Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks
BioDriver@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Did these people forget how ball-smackingly hard Hollow Knight was???
HK can be trivialized pretty early on by stacking charms and upgrades. Silksong spaces out meaningful upgrades in a way that really forces you to learn the ins and outs of the game before you can start buildcrafting.
FWIW, all the final bosses are easier than HK’s true final boss. The difficulty scaling starts with a rough curve but evens out over time.
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.
I imagine a non-insignificant portion of Silksong players never played HK and just jumped on the hype bandwagon. Which makes sense considering it was built up like it would literally pay off your mortgage and reunite you with your high school sweetheart.
tahoe@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes.
I think time has made people look at Hollow Knight through rose tinted glasses. When I picked up the game in 2018, I got to the Soulmaster and gave up entirely because of its runback, it was just too annoying.
I ended up finishing the game a few years later and absolutely loving it, but runbacks are to this day my main criticism of the game, and I know a lot of people agree about that.
For this reason I hoped that they’d make things better in Silksong, but at least now I know what to expect so it doesn’t annoy me as much as it used to.