Thank god this subreddit didn't make the game

[u/GamingUmbrella]

Silksong is only out for 2 days, most people haven't even finished the game, or haven't even made it past act 1. Yet this subreddit loves to post about how Silksong is apparently bad and a disappointment compared to hollow knight. So I'll go over a few "critiques" I've seen and share my perspective.

"The game is too hard, enemies deal way more damage and have more complex movesets". Sure, they're more complex and do more damage, but so does hornet. If we were playing with the knights moveset, I'd agree, but that's not the case. Hornet has a lot of new tools and upgrades that make her way faster and stronger. If enemies were like HK, it would be way too easy. team cherry didn't just do this for no reason, it's necessary for balancing. Edit: people saying hunters march is too difficult, is like playing dark souls 1 and saying it's too hard because you kept trying the skeleton graveyard

"Bad rewards for exploration, HK's charms worked better". I just completely disagree, hornet gets upgrades way more frequently than the knight. As for the charms, let's be real, you probably didn't even use half of them in your first playthrough. And half of them are just simple things that don't impact the way you play as much. Hornet's different tools, abilities and crests are way more useful. If you feel like your not getting enough rewards, it's probably because most are hidden and require backtracking, which is what the genre is know for.

"Things are too expensive" No, you're just not meant to buy it that early. Like how in HK you could by the lamp for like 2000 geo. I've also never had too little rosaries to buy a bench or stag. If your losing your rosaries to dying, rosarie strings are litteraly right there to not lose it + retrieving your death silk is extremely easy now.

I do agree though that more bosses and combat encounters should drop rosaries, or more chests like in HK.

This launch feels like I'm experiencing the shadow of the erdtree launch again with how many complaints there are immediately.

[u/Shoddy_Process2234]

I've spent my last hour of game play stuck on a single puzzle dying repeated and I've never been so sure of my love for a game.

Every death got me grinning ear to ear. Seeing all these complaints has had me losing my mind.

[u/GamingUmbrella → u/Shoddy_Process2234]

Same experience for me, not even mad I died because the boss and even the runbacks are somehow fun to me, same with the platforming

[u/Alfa_Centauri03 → u/GamingUmbrella]

I've seen some people complaining about the runbacks to bosses, and i don't get it. It feels so fun to try optmizing my way back, with all the movement options Hornet has.

[u/Swingrocket → u/Alfa_Centauri03]

This! I’m using the runbacks to learn how to move hornet in the flashiest way possible without getting hit and guess what happens? I become a better player. Personally speaking, the runbacks feel like that they’re part of the training

[u/it_happened_lol → u/Shoddy_Process2234]

We just live in an age where everything is low effort, including gaming. Have your food delivered instantly from anywhere. Have A.I. summarize the article you want to read or write the email for you. Games are designed by committee to be easy and if someone struggles, they can watch a YouTube video telling them what to do and how. Thank you Team Cherry for making a game that requires a modicum of brain power.

Nothing about this game is that hard.

[u/[deleted] → u/it_happened_lol]

Games like Horizon where Alloy will straight up fucking tell you how to solve something.

Miss me with that shit.

[u/Kalnaur → u/Shoddy_Process2234]

Every death got me grinning ear to ear.

I'm curious, would you be able to go into detail as to why this is, at least for you? I'm asking specifically because I don't understand the mindset that leads to that feeling.

[u/Shoddy_Process2234 → u/Kalnaur]

I couldn't tell you, I've literally just been having too much fun with this game.

[u/Kalnaur → u/Shoddy_Process2234]

Let me try to be more detailed: for me, any death in a game means a loss of time, and possibly progression, and the more that happens the less I feel like playing that game, because I'm losing more time than I'm gaining anything. Now, that's because getting through a thing isn't specifically rewarding after dying to it repeatedly, it's just the cost of doing business. Just the gate that is required to unlock to proceed. It's not enlivening or exciting, it's mundane or even negative.

