My biggest complaint is the sheer lack of rewards when I finish a fight. Give me any currency.
I have spent so much of this game broke, unable to buy the things I need to advance any side plots.
I’m currently stuck on the fight for the Music in the top left of the citadel. The double boss at the end is brutal. But because no enemy in that fight drops monster parts, I have to quit to grinding it to go grind more materials to build equipment, despite having slain 20+ enemies each run.
I’m about 10 hours into silksong and it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. But the majority of the boss fights seem… cheap?
Like, their difficulty doesn’t come from their various attacks, or their environment. Instead, it usually comes from the fact that they do double damage, or the fact that they spam the same two attacks over and over way too quickly, or the fact that they can do the same add summon three times in a row and make what was a controllable situation practically impossible
Now, I’ve 112% the OG hollow knight and beaten true radiance, so I’m not against difficult boss fights. In fact I relish the feeling of learning their moves and patterns after every single death
But when the moves are “ram into wall. Then ram into wall again” it becomes incredibly annoying
A high difficulty is not inherently good game design. Making a game more approachable through lower difficulty settings with additional checkpoints doesn’t make it worse for people who like a challenge. It just makes it enjoyable to more people.
Claiming it’s down to “artistic vision” just feels dishonest. You could claim Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you… but why? How is it a bad thing if more people can enjoy something?
Cup Head is a great example. It’s a fantastic game with an art style that younger kids love. But it’s too difficult for most kids, which doesn’t make the game better, it just locks them out from a game they’d otherwise love.
Is it not fair for the game developers’ artistic vision to not be accessible to all? Accessibility is nice, expands the potential audience, but if it compromises my artistic vision and I’m ok with giving up reach and money to preserve it, that doesn’t make my game bad or my vision invalid.
It would be ridiculous to call up the bar or the ama and complain to them that becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not accessible to all.
One last addition, adding control remapping, color options, and text to speech are true accessibility. Easy mode is fake accessibility
Easy mode is not fake accessibility. Celeste has the correct idea in allowing players adjust the difficulty for accessibility purposes. Not everyone has the same reaction speed, same cognitive abilities, same eyesight. There are people who can only use one hand and that automatically makes reacting to attacks many times harder, should they be excluded from being able to enjoy the game because they are not physically capable enough for the boss fights? And boss fights are probably 5% of the game anyway!
Runbacks are a lame attempt at artificially increasing difficulty. I’ll happily die on that hill. I love difficult games, but there is a fine line between frustration and difficult.
Elden Ring (at least all the bits I played through) and Sekiro absolutely nailed it. None of the run backs were particularly egregious, and it let me really focus on experimenting and learning to feel out the difficult fights. Celeste is another good example. I have dropped hours on some of the later levels trying to master them, but never once got frustrated.
Hollow Knight I never finished because I got stuck on a boss and the runback was just way too long and annoying. I loved everything else about the game and want to finish it eventually.
Edit: I think they have their place as “mods” that you could enable to increase difficulty, and i’d actually probably enjoy it that way. Just designing the game around them is where i draw the line.
To be fair, From has like many games to learn from that while Cherry only has HK. I’ll never forget the sheer pain of the Frigid Outskirts from Dark Souls 2.
To me it feels like “if you don’t survive the journey, you’re too weak for the boss itself” it brings me down and makes me calmer until I reach the boss.
I like them because it forces you to try to salvage a fight instead of just conceding after a bad start. The time spent getting to the boss is investment you don’t want to waste.
I think this is really just an issue of the tools and abilities not being inherently linked to the related bosses.
FYI quickhop attacking is faster than ground combos and you can weave in the trio dagger throws when you are dodging away from close attacks. Also your attack will negate enemy attacks weapon hitbox(but you still have to dodge bodily contact). The poison tool upgrade is overbalanced and makes a lot of fights a joke.
And all music should be under three minutes long. Every book should have page numbers. Photographers should have familiar subjects. Paintings should have a full explanation by the artist telling you exactly what they meant to communicate. /s
If the game isn’t for you, just move along. There are tons of games out there.
are you aware of the meaning of the word “setting” in this context?
