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Spoilers: Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challe

Spoilers: Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.

crooked-v 1y ago
Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.
- yladiz 1y ago
  I think that’s a slightly uncharitable take. Yes, it was originally DLC, and yes it is unforgiving, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the White Palace from the first game, and it’s not brutally punishing (you are quite agile and get good upgrades pretty early on).
  - foresterre 1y ago
    I felt that the beginning of the game is pretty punishing, exactly because you don't have these movement abilities yet. After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable. Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity. I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep to reset my mind, and learn pogo-ing for real. That also was the lesson I needed to go forward: take your time, consciously clear the environment, and learn the movesets. I have a lot of hours in the original game, and was way too used to sprinting through the environment.
    - gyomu 1y ago
      Most of the pogos don't require the full diagonal range, you can just trigger the attack when you're really close to the target, which makes it almost a regular downwards jump.
      - boppo1 1y ago
        Yeah, this was the big insight for me.
        sunrunner 1y ago
        And to add, gliding down to allow yourself more time to adjust. It seemed too good to be true first, now I think working exactly as intended.
- gyomu 1y ago
  Everyone repeats this, but is there any information that confirms it? Yes, it started as a DLC for Hollow Knight - but the devs have known for the past 5 years that it would be a standalone sequel. Is there any evidence that they designed it as "extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff", rather than approached it as a game on its own right?
  - sunrunner 1y ago
    A lot of people coming to Silksong having played Hollow Knight seems to be saying this, but also seem to have forgotten that pretty much exactly the same things were said about Hollow Knight when it first came out over eight years ago. Almost like the collective memory of Hollow Knight's difficulty has dulled over time as people have, over the eight years, dare I say it, git good... Are there things that are measurably more difficult? Perhaps. Common enemies can now do two masks worth of damage which before was relegated to boss specials, so environments feel more dangerous. This has always been a significant part of the early game, as an extra mask in Hollow Knight was significant enough to keep you safer from regular enemies, but in Silksong once you get hold of an extra mask you go from being able to be killed in three hits to...being able to be killed in three hits. So I think there are things that make it feel tougher. At the same time though, all the same things were said before about the difficulty, about not knowing where to go (Silksong gives even fewer clues I'd say), but people persisted through areas, learnt boss patterns, and eventually just learnt the game up until P5. And in a few years the collective memory of Silksong's early game difficulty will have gone as people adapted to it.
    - slightwinder 1y ago
      It's less that it's harder, but simply very annoying. It has so many broken, twisted concepts even from the beginning. This makes it really not fun to experience, which then makes it's harder to play. It's obvious why Team Cherry didn't allow pre-sale reviews. It will be interesting to see how successful it will stay in a month, and next year.
- optionalsquid 1y ago
  At one point (2020) they did intend for the difficulty to be similar to Hollow Knight: > So Team Cherry is not out to make a more difficult sequel, then: they're hoping for it to be a "comparable" test of skill to Hollow Knight, Pellen says, while Gibson explains that starting with the clean slate of an entirely new kingdom with its own lore and new characters is another way in which Silksong is designed to be "a perfect jumping-on point for new players. We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game — that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way." https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidvania/comments/oebdg6/the_hollow_knight_silksong_edge_interview/ https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidvania/comments/oebdg6/the_ho...
SamoyedFurFluff 1y ago
Mentally what you need to do is prioritize killing adds once you’ve memorized the avoidance of the boss pattern. Additionally, a heavy use of tools is immensely helpful in removing adds before it becomes overwhelming.
sniffers 1y ago
It's hard, but I think you are projecting your own experience here a bit. Many players are able to track these things and come up with strategies to minimize the impacts of the adds (changing loads, altering movement, planning encounters, etc.) There's much more elegance to the design than you are giving it credit for, it just is expecting you engage with the entire toolkit.
enqk 1y ago
Have you ever seen a bullet hell shooter?
testdelacc1 1y ago
Have you tried turning the “Backer Credits” setting on? The game reportedly becomes substantially easier afterwards. Source - https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777 https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- adamors 1y ago
  Rare to see Dunkey mentioned on HN, lovely.
marginalia_nu 1y ago
You can just attack the projectiles though. You don't have to dodge them.
aiven 1y ago
skill issue game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss. dont give up, use your brain, hacker
- gyomu 1y ago
  so much this Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult". For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes. And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.
taneq 1y ago
This is making me want to go back and try again to beat Hollow Knight (I got up to the Mantis Lords and that... teleporting warlock guy... looked it up, I'm thinking of Soul Master.) I'm pretty sure I remember things of this sort of difficulty level in it, too. The fights were brutally hard, but still felt fair.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  Mantis lords is a fantastic boss fight, because it's really hard, but super fair. There's an attack during which you can consistently heal, so once you recognize that it just becomes about mastering the reactions to each of their attacks faster and faster and faster as the fight goes on. It's sooo satisfying.
raincole 1y ago
> This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky I understand most people don't find it fun. Neither do I. But saying it's not challenging is just plain wrong. If it were true then the best player would have the same chance to pass it as I do. And it's not the case.
rkomorn 1y ago
The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting. I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss. It's just a time consuming chore. Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.
- scrollaway 1y ago
  Your post could be reworded to talk about learning just any musical instrument.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    I think learning to play a musical instrument would actually give me more satisfaction because it would open more doors towards creativity. But it's all personal of course. :) Some people like boss fights (or Souls-like games) and I'm happy for them. I just would be happy with a "bypass this" button.
  - BalinKing 1y ago
    I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end, which is enjoyable in its own right on top of the satisfaction of executing the technical challenge of playing it. A more akin analogy, in my opinion, would be “any musical instrument which has been artificially muted”—this could definitely still be fun, and indeed I’ve played my keyboard without sound before, but it really doesn’t compare.
    - simoncion 1y ago
      > I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end... You've clearly never heard me playing my horns! I never found the end result of all that practice to be rewarding (as the kids seem to say these days), [0] and -brother- I tried for years and years. So, I switched hobbies to video games and have a leisure-time activity that I like a lot more. [0] Those unfortunate enough to be within earshot were usually fairly unimpressed with the result, so this isn't just me shittalking myself.
animuchan 1y ago
Where it says "you just have to get lucky", there's clearly a typo. The correct text reads, "you just have to get good."
zimpenfish 1y ago
> you just have to get lucky. You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck. [0] Touhou is probably the definitive example here. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU
- whatevaa 1y ago
  I believe that our brains are not the same in such aspects and some people can, and some just can't.
- ashleyn 1y ago
  I'm sure it isn't luck but at the same time I watch these things and genuinely don't understand how they do it. Particularly the whole thing of seeing and reacting that quick. It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough. Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, process, and react within milliseconds. I definitely think there is a type of brain that can play games like these and another type that can't, and I'm in the latter.
  - diggan 1y ago
    I think you can train it, at least that's what I did with Stepmania in the early 2000s. I was watching in awe how people could manage to get perfect scores when I could hardly see the steps before they were at the bottom of the screen. Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use. Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.
  - 1y ago
DanielVZ 1y ago
You don’t have to keep track of seven things at once. You need to keep track of your own character and react accordingly. I understand that the game is hard but it adds a ton of fun to my taste.

