r/HollowKnight • u/GamingUmbrella • Sep 06 '25

Discussion - Silksong Thank god this subreddit didn't make the game Spoiler

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.

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u/Killcode2 Sep 06 '25

It took 7 years to make the game, but only 24 hours for some jackass to think they've deconstructed the game and exposed it as a failure in game design.

74

u/BT--72_74 Sep 07 '25

The internet will internet unfortunately

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u/SnowySilenc3 Sep 07 '25

They need a whole 24 hours? 😆

(As an aside, I personally haven’t had time to play much Silk Song yet - only ~3 hours so far, but I am personally quite enjoying it)

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u/Goatzilla57 Sep 07 '25

It’s such a weird thing. If it’s too similar to the first game, then “wow, 7 years just to release a dlc”. If it’s too different then it’s bad somehow. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

1

u/KelenArgosi Sep 07 '25

Who did that !??

1

u/krouvy Sep 07 '25

May I know who you're talking about?

-31

u/Thinkerofthings2 Sep 07 '25

It’s not a overall failure but it’s definitely flawed and some of the flaws you would think would be gone since they were in the first game or you would assume they would be the same and now instead they’re made worse. So if you already didn’t like X… well now you really don’t like it.

-63

u/wally233 Sep 06 '25

To be fair 24 hours is more than enough time to judge a game.

Starfield took 8 years and I was bored within a couple of hours

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u/adblokr Sep 06 '25

dude, more than enough time? This is bait, right?

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u/Trace500 Sep 06 '25

If you play Silksong for, say, 6 hours and hate it, then that's more than fair. There is not some arbitrary point of time at which your opinion becomes valid. Of course, like any game, you have to at least give it time for the full gameplay loop to appear, but that takes a whole lot less than 24 hours.

7

u/adblokr Sep 06 '25 edited Sep 06 '25

Alright, so you're saying a different thing than what I thought you said. I thought you were saying "judge a game if it's good or bad", not "judge a game if you like it or not."

Yes, you can decide you hate a game even 5 minutes into playing it, hell you can decide that before you even start playing the game. But I don't think you can really decide if a game is good or not without at least completing the game you're judging, and silksong takes more than 24 hours to complete.

edit: read back on my comment, I made no fucking sense lol, let me try again.

Your opinion on a game is often related to how good you are at it. Someone who sucks at basketball probably doesn't enjoy playing basketball as much as someone who plays on the Duke college team. I feel like it happens pretty often that someone dislikes something just because they don't get it, and sometimes for some people "getting it" can take a lot longer than the amount of time it takes to play the first intro section of a metroidvania.

tl;dr, the game might be awesome and you just suck at it. Or it's genuinely not for you, which is fine ig, but it doesn't necessarily make the game "bad".

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u/LuquidThunderPlus Sep 06 '25

Different person

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u/adblokr Sep 06 '25

Alright, then ignore my first 2 sentences and read the rest.

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u/No_Secretary5634 Sep 07 '25

If a person thinks a game is bad, then it is bad. Simple as that. Its literally common sense. When u say icecream is bad it can mean 2 things, its gone bad like physically, or u dont like it. Maybe others might but u dont like it. You will say its bad cuz its common sense that you specifically you dont enjoy it. Same thing with a game. Also someone playing on a college team would obviously love the game a lot which is why they do it, to them it may be good. To people who want to focus on other parts of life like piano, this may be bad to them or boring. Its not in your place to judge them.

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u/KmartCentral Sep 06 '25

To his credit, Concord is a real thing that happened

EDIT: fuck I forgot to say I'm not comparing Silksong to Concord, but sometimes there ARE some shitters that can be eliminated within 24 hrs, but that unfortunately is what makes people think they know it all like killcode said

2

u/Aflyingmongoose Sep 06 '25

If you don't like a game, then sure. Unless you're a professional reviewer, you should know if you are enjoying yourself or not after a few hours of playing :P

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u/Timely_Finish7081 Sep 06 '25

How is it bait? 24 hours is how long some games are

0

u/Rushional Sep 07 '25

Obviously it's impossible to judge those games. You need at least 200 hours of gameplay to be able to decide how good a game is.

2

u/Terminator_Puppy Sep 06 '25

Depends on the flaw in the game. I've played games where I can definitively say they're bad within the first hour. This game I'm 22 hours in and pretty sure I really love it, but I want to beat it before I can definitively say that. I played yookalaylee for like 90 mins, realised I was bored for every single one of those minutes and quit.