Just in case I can explain:
It means you can switch something from one behaviour or effect to another, basically giving you a choice of how something should work. So, adding a difficulty setting changes nothing about your experience of the game.
do you need more words to explain this simple thing?
I can try to use simple language and shorter sentences if you require it?
I think it’s a great game for veterans who like challenges like myself.
But I have to call out team Cherry for their interviews: They said they wanted anyone to be able to pick up this as their first Hollow Knight game and just start playing… Sorry, but, bullshit. the difficulty ramp is too quick, double damage comes out to early and the boss fights get more challenging quickly. See the weaver for instance, a fight I’d place around the difficulty of Grimm, but there’s double damage and you probably only have 5 health.
Also they mentioned part of the game’s difficulty was due to Hornet’s competence and utility… Ghost is canonically a better fighter than Hornet, so by that logic they should have made the game easier (yes I’m being silly about this part).
I dont think there is any conversation to be had about an easy mode or boss runbacks. Any time this small dev team spends on an easy mode is time wasted IMO.
If its to hard you can play another game. I see this the same as people demanding a complex movie be changed to be easier to understand. Its just a dumb complaint and im sick of seeing these people flood every comment section of every slightly challenging game.
I’m ok with there being a conversation on this topic, even if the arguments devolve to ‘waaah’ vs. ‘git gud’.
Ultimately though, I agree that a small dev team shouldn’t have to focus on a game-mode outside their vision - and any such demand for an easy-mode or other additions can and should be left up to mod makers.
It’s a single-player game, so in the end how the individual user wants to play is how they should be able to play.
I'm guessing it's something like when you lose to a boss you have to travel a senselessly difficult and long way back to the boss to try again?
That's exactly it. The runbacks aren't too long in this game despite all the complaints, but some of them are tricky and can get annoying if you keep dying 10 seconds into a fight.
More like the Dark Souls formula of having to trek through heaps of enemies and traps to get back to the boss. Including the whole “lose all of your money on death” thing.
This is the only thing I wanted to know from reviews, for whether or not to bother with Silksong. I love difficult boss fights, but cannot be arsed to spend more than half a minute doing a tedious chore in order to actually redo boss fights.
I’m guessing it’s something like when you lose to a boss you have to travel a senselessly difficult and long way back to the boss to try again?
Exactly. Lots of bosses don’t have convenient save points nearby, so you’re forced to walk back from the save point every time. And many of the treks are either long or just outright annoying (cheesy enemies, obstacle courses, etc). It’s like the 5 Minute Long Unskippable Cutscene’s more annoying older brother, because this unskippable cutscene requires actual gameplay and focus.
Hot take here, but I don’t mind them. Exactly because they take focus. They tell me when it’s time for a break. If I’m not up for the runback, then I’m not up for aother attempt at the boss.
I haven’t played silksong, but I’m just going off other games in the past for my experience.
If you make it through the hallway of meaningless denizens that just waste time and get to the boss, then die to the boss… Why waste time going through the meaningless denizens again to challenge the boss?
I can see it on higher difficulties when you need to make sure you get through the meaningless denizens perfectly in order to preserve your health and resources to have a better chance of defeating the boss.
But when you just want to experience the story on lower difficulty why make the denizens less powerful to make the boss easier when you can instead just put the save point in front of the boss in instead of the denizens? You’ve already made it through the denizens, it’s not like you’re skipping content.
Why are these side scrollers premium price?? Seems like such a cash grab. That’s why franchises are going backwards into side scrollers, easy money, i avoid them
I was all-in on Hollow Knight. Beat it multiple times, including Path of Pain and the Nightmare King. But I’m struggling with Silksong.
I went back and started up Hollow Knight again just to sanity-check myself, and, yes, it’s definitely an easier game. Many fewer enemies can hit for 2 health; there’s more variety in paths in the early game, so if you hit a wall in one direction you can try another; and you get access to upgrades that actually feel impactful relatively early instead of skills that use up my magic pool that I can’t spare because I need them because I’m always one hit away from dying.
