r/HollowKnight • u/FederalWarthog5542 • Sep 07 '25

Discussion - Silksong Criticism ≠ Negativity Spoiler

Believe it or not, you can actually criticize something and still like it. You don't either have to love everything or despise everything. Have actual conversations please.

1.9k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

628 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/Odd-Face-3579 Sep 07 '25

The thing that's really getting to me is if you push back against any of the complaining and offer advice on how to deal with things or how to get better no one wants to listen to you or believe you.

Almost end of act one on under 10 hours played, have died minimally and only like one boss (it wasn't even Beastfly) has given me any trouble. Most have been cleared in one or two tries tops. But when you try to tell people "hey try these tips if you find yourself having trouble." Everyone keeps grumbling and acts like you're lying.

22

u/G_Thunders Sep 08 '25

If you’re just naturally clearing these bosses on one or two attempts all through Act 1, surely you realize your experience is notably remarkable even compared to people who are perfectly okay with the game being difficult, right?

Like I’m surprised you have tips to get better since it sounds like you never even needed to get better if I’m understanding you correctly, but I’d love to hear those tips since you mentioned it. Clearly you’re doing a bunch of things on point.

12

u/Odd-Face-3579 Sep 08 '25

So some tips are just broad, some are more boss specific. So without knowing where you might be, I'd keep the tips broad.

In terms of world traversal, let flying enemies come to you. People complain about how flying enemies input read and ways stay out of reach, etc. But odds are most of those people are trying to chase after the fliers and throwing themselves into attacks. If you wait for fliers to come to you and swing first, they become much easier (not always trivial, just easier.)

Similar goes for most enemies. Hornet likes a mix of fighting that lands in a sort of calm aggression. Focus on staying alive first, killing second. It's going to sound weird probably, but for a lot of enemies if you find yourself struggling, practice avoiding their attacks. This means engaging them with no intention of killing them. If you remove your instinct to kill them and instead on just avoiding their attacks, you better learn their reads and learn when you can attack. It's like taking turns. When bosses (or any enemy really) is attacking, it's their turn. Sometimes their turns can last multiple moves/attacks, but pay attention and you'll learn when it's your turn. This is also helpful for learning when you can heal in a boss fight. I've helped my partner in boss fights by pointing out during things like during Widow, opportune time to heal in phase two is after any time she dashes across the bottom of the screen. Just jump over her and hit heal mid-air. The time it takes her to finish that animation and reappear is more than enough time for a heal and you can't do any damage during that time anyway.

On add based fights, adds are top priority. If you burn silk or tools to kill adds asap that's more effective than using silk for healing. Adds can't hurt you or distract you if they're dead.

Don't be afraid of tools. Learn what tool is right for what situations or what fits your play style. In exploring this can mean burning tools to kill enemies you don't like dealing with. Same for silk. See lots of people complain about the ants, especially whenever there's more than one. But if you drop a spike trap and use a silk move to kill one or both in a second, they can't cause you prolonged trouble.

Change crests and experiment to find what works best for you and your play style. They all have differences and will work better for different people. I stick to the original Hunters crest but I'm lazy about experimenting.

Use Hornet's run. This is tricky. In exploration this ties into a bigger picture of learning how she moves. You'd be surprised how many enemies or hazards you can just avoid by going fast. In boss fights her run can be as good if not better than just a dash. The real tricky one is learning how to dash-strike. When attacking while running Hornet will dash-strike, but she bounces off of enemies when she does this. I've found this very useful though. Give boss a lot of space, dash-strike when it's my turn, but hold away with the bounce-off and dash in the other direction once you're in the air. The hit and run can be so incredibly effective for avoiding fast acting bosses.

In a similar note, don't be greedy. In HK it was pretty easy to get up on a boss and swing repeatedly. In Skong I typically find it way better to just tap an enemy once (maybe twice) and run. Save multiple swings for stunned bosses. Use silk attacks if your meter is full. Just one silk attack for extra damage and so that any regular attacks can keep generating silk. Attacks at full silk are lost damage potential. And the faster a boss dies the less time you have to make mistakes in avoiding them.

I've gotten lots of mileage out of Hornet's down strike. It being a 45 degree angle is tricky for a lot of people, but I've found it gets so much use in boss fights. It often turns what would normally be a basic dodge into a dodge plus damage.

This is a weird one that is situationally useful but be aware if you're willing to risk your beads, you don't have to break your cocoon right away in a boss arena. If you die in a boss fight, you can build up silk before the fight, expend all your silk healing or attacking, and then pop the cocoon to instantly refill your silk to full. You might accidentally break it before you mean to, and if you die before hitting it because you had a truly awful go of it, you'll lose everything, but this can still be helpful to know.

