As an Animal Crossing player who will never purchase a Hollow Knight game (I have played both, though), let people have their uber hard games. I’ve never heard of a Hollow Knight, Dark Souls, or Elden Ring player say Animal Crossing should be hard. So why should casual game enjoyers try to force an easy mode on hard games?
I think we can all agree that the graphics are amazing, though.
If it were easier than HK people would be upset.
I haven’t played yet, but it is a different character with a different moveset from what I’ve seen. This is probably the reaction Team Cherry wants as opposed to releasing a gale that panders to players like the new Shinobi.
I can sum up this topic for basically every game:
If I can’t beat it, it is too hard.
If you can’t beat it, it is because you suck.
preach
Like the article mentions, a lot of points of criticism would just as easily apply to Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight had combat that required good reaction and precision. Hollow knight had platforming that required a lot of precision. The difficulty was also pretty punishing in hollow knight where you could easily get beaten by a regular mob if you playing sloppy. Missing maps and runbacks were in Hollow knight. If you’re stuck on a boss the amount of upgrades you can find and grind is limited and if you’ve found everything up to that point the only way to beat the boss is to “git gud”.
Credit to Team Cherry where credit is due. While runbacks are annoying they’re much faster in Silksong due to the character simply being faster. Healing 3 “hearts” at once and, possibly more importantly, letting you heal in the air makes healing far more viable during a fight. I remember in Hollow knight I pretty much gave up trying to heal in most boss fights because it was simply too slow and you’re pretty much a sitting duck. And the increased mobility has definitely made it easier to avoid damage. I think a big reason people complain about taking a lot of damage is because they don’t use the full toolset.
But that isn’t to say there isn’t a legitimate issue here. I think the game has something of a scaling issue. You start the game with 5 masks and if you get hit you lose a mask, which means 5 hits and you’re dead. But by the time you’re in act 2 most hits take 2 masks which means you’re effectively playing with 3 hits and you’re dead. Which again would be fine if by that time you also had roughly double the amount of health, but unless I’ve missed something you’re most likely going to get only 1 extra mask at the start of act 2, which does very little to alleviate the damage because with 5 masks it’s 3 hits and with 6 masks it’s still 3 hits. The game goes on but in terms of health you get weaker. You do get some tools to better evade damage, but since that requires adjusting your playstyle to use those tools (how many people use floating during a boss fight?) I think for most people the extra tools are not offsetting the extra damage they’re taking.
So the game might not be significantly harder than Hollow Knight, but it can feel like it due to it playing very differently to Hollow Knight. In Silksong you kinda have to evade every attack because you’re a glass pistol (not really a cannon), in Hollow knight you could choose to just tank some attacks because one attack doesn’t leave you half-dead. It also means in Hollow Knight you get more chances to make mistakes but those mistakes have a longer lasting effects due to healing being much harder. Maybe the best way to describe it is: “Hollow Knight is like Dark Souls, Silksong is like Dark Souls 3”.
About the HP thing, your point seems to be that because people do not use the tools given to them (that would make the fight easier if used properly) things get too hard later… If people are kneecapping themselves by thinking ‘all I need is dash and slash’, well they kinda had it coming.
The issue is that most people are people of habit and habits are hard to break, especially when they also kinda work. Most bosses in both games can be solved by dashing and slashing better. It’s a strategy that works so it’s a strategy people will apply even if there’s potentially is a better strategy that would make the fight easier.
And so instead of experimenting with different tools to find what works better people will beat their head against the harder option because eventually the harder option will work too (or you give up and call the game too hard). I do the same thing with some Silksong bosses because sometimes I just don’t feel like experimenting.
Feels like this is the key part of the article:
But I think the passage of time has obscured just how much most of these critiques also applied to the original (and beloved) Hollow Knight. While Silksong’s bosses might be a little tougher, and its jumping challenges a little more precise, its predecessor was also often unforgiving and gated in almost the exact same ways (though some of this difficulty was eventually rebalanced). Only 22 percent of Hollow Knight’s Steam players have obtained the “Hollow Knight” achievement for reaching the first of the game’s multiple endings, and I’m willing to bet most of the remainder gave up out of frustration rather than boredom.
I’ve said this before but… what exactly were people expecting? I guess lots of people who never played HK jumped on the Silksong hype train just because the diehard fans were so rabid about it, and are now shocked at how hard the game they thought they were supposed to want turned out to be?
I dont know that it is too hard, but it definitely has a high difficulty spike compared to the original Hollow Knight.
I think the biggest descriptor I can say about Silksong is that the game is incredibly mean. There are a lot of traps, fights, etc, that you just will not see or know about until your second time going through that area. And that is not to mention the long run back when you die, it is very easy to see why people would be frustrated, especially in comparison to the original Hollow Knight.
I have noticed that enemies hover just out of reach of your upwards slash more.
Its all stuff like that. Its meant to catch you for trying to play it one way. But it punishes you hard for it.
I will say you can almost always skip lots of the return through jumping and floating.
For savage beastfly you literally dont have to do any of the flower bounces, or fight if you have the float ability and dash.
There can be games that are really unforgiving, and there can be games where you hold down X and point forward to parkour to the next map tower. The market has room for all of it.
i think the only thing thatll satisfy people is a difficulty slider like 9 sols has, where you can adjust the dmg you take to nothing and adjust the dmg you deal to oneshot.
at which point, like, why even bother…just watch a playthrough. even with that feature, people complained that there was a single achievement that required beating the game with unmodified difficulty.
if the games too hard, you can just mod it i guess.
I think I got stuck where most people that get stuck do. Moorwing. But I also was stuck on 3 combat rooms (opposite moorwing, 4th mask frag, past the red barbarian mini boss) and stuck past a locked door that i bought a key for.
I modded it. With 1 mask damage limit, and 1.5-2x damage output makes it feel like a normal difficulty setting.
I’d rather they add an easy mode than globally nerf the difficulty
same
It’s not hard you dipshits have no patience and sense of pattern recognition.
Skill issue