My pet theory is that Silksong is actually just exactly what they originally pitched: DLC for players that have mastered the highest skill points in Hollow Knight. And maybe that would be fine if I were coming straight into it off of the back of Godhome. But it’s been years since I was playing those areas, and my skills have atrophied. It’s okay for a DLC to expect mastery from the start, but a standalone game should have more of a curve.
This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it’s not their thing.
I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.
So far, every run back I’ve experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it’s not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don’t be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren’t enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.
Name one with purpose, then. There is the big cave with the boss. It is separated in two halves by a long ass platform. There are no enemies, exploration, rewards or challenges on the platform. The sole purpose of it is to make you run right and then left, instead of just facing the boss right away.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I barely consider that one a run back. It’s like 40s to get to the boss from the bench. And at that point I the game, I noticed myself start hitting the bounce plants much more consistently after having to do this run many times. Up until then I hadn’t been forced to repeat the same small section yet.
And (staying vague to avoid spoilers), the bench itself was particularly “surprising” specifically because of the long gap without any benches leading up to it, forcing you to repeat the same long platforming/combat sections over and over. Players would not have been “surprised” by it if they weren’t so desperate for a bench.
It’s not about me liking it or not. I don’t even have that game. The point is that one should play games fitting ones abilities. There are people who will master this game, like I mastered Elite about forty years ago. Complaining about a game being difficult is either they overestimated their abilities, or they lack perseverance.
For the rest, there is always tictactoe or animal crossing.
Well whether you like it or not, you’re just insulting people for criticizing a game. Not even just for it’s difficulty, so you couldn’t be more off base.
Legitimately this mindset is why most gaming forums are so toxic. It makes it difficult to actually discuss problems with and opinions on games without people basically going “git gud.”
There is room to bring up the fact that some games are just not for everyone, but that also doesn’t invalidate the criticism they have.
Seems to me it’s usually “kids” that don’t mind difficult games. I’m in my 40s and I don’t have the time or inclination anymore to replay a boss for hours on end, but when I was younger I loved a challenge like that and would usually set difficulty to hard.
We have this debate monthly since the last decade. I don’t particularly like the way hollow knight handles saves, not the difficulty itself. It’s time consuming, not inherently hard…
Time consuming does not equal difficulty, remember this.
We should definitely talk about how levying criticism, especially thoughtful criticism, is treated as a personal attack by other people playing the same game. It’s a bizarre form of tribalism.
We should also talk about how “Difficulty is part of the game and if you find it too difficult then this game is not for you” is not a personal attack, but a perfectly valid response to said criticism.
If the criticism is limited to “It’s too hard.” then I would agree. But that’s not a valid response to criticisms about specific design elements like “these power ups feel like they do nothing”, even if it’s a perception issue at hand you need to address the actual observation and not jump on with ‘git gud’.
I was learning a game a few months ago and struggling with understanding a specific character, so I went to the official discord and asked for advice, not complaining it was too hard, just asking for what kinds of strategies work and I was met with endless ‘try harder, scrub’ responses and literally no actual advice. I quit playing the game because the community was so up it’s own asshole.
And for sake of clarity. I don’t play HK, it’s not my preferred genre and my favorite game (that I can replay) is Noita so I am familiar with reviews that complain about difficulty. It’s fine for games to be hard and it’s also fine for people who find the games too hard to leave a review saying they found it too hard. That is part of informing buyers so people can only pick it up if they desire that kind of challenge.
It’s just a trend that is all too common in gaming. People like a game or a developer and become incapable of seeing an opinion that they disagree without taking it as a personal slight. It’s weird.
This excuse stopped working the day I opened a tough-as-nails game like Furi, saw it had a difficulty menu, said “That’s nice”, and went back to challenging myself against the bosses on default settings.
It’s such a huge cop-out of self control, and especially falls to acknowledge that the forms of difficulty in a game are often varied - and someone might suck at only one of them.
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