of them! I only heard about the game after its release, and the first time I played it was in during the end of 2017.
Considering it released a couple of days ago, I don't see how this can be true.
They're referring to Hollow Knight, not Silksong.
Same.
So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.
The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."
No I strongly dislike this game too. It’s too hard, I don’t like the movement which feels ‘rigid’ , and it’s super gloomy and depressing.
I enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.
You’re not the only one. Hollow Knight is a gorgeous game but it’s difficult to the point of becoming unenjoyable.
I persevered and beat it out of pride, not because I was having fun (some bosses took me more than 100 attempts to finally beat, that’s not fun, it’s a chore). About a year later I did it again just to prove to myself it hadn’t just been a fluke. But after that - no more. And I’m certainly not buying Silksong, I won’t give money to creators who hate their gamers so much.
I hated Elden Ring because it felt way too hard and the movement & animations feel very slow. I died to bosses like 100s of times and just quit. HK didn't feel hard at all though, most bosses i beat within like 2-3 tries, maybe 10 tries at most for a few. But yeah I'm not a fan of frustratingly hard games either, it just feels like a tedious chore. It's funny how small tweaks can change what different people find hard I guess.
Same! But it all boils down to what kind of player you are and what you seek in games.
Even though the context is/was online multiplayer games, I still think Bartle's player types are a great starting point to better understand why you play games. And people do not necessarily have one and that's it but you can figure out which one is the main one.
For instance, I've got friends who play to feel mastery over a game: they'll grind it, suffer, put the time, just to then be really good at it. For others that's an absolute waste of time.
Other friends just absolutely like to spend hours competing with others and being better than them, from playing CoD, WoW battlegrounds and such. They study the changelogs to know what changed to get the edge over an opponent who didn't. It's fun to win for them.
Others think that games are mainly to be shared, they do coop, spend more time chatting than actually playing but still love the time. They don't necessarily finish games as that's not the point.
Then you have people who love exploring, both the world and the game content, so these are the ones playing the story completely, going to do sidequests and such. The extreme of this is the completionist, who's mainly drawn to do everything and anything, regardless whether it actually unlocks anything interesting new.
And more but the point of my long comment is that it's ok if you don't enjoy HK, or Dark Souls, etc. While I appreciate the craft, I personally don't enjoy dying a million times just to beat a silly digital thing. I want the just right amount of difficulty so that I can escape death a few times, defeat it and move on with my exploration.
And games go at waves, you had tons of competitive games a few years ago, now it's a lot of skill-based souls-like bastard games who hate you for even picking them up.
So, don't feel bad and go play Clair Obscure with enemy mods on and enjoy the sublime storyline, world and soundtrack. It's your game, you bought it, so enjoy it as you please.
Just to comment on the downvotes, I think this (a comment to the effect of "I don't like it" being downvoted) is an understandable if unfortunate consequence of modern internet culture not taking "it's just not for everyone" as a conclusion (especially if this is due to something being too hard).
To make something exclusionary, especially if this has a whiff of elitism, is taken by some to be a moral failing. Every complaint that could be read as saying that a work is like that, therefore, raises the spectre of activists or dedicated rabble-rousers using it as ammo to get the developers to ruin it for those who do enjoy it, be it by actually simplifying the game for everyone, devaluing the sense of achievement by introducing an "easy mode", or just changing direction with future expansions.
This has in fact happened with many games I play(ed), live-service games seeming particularly susceptible. The incentive to shout down any complaints about difficulty therefore exists.
I also didn't like hollow knight despite loving hades and dead cells (somewhat similar) although I only played it for ~ 2 hours
I am loving silksong so far however
There are at least two of us :) I like exploration and I like bloodborne, elden ring, dark souls 3, demon’s souls, dark souls - in that order. Thus, I don’t mind difficult bosses and obscure storytelling.
I’ve clocked 10h in HK but I can’t get over these fuzzy hitboxes (I say it as souls veteran!), shallow fighting system and difficult platforming.
It is ok, just not a game for me.
[flagged]
Do you mean that I'm not skilled enough?
Oh, no argument from me! :)
To be clear, I'm not saying Hollow Knight is bad, I'm saying it was too difficult for me so I abandoned it, and will not buy the sequel because I don't have time to suffer. I want to enjoy videogames.
A good example of how the experience of something can be so different between people. I also feel the need to write an article about it, but I'm not done yet...
At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.
But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.
Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game), but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.
They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.
What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.
And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!
That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.
At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.
At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?" And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.
At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"
The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?
Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
Challenging fun is the kind that defers satisfaction to near the end of the process - so the more challenge there is, the more uneven the satisfaction is likely to be. It's the same satisfaction one experiences with language fluidity, and being able to "converse" with the mechanics. That is the cause of an essential problem in the design of such games: enjoying the game means becoming literate in what the game is doing. Some people are hooked on the pattern recognition particular to that form of challenge and find it easy to progress and satisfying to win. Others have difficulty maintaining attention, get frustrated quickly and quit. This is evident in reviews of UFO50, the anthology of "authentically fake retro games" from the makers of Spelunky. Most of the games in UFO50 are difficult in more-or-less the same ways that games of the NES era were, with some intentional anachronisms. People find games they love and games they hate in the collection, but their opinions on which ones, and how hard they are, are all over the map and in vigorous disagreement. It is an excellent litmus test for what kind of gamer you are.
The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.
A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.
I don’t think you can compare UFO50 and Silksong.
UFO50 is voluntarily retro and purposefully use poor design as a kind of homage to video game progress and as a way to foster nostalgia. Part of the pleasure is seeing the changes between the games pretending to be older and the newer ones. Plus, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t made with the idea that most players would finish all the games. Part of the pleasure is sampling the large collection, closing games you don’t like until you find one that sticks. UFO50 objectively contains games which are not that good next to real gems but it is particularly brillant as a collection. Plus independently of how it plays, it’s interesting in itself as a kind of experience. That’s indie at its best.
Silksong is supposed to be a modern game and excels at some parts but the issue is that some design decisions are just, well, bad. I agree with the person you are replying to that it’s not particularly respectful of its player’s time for exemple forcing you to grind and slog repeatedly through uninteresting parts to actually play the fun parts. This is notably something FromSoft entirely solved a long time ago. To me that’s entirely orthogonal to being difficult. It’s an enjoyable game but a flawed one which makes for a tarnished experience.
> you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania
This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages exploration: when you die, the game wants you to go back to the same place over and over, instead of going a different way or trying something new.
The shade also makes the places you died in actively harder. It’s a baffling design decision. Compare it to Dark Souls, where souls aren’t even that valuable (because you level up often enough, and single levels aren’t important). Plus, when you die twice, everything is gone, and you get total freedom. It hurt the first three times, then I realized souls are cheap and stopped worrying. I never finished Hollow Knight for such reasons. Loved the first half, then decided runbacks aren’t what I want to spend my limited time on.
I modded that mechanic out, it was infuriating.
It's not an easy decision, putting down a book, a movie or a game halfway through, but my lifetime on this planet is very limited.
Ehh, not interested in HK or similar games with such a high difficulty bar. Life is too short to be playing games that are not fun to play (for me).
Every time I see gameplay for this game, I just think it is a temu version of Ori and the Blind Forest. Is it distinct enough from that?
AFAICT the main difference is that Hollow Knight focuses on (and gets most of its challenge from) combat, whereas Ori focuses on platforming.
Hollow Knight has 47 boss encounters - OatBF doesn't have any (but I think the sequel does).