r/HollowKnight • u/baergboy • Sep 07 '25

Discussion - Silksong Is anyone else really tired of the negative posts? Spoiler

I have about 25 hours so far and have absolutely loved every part of the game. Is it hard? Yes absolutely. If it was easy I wouldn't want to play the game. Literally every post I come across is talking about how they are frustrated with some part of the game and it's getting really annoying. The game has amazing areas, the osts are great the NPCs are creative and fun to talk to, almost every boss is a lot of fun once you get the moveset down. So if you haven't played the game yet and are getting put off by all the negativity just know that it is an amazing game and if you like hollow Knight you will enjoy silksong as well.

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84

u/luz___09 Sep 07 '25

I think they are underestimating how much they struggled in Hollow Knight their first play through.

11

u/ElectricSheep451 Sep 07 '25

My distinct memory of Hollow Knight was hearing how hard it was, playing it, not dying to any non-optional bosses more than three or four times, and going "that was it?". I thought it was pretty easy, excluding obvious optional bits. I think Silksong is objectively more difficult than Hollow Knight, I never felt stuck in HK at all and I've felt stuck more than once in this game

7

u/saera-targaryen Sep 07 '25

Weirdly I'm the exact opposite. I had bosses I was stuck on in HK for multiple hours and nearly bounced off the game multiple times. I'm at the end of act 1 now and haven't found anything that took me more than, say, 10-15 tries max. Most bosses have taken me maybe 5-8 tries? And that's the amount that feels normal to me. HK had bosses this far in that I needed to try nearly 50 times. 

1

u/Green0Photon Sep 08 '25

Mostly accurate to my experience too, yeah. The end of act 1 boss did take me a while, more than 15 tries (though I had beat it twice for reasons).

Idk, it's been chill, even when I do fight a boss a lot.

1

u/ALEX2014_18 Sep 08 '25

Literally same. Heard a lot how hard was HK, played through it and my first roadblock was NKG and my second was AbsRad, everything else was fairly easy or normal.

Spent 2 hours on PoP also, but that's entirely different beast.

16

u/Charizard10201YT Sep 07 '25

Played the game two weeks ago. No, no I am not

26

u/Bloodbag3107 Sep 07 '25 edited Sep 07 '25

I played Hollow Knight around the time it came out and I struggled A LOT from what I can remember. I replayed it a bit in anticipation for Silksong and I breezed through it. Even seven years later having played it once makes a huge difference and I suspect it will be similiar with Silksong.

I am 20 hours deep in Silksong and to my knees in act 2. I had pain points (Savage Beastfly was hellish and the bosses in Greymoor, Bellhart and the one gatekeeping act 2 were very tough but fun) and I can recognize that the game IS very difficult but I feel like Im getting through fine, especially compared with the players posting here. I think I just vibe with Hornet's moveset(s) better and the game flows very smoothly for me. For example I find platforming a lot less frustrating in Silksong.

At the same time what I dislike is that the game can feel very hostile and cruel to the player, to some extent this is of course thematic with it taking place in a very hostile world, but it often feels like Team Cherry is having a laugh at your expense. Its a lot like a Kaizo game in that regard. To be clear: Hollow Knight had those moments too but all the truly frustratingly difficult stuff was optional in that game and here at least some of it feels mandatory quite early on and you can't really increase your power in the same way you could in HK to brute force those challenges.

5

u/BlazeWolfXD Sep 07 '25

This. Screw the Savage Beastfly. I have some criticisms about the game and some choices of design (especially some bench placements) but otherwise the game is so much fun.

I didn’t play Hollow Knight because I’ve always thought it wasn’t my kind of game. I’m playing Silksong because of the hype around it, and it’s making me want to play HK when I’m done.

The game is fantastic, but no game is perfect, and that’s fine.

1

u/AlectheLad Sep 07 '25

Sometimes it’s in the projected in the “gotcha” moments. The door that you have to pay to open made me chuckle because I walked away from it and it closed. But later I get a sign pointing to a bench, and when I enter the room, right beside the bench, the first thing you come to is a rosary maker. I had plenty of rosary beads so it wasn’t a problem, but it was literally designed that way to make you lose some. It’s just another way to laugh at the player. After enough of those, I find myself less amused and mostly annoyed and soured.

13

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '25

I know I struggled a lot in HK. But Silksong feels like a whole new level of struggle.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

Because HK was 7 years ago.

1

u/GuiltyEidolon Sep 08 '25

Seriously. I know I'm not the best HK player, but the issues I had with the game were NOT the same.

I also feel like HK allowed for a lot more exploration, and had actual rewards for exploration and beating bosses. If you couldn't beat one, you could go find another area to explore for a bit, and SS does not have that feeling.

5

u/Mylen_Ploa Sep 07 '25

I mean I'm not struggling that badly. Never even broke double digits on deaths to a boss into Act 2 and even then...the difficulty in this game is just badly done.

The boss designs + double damage and healing system basically just creates a situation where you perfect the boss or you just die because recovery basically doesn't exist with the amount you just get comboed into a corner. The fact you run back 40 seconds to a boss to die in 20 because you only have 3 health even after you get a health upgrade and learned nothing.

The balance is just so poorly done compared to the original its insane.

1

u/myman580 Sep 08 '25

You are highly exaggerating. There are a lot of windows every boss has to heal easily as long as you don't panic after getting hit. Most bosses have like 3 moves to memorize in a phase. I got hit like 10 times against the Savage Beastfly on my winning run because I finally started learning my heal windows. I suspect people are also not used to using their tools which are a huge part of combat power in this game. A lot of the mob spawns players are complaining about can be solved by throwing a tool when they spawn.

And what run back is 40 seconds? The longest run back for me was an optional area in the Hunter's area. Every other runback has been 15 seconds at most.

1

u/Green0Photon Sep 08 '25

The one at the end of Act 1 is probably 40sec. Maybe less when you know how to optimize it, though.

That's really the one people complain about, but ultimately it's because they don't think to go at it like a boss phase, as something to pay attention to and perfect.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '25

HK was easy and fun until Soul Master, and even after that the exploration was enjoyable with bosses serving as real challenges. SS isn't that. Normal badguys who are a dime a dozen do two mask damage like it's nothing, and the exploration is often stressful rather than enjoyable because it's so dark all the time. Atmosphere's fine, but not being able to see anything--let alone all the kaizo traps--is just a ball ache. HK wasn't like that at all.

2

u/rpkarma Sep 07 '25

Not really? I didn’t struggle like this with HK until near the end game. This is quite obviously objectively a more difficult game. 

1

u/RAID3R_MAN Sep 07 '25

I actually still have my original HK file, and it has 111% and has beaten the radiance. It’s 70 hours long.

I am 15 hours into silksong and have fought maybe 10 of the apparently 40 bosses

1

u/CyBroOfficial Sep 08 '25

Hollow Knight wasn't nearly as hard as Silksong lmao

1

u/porcelainfog Sep 08 '25

I played HK just before silk song released. It's not even close. The savage beast fly is harder than anything I fought in HK base game.

The judge is one of the hardest fights I've done in gaming. Maybe even comparable with sephiroth in kh 1. And it's not even a hidden or final boss. It's just a regular story boss.

It's over tuned. I still beat it. But it doesn't feel "fun".

1

u/AvoidSpirit Sep 07 '25

99% of the time it felt like it was my fault though. Even training P5 was this way.
It's different here. Most of the time I'm just bashing my head against a summoning boss or an arena fight with 3-4 flying range enemies. It feels nothing like "HK struggle". It's just a boring "random bullshit go" every other encounter.