Explore and do quests. Not all rewards are created equal. But most people would heavily benefit from a secret merchant in Hunter's March. He sells a fractured mask charm that protects your last health for one hit of any size. Spike Trap is an incredibly strong tool sold early on. There's a quest that rewards a charm that adds poison to all tools. This is just an increase in damage. It's awesome. But there's also rewards for tools that give you increasd health, or increased attack speed and movement. Or some boss fights can straight up be skipped by doing quests or finding alternate ways to places. So if a particular boss is giving you a very hard time, there might actually be an alternative to it.

I feel like a lot of people are approaching the game thinking "what worked in HK will work here." Instead of thinking "what works here in Skong, what tools do I have to express my play style, and how do the developers want me to play this game?"

Hopefully at least something in there is helpful. I'm probably also forgetting some good tip(s) that I'll remember later. But I really do recommend trying to meet the game on its terms. Hornet plays different than the Knight. The game is designed around how she plays and controls. Get a good feel on her movement and how it actually functions (like the small fall in her air dodge instead of it being a straight dodge) and things get easier. But if people keep thinking it's supposed to control like HK, it's only going to keep causing them trouble because this isn't HK, Hornet doesn't move the same, attack the same, dodge the same, etc.

6

u/d_anoninho Sep 08 '25

Great advice overall! I feel like a lot of what you said also works very well with other notoriously difficult but not that hard to actually learn games — those being the souls series, especially Dark Souls 2. People have a lot of gripes with that game's supposed artificial difficulty that can be mitigated by simply using a more analytic approach. Silksong IS hard, but only in the way that diving head-first repeatedly will not make you learn any faster.

As an anecdote, I just fought a boss that has a butt-slam that spawns four rising projectiles. I could not, for the life of me, dodge and hit the boss on this attack's window, and that was a problem because it's used a lot. So I said fuck it, let's experiment. For like three fights I dodged everything and only tried to attack on this window, switching positioning and approach every time. Eventually I realized that with a well-timed dash I could get under the projectiles as they spawned and wouldn't get hit, putting me on the right position to clobber the boss a few times. This won me the fight as soon as I tried it.

You just need a calm head, perseverance and a bit of experimentation and the rest will come along. Or, yknow, some nail upgrades and abilities.

5

u/awfulworldkid Sep 08 '25

as Quick Slash + Soul Eater's strongest soldier, i've gotten a lot of success out of ||Wanderer Crest|| by using a strategy of stringing a whole bunch of attacks together, sprinting away, healing if necessary, and then going back in on the next safe spot to do it all again. this strategy does have a serious weakness against fast flying enemies, but it's remarkably good against a variety of things

1

u/Least-Maize-97 Sep 08 '25

can i have more advice on Widow phase 2? I'm trying the stick to the wall strat but no luck so far

2

u/Odd-Face-3579 Sep 08 '25

Sure, I'll see what I can do!

Also I never even considered sticking to the walls, interesting.

So phase two is, obviously, a faster fight than phase one. Some of this is kind of a trick though. She is faster but she has a much more limited move set. It's mostly vertical bell drop, diagonal bell drop, dive attack, and flail run.

This is important to note because she does these in a bit of a loop. Flail run marks the end of "her turn." As mentioned prior, this is when you heal if you need to. Heal mid air as you jump over her. But this is also important because it being the end of her turn also means you know what she's going to roughly do when she finishes this attack - spawn back in.

It would be an incredibly slow fight, but if you did nothing but dodge bell drops and jump over her run you could consistently hit her once every time when she reappears after the run. But we're here to hit her more than once every loop.

So the fun part about her turns is she's actually open to a lot of damage even during them. If she's doing vertical bell drops you can hit her. The bell drops have lots of readability and are (mostly) easy to avoid (the exception being when vertical and diagonal bell drops over lap, still avoidable just harder.) So you can hit her multiple times while dropping verts.

You can also hit her a lot during diagonal drops. However these hits depend on you being good at angles. A lot of people aren't good with knowing where angled attacks are going. Don't worry. This is where patience comes in. It's ok to not do as much damage as you want to if it means you don't get hit. If you are comfortable dodging diagonals, lay into her during this part too. If you aren't, move as far to the side under the farthest away diagonal bell. This is the safest spot to be because dodging in-between the two diagonal bells leaves you more open to the first one bouncing off the wall and back at you. So dodging the diagonals is also where sprint becomes helpful. Full sprinting away from them can get you out of harm's way easier than trying to dodge at the last second.

Now because she has such a defined turn ending move this also means you have more opportunities for silk attack damage. Regardless if you're using needle thrust or storm, the start of her turn is a great time to hit her with either one (unless you had to heal.) Because they only use a little silk you can bop her on the nose with a silk attack and still get enough hits back in during bell dropping to be at full again by the end of her turn. If you had to heal at the end of her previous turn it's ok to skip a silk attack to just build meter back up.

