The Metroidvania Party#

I’ve played the original hollow knight shortly before silksong’s release. While I’m late to the metroidvania party, I do enjoy this style of play: exploring the map, finding new items, backtracking to discover new secrets. Hollow Knight also has a pretty good difficulty curve. I never found it too difficult, and the constant progression gives you a good sense of accomplishment as old enemies become easier to handle and bosses are always just right. The original game also offered extra content if you were the kind to pursue additional challenges, like the pantheon. Personally I’m not one to seek these challenges, I prefer having a goal (beating the game) and putting effort into it, I don’t like difficulty for the sake of difficulty, which is why Silksong is such a letdown for me

The Good#

I don’t want to just bash on the game and give it a negative review. For me games have a karma system, which is purely subjective and based on how much I enjoyed my time playing it. No game is perfect, and they all have ups and downs, and in the end I weight the ups against the downs to see how good I find the game.

Silksong has plenty of goods, and it’s important to lay them out to understand later why I dropped the game

Boss battles#

Boss battles are very good once you learn the patterns. There were many bosses I first found too hard, but after a few attempts I start to counter their patterns and not soon after I could beat them. With every difficult game (soulslike comes to mind) there is some frustration when the boss kills you for the 100th time, but generally with these games you can understand that attack pattern and how to dodge it effectively. Most of the times I would die to a boss, it was a mistake I made.

Along with the fight itself, the boss soundtracks are great. They setup the entire atmosphere to make the bosses really memorable even months after you beat them.

Visual Style#

While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Hollow Knight, Silksong improves the visual style into perfection. Scenarios are vivid and the color palette is amazing. Each map is distinctive from the others and the environments are just gorgeous to look at. Along with the visual style, the animations are also very fluid. I love specifically when you start moving backwards, Hornet will slide back for just a second before turning around

Mechanics#

This game feels very polished when it comes to mechanics. The pogo is swapped for a diagonal down strike and new tools are added to change combat encounters. Another thing they changed was the healing: instead of holding the button to heal one mask at a time, now you hold the button to heal 3 masks. While on the surface this seems good it became one of my biggest gripes later

The Bad#

Without sugarcoating it: the game is artificially difficult. And the biggest contributing factor are double damage hits.

Suppose you have 3 health points and each enemy hits you for 1. It takes 3 enemy hits to die and be sent back to the nearest bench. Now suppose that after quite some time of gameplay you were able to raise your health to 6, but each enemy hits 2 damage. It also takes 3 hits to die, so essentially this means that you have the same power level you had on the start of the game. In my actual playthrough it means that after 16 hours of gameplay, I’m as strong as I was on the first 10 minutes.

Instead of just complaining that this is bad game design, I’ll suggest how they could have made this better: Instead of making enemies harder by increasing damage (and being more frustrating), limit the double damage to a specific attack pattern. Now that all the other patterns hit for a single damage, make variations for them. Instead of the enemy having 3 patterns that do double damage, now they have 7 patterns. One of them will deal double damage, the other 6 are variations of the same 3. Now the player won’t be severely punished for missing a pattern, but the difficulty comes from having multiple similar patterns. The player has to learn 2x more to beat the enemy, or they might play it only on specific combinations, either way they’ll have more time alive in each combat encounter to learn each enemy, and will make each runback less frustating

I’m not a hardcore gamer. If I get to an enemy I can’t beat in a difficult game, I’ll look for alternatives: can I farm this weaker enemy to level up? can I find another tool or gadget which will help me on this fight? But Silksong roots in metroidvania makes this remarkably difficult, progression is locked behind key items, and if I can’t beat the enemy to get the key item, I can’t progress the game at all.

If at every combat encounter I’m only 3 hits away, I have no room for error. This doesn’t make the game harder, it just makes the game infuriating. With the same 16 hours I beat the Hollow Knight, and now on Silksong I’m just over the 50% mark.

And being 3 hits away makes healing that much more important, but there’s a caveat: on Hollow Knight I could heal one mask at a time. let’s say that each heal cost me 2 seconds. If I want to heal 3 hit points, that’s 6 seconds vulnerable. Now in Silksong each heal restores 3 hitpoint, let’s say in 4 seconds. On paper that’s better right? Wrong, because even though we heal faster, if an enemy interrupts my healing at 3.8 seconds, I won’t heal 2 hit points and lose 1 (since I was attacked), I’ll just take a single hit. So when trying to heal you need to really commit to it and if you are interrupted, you also lose all the Silk. guess your run is over

Honestly it feels like the Dev thought during the time until Silksong was released everyone was grinding the pantheons so they could make the game artificially harder otherwise the fan base would find it too easy, but this just makes the more casual gamers unwelcomed by the game.

Conclusion#

Last year I dropped Silksong after being locked on an encounter I couldn’t progress. I thought that if I give myself time to let the frustration out, I would come back better prepared to beat it, as I usually do in soulslikes. Then after 8 months of downtime I downloaded it back, and after multiple attempts I was able to beat the encounter. I didn’t feel any relief or enjoyment, I felt dread that these types of encounters would only become more common and I’d have to put up with more bullshit to finish the game. Then I got the timing wrong and took damage from a trap (2 damage for some reason) found a basic enemy which input read my movement and then made one of those attack patterns that hit once (but multiple hits per attack that you can’t dodge). I didn’t feel there was any joy waiting for me forward, and by that point in the time the negatives had outweighed the positives by quite some margin.

Even though I really enjoyed Hollow Knight, I’m not the target audience for this game, and for me Silksong is a 4/10