crooked-v 1y ago

Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.

yladiz 1y ago
I think that’s a slightly uncharitable take. Yes, it was originally DLC, and yes it is unforgiving, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the White Palace from the first game, and it’s not brutally punishing (you are quite agile and get good upgrades pretty early on).
- foresterre 1y ago
  I felt that the beginning of the game is pretty punishing, exactly because you don't have these movement abilities yet. After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable. Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity. I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep to reset my mind, and learn pogo-ing for real. That also was the lesson I needed to go forward: take your time, consciously clear the environment, and learn the movesets. I have a lot of hours in the original game, and was way too used to sprinting through the environment.
  - gyomu 1y ago
    Most of the pogos don't require the full diagonal range, you can just trigger the attack when you're really close to the target, which makes it almost a regular downwards jump.
    - boppo1 1y ago
      Yeah, this was the big insight for me.
      - sunrunner 1y ago
        And to add, gliding down to allow yourself more time to adjust. It seemed too good to be true first, now I think working exactly as intended.
gyomu 1y ago
Everyone repeats this, but is there any information that confirms it? Yes, it started as a DLC for Hollow Knight - but the devs have known for the past 5 years that it would be a standalone sequel. Is there any evidence that they designed it as "extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff", rather than approached it as a game on its own right?
- sunrunner 1y ago
  A lot of people coming to Silksong having played Hollow Knight seems to be saying this, but also seem to have forgotten that pretty much exactly the same things were said about Hollow Knight when it first came out over eight years ago. Almost like the collective memory of Hollow Knight's difficulty has dulled over time as people have, over the eight years, dare I say it, git good... Are there things that are measurably more difficult? Perhaps. Common enemies can now do two masks worth of damage which before was relegated to boss specials, so environments feel more dangerous. This has always been a significant part of the early game, as an extra mask in Hollow Knight was significant enough to keep you safer from regular enemies, but in Silksong once you get hold of an extra mask you go from being able to be killed in three hits to...being able to be killed in three hits. So I think there are things that make it feel tougher. At the same time though, all the same things were said before about the difficulty, about not knowing where to go (Silksong gives even fewer clues I'd say), but people persisted through areas, learnt boss patterns, and eventually just learnt the game up until P5. And in a few years the collective memory of Silksong's early game difficulty will have gone as people adapted to it.
  - slightwinder 1y ago
    It's less that it's harder, but simply very annoying. It has so many broken, twisted concepts even from the beginning. This makes it really not fun to experience, which then makes it's harder to play. It's obvious why Team Cherry didn't allow pre-sale reviews. It will be interesting to see how successful it will stay in a month, and next year.
optionalsquid 1y ago
At one point (2020) they did intend for the difficulty to be similar to Hollow Knight: > So Team Cherry is not out to make a more difficult sequel, then: they're hoping for it to be a "comparable" test of skill to Hollow Knight, Pellen says, while Gibson explains that starting with the clean slate of an entirely new kingdom with its own lore and new characters is another way in which Silksong is designed to be "a perfect jumping-on point for new players. We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game — that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way." https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidvania/comments/oebdg6/the_hollow_knight_silksong_edge_interview/ https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidvania/comments/oebdg6/the_ho...