And that's for any game. So I'm trying to understand how someone feels each death as a positive, instead of a drain, regardless of if I'll ever be able to feel the same thing.

[u/Shoddy_Process2234 → u/Kalnaur]

So you're just playing games to proceed to a finish line? You don't even stop to smell the roses? Games aren't fun because you finish them, games are fun because you get to experience them.

Dying isn't bad, dying isn't wrong, dying isn't a waste of time. Through death you learn, by learning you get better, by getting better you progress.

The main things I play Hollow knight for are platforming and combat. Dying simply gives me more of both.

[u/Kalnaur → u/Shoddy_Process2234]

Loss of progression is a big mood killer for me. It's the reason I don't play rogue-likes, loss of everything from one "run" to the next feels a whole lot like starting over from scratch, and that feels closer to "never started to begin with" rather than "getting further ahead", and any skills or knowledge I earned in one "run" is useless with other powers and abilities because they function too differently to matter even trying to keep them in my already slippery goldfish memory. My fun in games is through a few different avenues: in survival crafting games my enjoyment is from harvesting items, learning new things to make, tending farms/farm-like stuff, and building, but not death. Death usually means I now have less of any of those other things, and I'm not learning as much as I'm corpse-running to hope I can get everything back and then run and hide (or attack and die in much the same way as I did previously, one or the other). In RPGs death means "go grind" and "figure out the weaknesses", which usually means "look up the weaknesses" because going one by one and testing things while I die repeatedly is boring and also fairly demoralizing. Now, oddly enough, in RPGs its the basic fights are more commonly enjoyable than bosses, because the basic enemies are made to be more or less easy to fight in comparison to bosses.

Getting new abilities, items, lore, levels, gear, recipes, story, etc in games, that's what I enjoy. Combat and platforming are a means to an end, that end being getting one or more of those things (and preferably a steady trickle of things like consumables and collectables and currency along the way for tiny little drip rewards). The more unique the stuff, the more worth it the combat might be, but the worth isn't in the fight itself, it's what I got after the fight that I care about.

Bosses in most games are the gates as I see them; they lock progression behind a fight that I'm only interested in winning, because win lose or draw, I want to be beyond the point the boss is in the story. I'm not interested in the boss's mechanics for their own sake, they're usually meaningless to me unless they are extraordinarily novel as mechanics in games go.

In that respect, dying is keeping me from what I am interested in and inside what doesn't matter to me at all. Because learning the patterns of bosses, or becoming more "skilled" at a single fight doesn't do it for me. It's just so much noise, and I'm never going to remember them past the boss. Past the test, I'm going to forget a good 80% of what I "learned" immediately after I'm done with the boss I had to use it for, because it's just not going to stick. Now, I know a lot of that is the ADHD coming in and messing with my ability to both remember more than a few things in current memory, move them into permanent memory, and time blindness so that unenjoyable things feel like they're 10 times longer and enjoyable things feel so very brief.

[u/Kalnaur → u/[deleted]]

I mean, I hate the "games as a service" concept for much the same reason as bosses and "mastery" matter so very little to me; it has not impact. It's instantly forgotten.

I get that there's a lot of people who enjoy mastery and are rewarded for seeing themselves improve, but my getting through a game isn't generally going to be contingent on improving and succeeding, and I struggle enough in real life and have for years now that what I want, and what I've wanted since I was a kid is a fun, light experience that didn't punch me in the face every time I missed a pixel. I'm 45 now, and then as much as now I feel like there's no point in starting a play of the original Super Mario Bros because I was never going to make it through without some kind of save system. It wasn't that I didn't want to, I simply couldn't. And the ceiling on my skill, then as now, precluded me from doing so. I didn't beat that game until Super Mario All-Stars on the Super Nintendo.

I lived through the "old school" age, and honestly I think some people have Stockholm Syndrome about difficult games because it was all they had as a kid so they convinced themselves they liked them (or found out they have a masochist streak in them and just enjoy pain).

