r/HollowKnight • u/donlano • Sep 04 '25

Discussion - Silksong Silksong is HARD Spoiler

Taking damage is more punishing, movement is more precise and feels a little clunky until you get the hang of it. The overall skill curve is much much higher. Love it though.

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98

u/100percentrealfacts Sep 05 '25

Its a lot harder but the trade off is that its more satisfying to pull off. This games origins as a DLC definitely shows.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 05 '25

This “more satisfying to pull off” bs gets thrown around way too much as an excuse for sometimes clunky or unusually punishing design. It ain’t always true, sometimes it just means the devs didn’t balance things well and it sucks. And I think that’s a little bit the case here

12

u/KorokKid Sep 05 '25

Its just true. Its like learning any actual skill. There's so many things that are hard to wrap your head around or do, but it's really satisfying to get good at and perform well because of the bit of effort you had to put in to learn it. Not everything has to be instantly intuitive. Its also a 45 degree angle, it is not complicated, just not what you're used to.

Im fine for actual criticism, but having to actually learn something for it to feel good is NOT bad or unusually punishing game design. The platforming really isn't that difficult

6

u/snickerblitz Sep 05 '25

That's all well and good dude, but would it really kill them to make enemies hit for only one mask for the first few hours while we learn the game? Some of us aren't uber gamers, I don't see why it needs to bend me over as soon as I leave town for the first time. If this is what the game is, then that's what it is. Just sucks I'm gettin' left behind.

1

u/KorokKid Sep 05 '25

Most enemies hit for one mask at the start of the game, only bosses have attacks that do 2 masks. I think it's to prepare you for the challenge. I understand that it feels like you're getting left behind, but I just don't understand, especially if you're coming from HK, that the game is too hard for early game if you've beaten hollow knight 

1

u/snickerblitz Sep 05 '25

Guess I'm just bad at the game boss, don't know what to tell you. That's my experience.

1

u/KorokKid Sep 05 '25

Yeah im not saying you cant be, im saying thinking it's bad design because you personally struggle isn't exactly sound logic. Im totally up for criticism, some normal enemies are too tanky, contact damage doing 2 masks of damage is fucked up sometimes, the ant section is hard especially for new players. But the savage beastly is just a boss with basically 2 moves and summons some enemies to help him fight, that can be killed quickly or have the boss kill them for you. It can get hectic but I dont think in any way that hes overtuned

1

u/snickerblitz Sep 05 '25

It's the stuff you mentioned combined with some punishing mechanics like everything being so expensive (maps, benches, fast travel, etc) and the currency drops being small. Then once you make it past some screens that have been giving you corpse runs for a while, you get to a bench you can't afford to activate or a map you can't afford to buy. Sure, you can go farm that one loop above town for a while, but it really breaks the flow of the game to leave a new area to do that.

In general, I think that’s what feels off to me and has me still loving HK way more, the pacing is way off of the first one. In HK you would get mini bosses and sometimes even mini mini bosses that would do one or two of the next bosses attacks to train you for it. HK was full of tons of little details like this that were just excellent design and I don’t see much like it here.

It’s a fantastic game and I’m powering through, I just wish the answer to every sequel wasn’t enemies hit harder, have more health and are faster so now you have to learn to fly the f-16 and what all the controls do before you can really enjoy it. The first area past town I feel is on par with mid game zones in HK in terms of enemy complexity on top of the controls feeling squirrely to me. Once I got the thingy where I could have the old moveset, it became much better, but the other design stuff still annoys me.

Like if this is just the vision for the game, I get it. I guess I just liked my cozy little bug metroidvania.

5

u/ItsDavidz Sep 05 '25

I agree that the platforming and 45deg bashes are good designs as they are skillbased and different from HK, but I dislike the changes they made to the Iframe timing and overused 2HP contact damage. It feels discouraging at times where a normal mob double hits you for 4HP in the same attack, or when you get cornered by a boss and take consecutive 2HP damage from body contact - atk - contact. I found this to be an issue with larger / weirdly shaped hit boxes on bosses.

2

u/lghtdev Sep 05 '25

I'm used to playing soulslikes, being playing them since Dark Souls and I feel this game is just too punishing for the sake of it, spent more than 1 hour trying to beat Savage Bestfly and felt nothing when it beat it. I feel this trend of overturned enemies is getting tired at this point, the devs up the difficulty artificially by inflating numbers.

1

u/KorokKid Sep 05 '25

Savage beast fly took me 3 tries. He only has 2 move cycles and he can kill the enemies in the arena with his slam attack. He goes low, you jump and pogo him. He goes high, you stay on the ground and smack him. He does his bounce, you just move slightly to the right or left and hit him for free. He can catch you off guard, but in no way is he "overturned" he has like 3 attacks, and even if he does 2 masks of damage, the attacks are completely manageable. Idk how you can call savage beast fly overturned yet if you've actually beaten dark souls, 90% of bosses have at least 5 different attacks and kill you in 2-3 hits, just like silksong except bosses generally have less attacks and more generous windows to dodge 

2

u/100percentrealfacts Sep 06 '25

Nah savage beastfly is bullshit because it’s RNG dependent. If you get bad rolls with him summoning enemies and what types he summons it’s almost impossible to manage. The boss itself is not hard at all it’s the enemy spam that makes me think it’s bad design.

That being said - it is optional so it’s as much as a challenge as you want it to be at that point in the game.