SamoyedFurFluff 1y ago

Mentally what you need to do is prioritize killing adds once you’ve memorized the avoidance of the boss pattern. Additionally, a heavy use of tools is immensely helpful in removing adds before it becomes overwhelming.

sniffers 1y ago

It's hard, but I think you are projecting your own experience here a bit. Many players are able to track these things and come up with strategies to minimize the impacts of the adds (changing loads, altering movement, planning encounters, etc.) There's much more elegance to the design than you are giving it credit for, it just is expecting you engage with the entire toolkit.

enqk 1y ago

Have you ever seen a bullet hell shooter?

testdelacc1 1y ago

Have you tried turning the “Backer Credits” setting on? The game reportedly becomes substantially easier afterwards. Source - https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777 https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
adamors 1y ago
Rare to see Dunkey mentioned on HN, lovely.

marginalia_nu 1y ago

You can just attack the projectiles though. You don't have to dodge them.

aiven 1y ago

skill issue game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss. dont give up, use your brain, hacker

gyomu 1y ago
so much this Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult". For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes. And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.

taneq 1y ago

This is making me want to go back and try again to beat Hollow Knight (I got up to the Mantis Lords and that... teleporting warlock guy... looked it up, I'm thinking of Soul Master.) I'm pretty sure I remember things of this sort of difficulty level in it, too. The fights were brutally hard, but still felt fair.

BobaFloutist 1y ago
Mantis lords is a fantastic boss fight, because it's really hard, but super fair. There's an attack during which you can consistently heal, so once you recognize that it just becomes about mastering the reactions to each of their attacks faster and faster and faster as the fight goes on. It's sooo satisfying.

raincole 1y ago

> This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky I understand most people don't find it fun. Neither do I. But saying it's not challenging is just plain wrong. If it were true then the best player would have the same chance to pass it as I do. And it's not the case.

rkomorn 1y ago

The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting. I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss. It's just a time consuming chore. Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.

scrollaway 1y ago
Your post could be reworded to talk about learning just any musical instrument.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  I think learning to play a musical instrument would actually give me more satisfaction because it would open more doors towards creativity. But it's all personal of course. :) Some people like boss fights (or Souls-like games) and I'm happy for them. I just would be happy with a "bypass this" button.
- BalinKing 1y ago
  I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end, which is enjoyable in its own right on top of the satisfaction of executing the technical challenge of playing it. A more akin analogy, in my opinion, would be “any musical instrument which has been artificially muted”—this could definitely still be fun, and indeed I’ve played my keyboard without sound before, but it really doesn’t compare.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    > I disagree, because with an instrument you actually get music out at the end... You've clearly never heard me playing my horns! I never found the end result of all that practice to be rewarding (as the kids seem to say these days), [0] and -brother- I tried for years and years. So, I switched hobbies to video games and have a leisure-time activity that I like a lot more. [0] Those unfortunate enough to be within earshot were usually fairly unimpressed with the result, so this isn't just me shittalking myself.

animuchan 1y ago

Where it says "you just have to get lucky", there's clearly a typo. The correct text reads, "you just have to get good."

zimpenfish 1y ago

> you just have to get lucky. You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck. [0] Touhou is probably the definitive example here. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU

whatevaa 1y ago
I believe that our brains are not the same in such aspects and some people can, and some just can't.
ashleyn 1y ago
I'm sure it isn't luck but at the same time I watch these things and genuinely don't understand how they do it. Particularly the whole thing of seeing and reacting that quick. It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough. Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, process, and react within milliseconds. I definitely think there is a type of brain that can play games like these and another type that can't, and I'm in the latter.
- diggan 1y ago
  I think you can train it, at least that's what I did with Stepmania in the early 2000s. I was watching in awe how people could manage to get perfect scores when I could hardly see the steps before they were at the bottom of the screen. Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use. Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.
- 1y ago

DanielVZ 1y ago

You don’t have to keep track of seven things at once. You need to keep track of your own character and react accordingly. I understand that the game is hard but it adds a ton of fun to my taste.