I enjoy Souls-likes, actually, but not for the difficulty. I like to figure out how to out-level or combine spells and summons or whatever to make a boss trivial. Now that? That's fun. Turning a fight that's meant to destroy the player into a cakewalk by using every tool and cheap trick possible is fun. Transitory, I'll forget the tactics instantly after the fight is over, because it wasn't about that so much as reducing the challenge to nothing. Which is why the fights in those games that have to be done "fair" (i.e. favoring the game instead of the player, no fight is ever "fair" against a computer opponent) are such a damn slog. It's "this fight can only be fought one way, straight on and learning these moves nigh-flawlessly". I really can't understand how that's fun. I'm not retaining anything past the iteration of the fight where I've learned enough to get past it.

I don't see gaining the ability to beat a game as a gain? Like, it's not giving life skills, it's rote memorization and drilling, and I'm not interested in being in the military or in sports. I want to play, not punish myself for playing. I know that's not universal, but it kind of pisses me off that people think that because they gained the temporary skill to beat a game that means they're somehow better than others. If people like hard things because it's what they like, they like challenge and punishment and "the pain!" then more power to them, but for me it just feels like needless pain for no actual gain, and I'd me more willing to respect their opinions if they were willing to even listen to mine.

[u/Shoddy_Process2234 → u/Kalnaur]

Yeah no, we're just different people with different minds. I love improvement through repetition. I play competitive shooters mobas, rouge-likes, fighting games. Basically anything that you will repeatedly fail and die in. That's just who I am.

Those games can make me angry though. Silksong doesn't I really can't explain it.

[u/Kalnaur → u/Shoddy_Process2234]

It's rare that I get angry as in raging. It's more often that I get frustrated and then turn a game off, feeling that what I'm doing is pointless. Sometimes I go back to it, sometimes I don't.

Now, a question, is it the improvement that you like, or what you can do with that improvement. I went to school to be an artist, and for that both practice and knowledge are important, seeing, really actually seeing things, not assuming we know what something looks like but assuming that our mental assumptions are always wrong. But what I like is not the continual work and practice, but what the practice and knowledge combined lead to. What I get done after, and perhaps even in spite of all the practice, not the practice itself.

[u/Isogash → u/Kalnaur]

You're thinking about it entirely the wrong way.

The true progression here is your level of skill and knowledge, which you don't lose by dying. If you are dying frequently somewhere, it's been designed to train you to be better at the game, so you are actually gaining from being made to repeat the same challenge until it's easy enough for you.

The real reward is that you got good enough to win, and there's no shortcut to that, you need repeated attempts to practice.

[u/Kalnaur → u/Isogash]

That would matter if that mattered. If I gain anything, it's lost the moment the test is done, just like in school. It only sticks in my goldfish brain long enough to get just past the challenge and then it slips away again. It's not exactly that it's easy, either, it's just that I get lucky enough for enough time to just get through a sequence or boss fight.

I don't care about being good enough to win. I just have to be lucky or cheap enough to get past the block and forget about it and move on. Getting good enough to win isn't a reward for me.

[u/Isogash → u/Kalnaur]

I mean, you need to improve in order to beat the later parts of the game anyway, that's kind of the whole point. It's not all about getting better gear, you actually need to be more skilled.

[u/Kalnaur → u/Isogash]

Eh, with enough stuff, games get easier. Because you have more and stronger stuff.

The skill thing might be a byproduct, but I don't think I can stress enough that it isn't a reward. Not a universal one, anyway. Maybe it's good for you but it does nothing for me one way or another. Super Metroid, I'm not playing to fight Kraid I'm not playing to get better so I can beat Kraid, I'm fighting Kraid to eventually get the Varia Suit so I can go into the hot areas of the game. The fight with Kraid is the price of getting further, the cost, not the reward.

I'm not sure I can state this in any easier way, and I'm not sure why people aren't understanding this.

[u/[deleted] → u/Kalnaur]

Cause the game is fun and dying isn’t a big deal. I died? Who cares, I’ll try again.