It’s funny that I wrote my first piece on “Silksong” when I had only played for less than a week. I’ve now beaten the game, crawling across the finish line with 115 hours.
It’s also odd in that I never really wanted to write an in-depth piece on the game, but having played so much of it, it exasperated and inspired me to write more.
Since that first piece, there have been some slight tweaks to the opening difficulty, but Team Cherry has largely remained uncompromising in their vision. The game has retained all its difficulty, even the parts that were painfully artificial.
Certain internet critics suffer from developing a parasocial relationship with developers, believing themselves to be almost like a QA tester for games they review. So while wanting to remain honest in my critique, I realize that not much is going to change. But I still have some frustration as I’m in the endgame seeing things that frustrated me at the beginning are worse in the last act.
If you got frustrated with enemies dealing double damage to Hornet, then you’re going to be particularly frustrated with Act 3 where there is a chance for enemies to get possessed by the void and start dealing double damage. And void enemies are significantly spongier, in a game where enemy health already felt imbalanced.
Locked room gauntlets that felt like they belonged in a much inferior soulslike? There’s even more of them in Act 3. And some are the longest in the game.
Team Cherry listened to some of the feedback about double damage, removing some environmental instances. But for the majority, they let it stay in place. In an era where companies bend over backwards to win over consumers, it’s refreshing that Team Cherry are uncompromising with the game’s difficulty.
That being said, I think that there are a lot of pitfalls to Team Cherry’s philosophy of difficulty but there’s also stellar… blade, no game design on their part. (Free stellar blade!)
Comparing “Silksong” to the original Hollow Knight is almost like comparing one of the Dark Souls games to “Elden Ring”. There’s a certain simplicity in the original which is preferable, but the successor has greater ambition on every level.
First, Hornet’s movement options in this game are incredible.She is such a pleasure to control and there is so much to master in controlling her sprite.
As well with your basic character’s moveset being faster and trickier, you have so many more build options than “Hollow Knight”.
By changing crests, you have the option of using an entirely different moveset and playstyle. For instance, if you want to focus on using tools, you can use the Architect’s crest and overwhelm enemies with sawblades and cogflies. If you want to hit enemies hard and hope they die first, you can use the Beast crest.
This adds depth to the gameplay, as each crest radically changes your style of play. Each one takes time to master and adds a complexity almost like Fromsoftware’s different weapons. I can see doing completely different playthroughs and focusing on a different crest each time.
This focus on mastering Hornet’s moveset is key to enjoying “Silksong”. Rarely have I been so aware of my skill at a game improving so much as I played. At the beginning of act 2, I felt the difficulty curve going slightly downhill, partially from the different upgrades I had gotten, but mostly from the game putting me through the ringer for so long.
A lot of complaints have developed about the game, but I think the one that demonstrates the interesting style of Team Cherry is the length of many of the runbacks. For instance, the runback to Last Judge (the boss of act 1) is not only from the bottom of a level to the very top but it’s also an area where there is a lot of difficult platforming and hard enemies to avoid.
But where many have complained about this as folly in game design, Team Cherry designed Hornet to be incredibly fast and mobile. In the repetition of running this distance and trying to make it to Last Judge with as much of your hp intact, one is forced to become a speed-runner and master the gauntlet, taking as little damage as possible.
It can be gratifying to be able to do a platforming challenge that was seen as impossible when you first saw it. This is what keeps happening to me each time I play “Silksong”, I struggle I curse, but I ultimately succeed.
“Silksong” is truly a character action game much like how “Sekiro” contrasted with the rest of Fromsoftware’s library. You are from the start invested in Hornet’s journey and how hard she has to work to overcome the religious autocracy she has been brought into.
The combat is a part of this, because while “Hollow Knight” had good combat, it wasn’t as much of a focus as it is here. This is where some of the enemy health bars begin to make sense, as enemies in this game need to be more formidable. You can’t always just run by them. You learn their attack patterns, so you can swiftly dispatch them.
But the game is about fast precise aerial combat because it makes you love Hornet more as a death-kicking badass. So the best boss fights are duels of skill between two masters, not least of all are the recurring battles with Lace who acts as a kind of Yang to Hornet’s Yin.
When I struggle with the game for long sections, it begins to feel that Team Cherry might have a Fromsoftware problem like that of “Shadow of the Erdtree” and the backlash that preceded it.
The “Elden Ring” backlash has mostly been forgotten but it heralded an issue that Fromsoftware is going to struggle with for the foreseeable future. Fromsoftware constantly is trying to expand its reach as a developer and bring in new people, at the same time they always must appease the hardcore sickos in their fanbase.
These people are the ones who will say they only enjoyed the most difficult area in the basegame, or that the hardest boss in the game was too easy.
Of course, it’s not like Fromsoftware isn’t good at challenging players, but players begin to demand a challenge that is unreasonable. Then under that pressure, the developers end up making things hard beyond the dictated limits of good game design.
This had started to reach its limit in the Elden Ring final bosses which were on the verge of being unreasonable, but really annoyed people in the DLC of the game, “Shadow of the Erdtree”. I do think Consort Radahn is not as bad a boss as people have claimed but it does seem at least now that the end of the DLC was something of a failure.