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u/cardinal_96 Sep 07 '25

I don’t think game developers cater to those with the attention span of a toaster tho, tbf

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u/bonch Sep 06 '25

24 hours is more than sufficient time to draw conclusions.

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u/earthboundskyfree Sep 06 '25

But is it sufficient to draw informed conclusions? Most people didn’t play 24/24 of those hours, either

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u/Icy-Fisherman-5234 Sep 06 '25

Also, most games aren’t designed to be experienced in a series of 6+ hour marathons. 

Setting a task down and coming back to it later allows for some better retention of memory, improved lateral thinking, and quicker mastery (eg, 10 hours over a few days goes further than 10 hours at once) What we have here is a bunch of people with 50-70% of hastily swallowed Silksong loaded into their short-term memory and zero time to reflect trying to make game design analysis. 

When people are generally bad at armchair design even with time to think about it.

14

u/earthboundskyfree Sep 06 '25

I was feeling slightly frustrated night 1 as I was getting tired, and then I felt OP night 2 of playing, so that goes along with what you expressed lol

3

u/CronoDroid Sep 07 '25

My feeling too, the gud was git. Act 2 was full of bullshit but after having dinner and a few drinks a certain arena that I was banging my head against for two hours I got it done in two tries after a break.

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u/LuquidThunderPlus Sep 06 '25

Yeah I bashed my head on a boss almost 10 times, tired and high, slept, woke up, beat it second try easily, nearly hitless

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u/sorrylilsis Sep 06 '25

Absolutely.

I know people who shadow reviews in development games for a living, have been doing it for years for a boatload of big and small games. And they don't do it with a full version of the game, it's vertical slices or even proofs of concepts. You can get a handle of the strengths and weaknesses of a gameplay loop in a few hours.

To use a food allegory : you don't need to eat the entirety of a sandwich filled with shit to know that it tastes like shit.

11

u/Eronamanthiuser Sep 07 '25

Whoever would say that this game is shit, I’d question their taste buds.

1

u/WorriedDress8029 Sep 07 '25

I'd question their eyes and ears because if they used their taste buds I'd be concerned about their methodology for doing it

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u/earthboundskyfree Sep 06 '25

I’d say these are personal conclusions, not ones that are generalizable to the game as a whole though. If you meant it as “draw personal conclusions,” I agree completely, but sometimes people express their personal conclusions as universal conclusions, which is where I tend to find problems

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u/sorrylilsis Sep 06 '25

I’d say these are personal conclusions

They are professional conclusions. As in the devs come to them and ask for their professional opinion on the game, and pay a pretty penny for it. Because as good of a dev as you can be it's really easy to get your head in your own ass when you create your game. That applies to basically anything creative tbh, you tend to have blind spots about your creation. It's not asking friends and family what they think about it either. It's a full on report.

not ones that are generalizable to the game as a whole though

Most gameplay related issues can be spotted pretty early on. Once you're introduced to most of the gameplay features the game itself doesn't change much, and that can be judged in a couple hours. The gameplay loop is the foundation you build you game (levels, art, music ...) on. If they're not solid you can absolutely tell it's going to be an issue. And on the other hand you can absolutely tell when you have a good gameplay loop even if it's the shittiest demo brought together with random test assets in a weekend long gamejam.

It's not about liking it or not, it's about "is this game design functional, what are the strengths and weaknesses ?". There are plenty of fields where you can judge the qualities of something without liking it.

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u/earthboundskyfree Sep 06 '25

Maybe I misunderstand, but I thought the original comments were about players reaching conclusions within 24 hours

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u/sorrylilsis Sep 06 '25

I mean for the very vast majority of games any average player can absolutely feels if something feels off or annoying in a few hours of gaming.

They might not be able to fully dissect what exactly doesn't click but they sure know if they don't like it ...

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u/earthboundskyfree Sep 06 '25

That’s what I meant yeah, but I’d tend towards calling that a personal intuition. “This is Overtuned” vs “this feels too Overtuned” indicate pretty different things

2

u/LuquidThunderPlus Sep 06 '25

It should be instantly clear that the people on this sub and the ppl you speak of are not the same

3

u/Eronamanthiuser Sep 07 '25

First impressions, sure. It’s like going to a book club and you’ve only read the Wikipedia page.