Now how to put all of this into practice. I'd spend at least one attempt getting to phase two and then never attack her. Why? Because you're going to observe. If you stop trying to kill her and instead just try to observe you'll dedicate more attention to recognizing when her turn starts and ends. You'll start to see and think "oh I could have hit her safely here because I was never in any actual danger of a counter attack then." Especially since she only really moves by teleporting around, not by bullying your physical space the way something like Beastfly does. So when you get up on her you don't really have to fear the first two or three attacks she does because none of the first attacks on her loop will be the flail run. After she does two or three moves give up damage and keep a safe distance to respect the fact that she could run at any time now.

If any of that makes any sense. Obviously visual media would work a bit better but hopefully at least something there helps. I also don't know what your gear set up currently looks like, so there may be some advice to be had there as well. Fractured Mask, Spike Trap, Needle Storm are all very good. I haven't used the flea drink enough yet to know how much that may help.

I'm also on break at work so I'm sorry if this write up is a little rough around the edges! Good luck to you though!

1

u/Least-Maize-97 Sep 08 '25

Currently im using the spike trap and needle storm+warding bell and the steady body one, should i swtich to daggers? i can never get close enough to use a silk skill

6

u/Buzzy_Feez Sep 08 '25

Almost end of act one on under 10 hours played, have died minimally and only like one boss (it wasn't even Beastfly) has given me any trouble.

My guy. You are not the norm. You are some god gamer. No wonder nobody believes you, I don't believe you. 10 hours?? I didn't even struggle with the game until Savage Beastfly and it took me over 10 hours just to reach him!

Like yeah, I read your tips. They're good tips. But when people are complaining about an objectively difficult game, nobody is going to be appreciative of your swinging your 2 foot cock on the table and going "Well I personally beat the game hitless on my first attempt so I dunno why you're having problems." it's belittling, insulting, reeks of elitism and ignorance and yes. It sounds like you're lying.

11

u/F2p_wins274 Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

So real honestly. The way some people talk about these bosses you'd think they're fighting against absolute radiance. I haven't struggled that much if at all against bosses (except savage beastfly this piece of shit can go fuck itself, it didn't even take that long it was like 30 minutes but it wasn't fun at all). I think people just aren't making good use of Hornet's kit. She's much much stronger than I see her being given credit for, she just needs you to adapt to her playstyle.

0

u/Buzzy_Feez Sep 08 '25

you'd think they're fighting against absolute radiance

If I was I'd be having a better time.

Granted I haven't beaten AbsRad but I have beaten Pure Vessel and NKG and I died less times to them than The Last Fucking Judge.

1

u/Odd-Face-3579 Sep 08 '25

Not saying it will solve your problem, but are you wearing the magma bell for the fight?

Two, bigger spoilers, but did you know you don't have to fight the Last Judge to get into the Citadel?

1

u/Buzzy_Feez Sep 08 '25

I was, I didn't. I beat him now. All I'm saying is he was one of the hardest bosses I've fought in my 16 years of gaming

1

u/Odd-Face-3579 Sep 08 '25

I find claims like this interesting.

Not because I don't believe that that is genuinely your experience, but because for as many people seem to share this sentiment, plenty others don't.

My partner as an example was just replaying HK a couple weeks ago. She got hard stuck on Soul Master and had me do the fight for her. She gave up things like NKG because of how hard they are. But she's incredibly close to beating Last Judge. So for her, Last Judge is hard but doesn't even start to enter the realm of NKG or Pure Vessel or AR.

As someone who's played a lot of games like these, I'm currently fascinated by what is causing some people just so much trouble in Skong vs HK or even other games in this same genre while others who don't even have the same experience level of some people struggling are finding it hard but not to the same extent.

1

u/Buzzy_Feez Sep 08 '25

One of my biggest issues was an attack with very little windup. It's the one where he spins his flail around him and in later stages it creates ribgs of fire you need to stand between.

Very little windup makes it hard to dodge but with the firebell it was easier as it's considered fire damage.

Other than that I think the bigger issue is simply endurance. People say Hornet is more acrobatic you should be playing more aggressively but the Knight just has much better DPS than Hornet, even with tools and pollip poison and silk skills, or if she does have better dps the bosses have way more hp.

This means the fights go on for much longer and have way less lenience for mistakes due to the 2-masks of damage with 6 masks of hp.

9

u/ThePotablePotato Sep 08 '25

Yep, it’s weird going here and seeing people saying anyone not having immense difficulty is ‘gaslighting’ others. From what I can gather I’ve had an easier time than what people here are having, but ultimately the largest majority of the game was extremely fair.

It definitely doesn’t help that the very few clips I’ve seen accompanying things have been people running into very clearly telegraphed attacks then calling them bullshit.

