I wrote this in a hurry on vacation because I haven’t published anything since July! A little proof of life as I work on a longer piece about “Dark Souls 2”. Title is a joke on Joseph Anderson’s Elden Ring video essay
I worried that when “Hollow Knight: Silksong” was released, that it would be greeted with a typically online mix of wrath and anhedonia. Because of this worry, I’ve been avoiding most coverage of it. Given that the game is seven years in the making and fan frustration reached its peak shortly before the release was announced, one might expect that fans would turn on the final product because nothing could live up to the game they were promised.
So sampling “Hollow Knight: Silksong” in isolation, i was immediately blown away by the beauty and scope of the game. But there has been some friction, surprisingly the source of my frustration was not the discourse of the much belated release by Team Cherry but the game itself.
Of course, if you, dear reader, want to avoid spoilers, I am going to avoid talking about any story details etc. My main point is some issues I have with the design of the new game.
Rather than major critiques, my problems are mostly nitpicking. “Silksong” is an impressive leap forward from “Hollow Knight. To give an example, the movement alone of the central character shows a mastery in the Team Cherry designers. When you combine this with the expanded world and jaw dropping gorgeousness of the environments, you can see a game that surpasses the original in many ways.
In terms of the story, we are far beyond the cryptic roots of the original “Hollow Knight”, “Silksong” not only has a protagonist who speaks for herself, there are also NPCS who extrapolate and paint the world vividly. And not only that but NPCS are no longer static but move around the world, fight with you and react to changes in the world structure.
To speak more on Hornet’s moveset, the death kick Hornet starts out with is perplexing, being at a sharp diagonal. It seemed at first like a strange design choice, much more difficult to use than the downslash that the knight had in the original game. This move was borrowed from “Zelda 2” and allowed you to pogo off enemies. (Funnily enough, you can find the simpler downslash but by the time you do, you won’t want it anymore)
In contrast, Hornet’s death kick will miss enemies when directly above them, it takes strategy to bounce off enemies. In mastering this move, you gradually realize that Hornet’s kick is not only a fun offensive weapon, it is from the beginning another tool for traversing the world.
This will appeal to people who felt the the knight in “Hollow Knight” started out with too limited of a moveset. But beyond that, it’s just a good design choice that makes the game stand out as more than a reskin.
But Hornet’s interesting moveset also points to the much higher difficulty of this sequel, Hornet is as satisfying to control as the knight in “Hollow Knight” but she requires a higher level of skill to operate efficiently. (Particularly impressive is that while sprinting she has an entirely different set of attacks, but this only adds to the trickiness of controlling her.)
Unlike the low level of skill that was required to get through the beginning of Hollow Knight, Silksong pretty immediately starts ramping up the difficulty.
“Hollow Knight” was a particularly hard game, but it had an astonishingly smooth difficulty curb. Up until the first Hornet fight in Greenpath, there was very little to challenge most players. By contrast, “Silksong” in the first 9 hours quickly reaches jagged peaks in difficulty which can feel quite insurmountable.
Some of this difficulty is well-designed but a lot of it is artificial. I realize a lot of people see red when they hear the term “artificial difficulty” but I use it in the classic sense of pumping up the damage the player receives and giving enemies large amounts of health.
This appears to be a common complaint but the game almost right away has many enemies which do 2 or sometimes 3 hearts of damage out of your 5 hearts (masks).
This was something that happened rarely in the original “Hollow Knight” also but even then it felt like a bad design choice. Using the heart system for health (as both games do) is very old school, “tough but fair” as it communicates to the player how many hits they can take. When this suddenly changes and many enemies are taking 2 hearts from a single hit, it becomes a question as to why use an antiquated system when you are not straightforwardly communicating with players. If I have 5 hearts and I die in two hits then the heart system is not functioning.
The answer remains unsatisfying. Team Cherry have always been interested in an immersive world even if it comes at the cost of player enjoyment.
In both games, to get an in-world map; you not only had to buy a map, but you also needed to buy a quill to update it. And when exploring. You had to have a compass equipped to see where you were on the map.
This can feel kind of ridiculous, having to buy 3 items just to be able to see where you are exploring. Many other Metroidvanias do quite well by automapping as you explore.
But this crunchiness also makes the player immersed in the game world, Not having an automap in an unfamilar area makes each new area feel more dangerous. And it adds a enormous sense of relief when you finally track down the cartographer character and get your bearings. This would be lost if you instantly started seeing your progress charted as you explored.
In receiving extra damage, it seems Team Cherry also wanted a certain veracity. Certain attacks are more dangerous and must be avoided (and of course make the game harder). The problem is that as it the original hollow knight, this veracity never made sense because if getting impaled on a pile of spikes cost one heart, why should a late-game enemy take off two with a mantis claw?
This punishing damage combines with many enemies taking a ton of hits to go down. I have just discovered where, roughly the first sword upgrade might be and it’s pretty out of the way. With Hornet’s poor damage making some of the tougher enemies take almost 13 hits to go down, it’s confusing why some of the enemy health wasn’t nerfed.
In the original “Hollow Knight”, I don’t recall any enemies with the amount of health as any of the midgame enemeies.
There’s also the addition of gated combat encounters at the beginning of every area that make progress seem impossible. This is odd to me, as I do remember some of these in Hollow Knight such as the Trial of the Warrior in the colosseum. But a majority of these were non-essential content for people seeking the true ending.
In Silksong, these gated encounters are required to advance one’s exploration. And at times with so many enemies crammed into a tiny arena that an entire health bar can be wiped out with one mistake. The decsion to make these mandatory really feels like Team Cherry was influenced by inferior metroidvanias that attempted to copy Hollow Knight. These fights feel like they belong in a middle of the road Metroidvania rather than Team Cherry’s masterpiece. (“Death’s door”, I’m looking at you!)
I’m not sure whether there was an atmosphere of insecurity in creating the intense difficulty of “Silksong” or if it’s a product of the relative isolation of Team Cherry. The game feels more about “fuck-you” difficulty that the original game didn’t reach until the very end. “Silksong” feels hardcore in the way “Cuphead” does at times, but much like that game can be a much less fun experience.
I’m still intrigued by the world of “Silksong” and am writing these impressions fairly early in the game, but I am curious whether this intense difficulty will end up marring their masterpiece or end up uplifting it. Either way, I’m on board but the middle of the game is a rocky experience that many will pogo of off as the knight did in the original game.