The problems were not just the absurd lighting effects that tanked the frame rate of my Xbox series S, but an increasing problem that Fromsoftware was having.
“tough but fair” is a good ethic for game design, but what do you when you have a segment of your fanbase that decrees that tough but fair is too easy? And tells anyone who finds something unfair to “git gud”. Then that ethic gets increasingly hard to maintain.
How much difficulty is too much? It seemed with Consort Radahn, Fromsoftware had gone beyond what players were willing to beat.
I personally think that had the fight been just the first phase then players would have maybe thought it was too easy, but it was an extremely fair fight with a learnable moveset. But because Fromsoftware felt they had to appease the sickos, there needed to be a second phase that was much more unfair and hence more difficult. As someone who beat the fight before it was patched, I can say that even in beating it, the second phase was aggresively unenjoyable.
Similarly, Team Cherry has to appease the sickos with unreasonable difficulty. It’s a similar feeling when three different bosses both do a fake-out ending and come back for a third phase that consists of overlapping attacks and precise timings.
Fromsoftware has done some of these fake out endings, and at least one of them was funny. In Sekiro when you behead the guardian ape and get the “Shinobi Execution” title card only to have his headless corpse get up and start attacking again.
The reason this extra phase works is that it has a reason in the game world to function. In fact, the curse of immortality is what “Sekiro” is about. None of the fights in “Silksong” have an organic reason for the boss to come back.
The real reason is that if the fight ended at the tough but fair stage, the sickos would say it was too easy. But like throwing red meat to the base in politics, there’s only so far you can play to the extremes before the general population starts to hate your guts.
“Silksong” (and a lot of newer soulslikes) have become games about duels. But the humble duel has become ridiculous in the face of excessive diffculty.
No longer will you have a duel with a boss that is hard because of their tricky moveset like Artorias or Fume Knight. Instead, you will fight a boss that has a tricky moveset, is inhumanly fast and has a health bar the same size as a behemoth.
Bosses like Lady Maria in “Bloodborne” were incredibly fast and tricky but were glass cannons who could be taken down if most of their patterns were learned. Obviously, there’s nothing impossible about “Silksong” bosses, once you learn to avoid about 70% of their moves, you will beat them. But there’s a tendency towards the nonsensical where there’s no corresponding weakness to a boss’s strength. Enemies are not only the most agile but the strongest with a ton of health. This fantasy without checks to some sort of realism increasingly becomes bland in a childish way.
As a game, Silksong leans heavily on these duel encounters. Most of these are great because it’s an opportunity to show off Hornet’s many elaborate movesets. But by the time I was almost done with the game, I was craving a couple of more large boss fights. Luckily there’s Crust King Khan, a fight that wasn’t as hard as the grueling gauntlet that proceeded it but was honestly just a lot of fun.
These duel fights are slightly marred by some bullshit mechanics. One of these is a reliance on grab attacks, something which Fromsoftware also suffers from.
While neither studio has ever done them very well, Team Cherry particularly suffers from not animating these grab attacks well, jarring in a game where everything is beautifully animated.
These grab attacks they are used to justify Hornet taking double damage from a boss that is her same size and attacks as speedily as she does. This happens a lot.
Skarrsinger Karmelita is incredibly tough but feels rewardingly graceful when you pull of the precise timings and learn to counterattack. But annoyingly the little boomerang projectiles she throws do a sort of grab attack on Hornet taking away two masks.
In fact, Skarrsinger Karmelita’s third phase is so preposterously difficult, that I felt very little after beating her besides the relief that I didn’t have to do it again.
This appealing to the sickos, I felt as well during several poison swamp related areas in Silksong, which were excessively punishing and just miserable to play through. Luckily the poison status effect is not as harsh as it might have been in a fromsoftware game, but do we really need another poison swamp at this point in our lives? Is there any reason for them to be in every souls game other than to be a tribute to Miyazaki’s love for them?
Granted, a lot of the optional parts of hollow knight that were for the true sickos, I peaced out on. I tried to do “The White Palace” multiple times but not only could I not hack it but I was repelled by the sterile atmosphere and the sawblades.
But Act 2 of Silksong also has the soaring cathedrals and some bosses that actually have elements of pathos and tragedy to them. In the end this balances out the excessive difficulty.
The Cogwork dancers actually subverts the model of a boss coming back a third time stronger and faster. In fact, phase two ends with you killing one of the two automatons. The third phase has the remaining automaton continue attacking, pathetically unaware that it’s partner is dead. This actually has a sense of sadness as you put the creature out of it’s misery.
“Silksong” has it’s strongest moment when it puts aside the “git gud” mentality and focuses on it’s characters. The game has made me cry at least once, when I thought Lace was dying and realizing that hers was a sort of half-life. Hornet actually tries to comfort her as having kinship as being a fellow being created unnaturally.
Silksong” has been a great pleasure but also a lot of frustration. The fact of its existence has absurdly made me realize that good things can still happen in a world that is breaking. But these good things also have to have their share of brokeness within them, and this is what the pain of playing “Silksong” is.