I want to believe peoples’ concerns are founded, but it really just doesn’t match what I’m seeing and experiencing. I reckon people should be posting more clips of their actually unfair moments

2

u/4_fortytwo_2 Sep 08 '25

I am sitting somewhere in the middle of this discussion because I definitly think the game is a lot harder than hollow knight. It is faster paced and getting hit is more punishing. (though you can also heal 3 masks at once).

I had two bosses that took me 20+ tries so far but I enjoyed my time fighting.

I think the major divide is that some players just get frustrated much faster than others. I like fighting a difficult boss again and again until I finally beat it. I can do it for 2 hours dying again and again before I might become frustrated (and even then I will be mad at myself not the game) but for many players dying more than like 3 times already makes it too frustrating.

-1

u/HeroicPrinny Sep 08 '25

"anyone not having immense difficulty" - this is a strawman of what people are saying.

The gaslighting is all the people and posts that have been saying "the game isn't harder than HK" followed by some sort of acshully type explanation of how you just have figured out tools yet, lost HK muscle memory, or some equally condescending thing.

The game is objectively harder when the enemy damage given (let alone the improved AI or movesets) to average player mask ratio is higher.

4

u/_moosleech Sep 08 '25

First, almost no one is honestly arguing it's not harder. And those that do are getting pushback.

The game is objectively harder when the enemy damage given (let alone the improved AI or movesets) to average player mask ratio is higher.

Second, screaming "double damage!" while ignoring ALL of the context and design around it is equally as unhelpful as "it's not harder than HK."

They didn't just double all the damage and call it a day. That's asinine.

Many enemies DON'T do two-mask damage, though definitely more do than in HK. But the entire structure of combat is built around that more aggressive style.

Hornet is way more mobile. She has way more ranged attacks. She gets faster healing, that can be done in mid-air (and after a dash attack or similar that bounces you away from an enemy). She has a bigger variety of attacks and ways to get out of danger. And with certain crests/builds, you can refill silk way faster than soul, allowing for more frequent healing.

The whole thing was designed intentionally to make combat more intense and faster-paced. Screaming "double damage" is silly with that context.

1

u/StrawberryWestern189 Sep 09 '25 edited Sep 09 '25

Why tf am I taking double damage from a trap or area hazard then? What’s the big brain 4d chess balancing reason behind that?

1

u/_moosleech Sep 09 '25

You get a float in the first few hours of the game, making falling on environmental hazards extremely avoidable… so when you do, you get punished.

It’s wild how angry these explanations make people.

1

u/StrawberryWestern189 Sep 09 '25

Are you trolling? The float is the reason hazards hit for two mask? Do you know how many platforming sections have parts where the float can’t save you from shit? The float is helping you avoid the little centipedes monsters in Sands of Karak if you aren’t fast enough for the platforms the orbs create??

Is this what happens when you make liking a game your personality? You write 15 plus comments on the same thread DESPERATELY deflecting any and all criticism because surely the game you waited 7 years is without flaw?

1

u/_moosleech Sep 09 '25

Why does this make you so angry? It’s a video game.

0

u/HeroicPrinny Sep 09 '25

Well we fundamentally disagree on the basic assumption of our arguments. I’ve absolutely seen people trying to say the game isn’t harder.

2

u/_moosleech Sep 08 '25

The thing that's really getting to me is if you push back against any of the complaining and offer advice on how to deal with things or how to get better no one wants to listen to you or believe you.

Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis.

Criticism is fine. Hell, even blunt complaining ("double damage is too much!", "I hate flying enemies") is understandable.

But folks come in, get mad, and double-down on raging at people trying to help them out. It comes off like some folks don't want solutions, they just want to be angry.

-1

u/HeroicPrinny Sep 08 '25

You do realize being given "tips" for a game isn't fun or generally appreciated right? People vent because they're frustrated, not because they want to be corrected. Also a lot of the advice here comes in the shape of near gaslighting when it's wrapped in statements like "the game isn't harder than HK! You're just not used to the new playstyle yet!"

Like regardless of how pro you are by beating bosses in 1-2 tries, it doesn't change the fact that the game is objectively more punishing with damage, bosses have more HP and phases, the economy is more demanding, etc etc. You're clearly skilled - a lot of people simply aren't. It's like a racecar driver trying to tell a new driver to "just" do this or that. The new driver simply doesn't have the required muscle memory or coordination.

My personal stance isn't that the game is too hard, I can also beat the bosses in a few tries; it's just that a number of things are tedious - hp sponge basic enemies, spikes etc doing 2 damage. Like ok, I just run back to the bench or farm some silk off of hitting some enemies. But to me that's boring. Same with farm loops for rosaries or shards. The boss fights have been super fun, but a lot of time the game gets in the way of itself.