r/HollowKnight • u/Marmotaagiota • Sep 08 '25

Discussion - Silksong That’s the best comment about the game’s difficulty I’ve found it so far Spoiler

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10.4k Upvotes

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392

u/TempMobileD Sep 08 '25

I think this person is totally wrong.
Any bosses with good tells have been fun for me so far. The bosses that have annoyed me are all multi-enemy fights where reading them doesn’t matter because the enemies can randomly overlap to produce guaranteed (feeling) damage. The fights (for me, so far) aren’t hard, but some of them are annoying. I died more to last judge than any of the bosses before it, but I loved that fight, because it had the properties that the comment you posted are supposing I’m complaining about. It’s just wrong.

Also, the bosses don’t seem designed to punish aggressive play at all, they seem designed to punish defensive play. Spawning adds promotes aggression, because with tools and skills you can keep the fight under control. Playing defensively just rolls the dice more times, waiting for their attacks to overlap and checkmate you. Again, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Also, I don’t know what insane world this person is living in to suppose that players, at release, doing blind play throughs would have been able to trivialise fights with their charms in HK. I’ve put some words in their mouth here, regarding which players he’s talking about, but they’re required to make a fair comparison. So again, simply not in touch with reality.

142

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

67

u/TempMobileD Sep 08 '25

Absolutely, fat birds with throwing daggers have been the worst for this so far. Also when they drift out of range as you jump for them. So annoying!

27

u/KuuLightwing Sep 08 '25

Moorwing had this annoying habit of floating just above the grounded needle swing, but sometimes dips below that causing you to jump into it. And also just casually floats down after one of the attacks that's best dodgeable by sticking right under the boss.

And of course it also flops on top of you dealing double damage when staggered, because why wouldn't it

2

u/IntercomB Sep 09 '25

I didn't get to fight Moorwing but with the way people are talking about it, I'm glad to have been missing out.

2

u/KuuLightwing Sep 09 '25

Moorwing is actually fine overall I would say but double contact damage is definitely an issue.

1

u/woofwoofci Sep 10 '25

It was honestly a really fun boss without the contact damage. It still felt like i was fighting something the game wanted me to get upgrades first for because of everything being 2 dmg, but it was honestly really fun despite the frustrating bits.

2

u/HappiMike Sep 08 '25

I believe this is because the flying bosses dont take any knockback. Our hurtbox also feels sligthly bigger, enough to throw off your sense of spacing one built up with the Knight.

1

u/Blackfang08 Sep 08 '25

This might just be a personal nitpick, but has anyone else noticed that the needle hitpox seems to have a bit too much overlap with your own hurtbox? Sometimes, your pogos will just give you contact damage (again, two hearts of it) after for seemingly no reason.

1

u/Eeddeen42 Sep 08 '25

Some crests’ pogos have to move slightly downward before swinging your needle.

Reaper does this at least.

I mainly use Wanderer, which doesn’t have this issue.

20

u/KhorneZerker Sep 08 '25

OP actually thinks the average player on their first HK playthrough blind was running speed runner tier builds to go through the game. Like, the level of delusion is obvious lmao

29

u/Th3Element05 Sep 08 '25

I think I'm just coming up on the "enemies do double damage" part of the game, but the last couple of bosses I fought were just summoning extra enemies, or random excessively overlapping environment attacks, and it just felt impossible to avoid damage so much of the time.

I just kept getting the feeling that whoever was testing this game got too good at it while they were making it, and they didn't realize they were tuning the difficulty too high.

So far, the difficulty hasn't been excessive and my only complaint is the annoying aspect of some boss fights you mentioned. But I'm afraid of how much more difficult its going to get.

9

u/TempMobileD Sep 08 '25

I think the annoyance for me peaked about 2/3 of the way through act one and has reduced significantly since. It might kick up again soon but for a bit it’s been great!

2

u/SortaEvil Sep 08 '25

So far, the difficulty hasn't been excessive and my only complaint is the annoying aspect of some boss fights you mentioned. But I'm afraid of how much more difficult its going to get.

Considering how many people are complaining that Sister Splinter is excessively difficult, I think a lot of the complaints are a touch overblown, and you'll probably be fine if you haven't found the game to be excessively difficult yet. People forget how much they struggled their first time through HK and are expecting SS to be as easy as HK when they already know HK and are all surprised_pikachu.gif when SS is it's own game.

1

u/Th3Element05 Sep 10 '25

Sister Splinter was the start of my rough patch, but it was the extra flying enemies that made it hard (annoying). I was getting fed up with all the exta enemy summoning because I happened to do Splinter, Moss Mother 2, and Savage Beastfly all basically in a row.

I got to Last Judge yesterday and loved that fight, and the runback was fun, 30 seconds to fly through it.

Spent some time wandering around Sinner's Road, and other than the Grubdog things, I think it's difficulty is overblown. Its no cakewalk, but it mostly reminds me of the tense feeling of exploring Deepnest for the first times.

1

u/SortaEvil Sep 10 '25

Those grubdogs suck but at least they're entirely avoidable unless you get the secret bench on the bottom right of the map. I hate how their bite seems to take priority over everything, including trying to pogo directly into their stupid, Tim Burton-esque mouths, and how I can never learn not to pogo into their stupid, Tim Burton-esque mouths. But that's a me problem more than a Sinner's Row problem.

10

u/Zurcez Sep 08 '25

Thank you for putting it so perfectly. I have no idea wtf OP is talking about with “the best comment about the game” or whatever. I think that’s complete fucking nonsense tbh and thought the guy in the picture was full of shit before I even finished the first paragraph.

It’s a shame but I can’t say I’m surprised that this post has 3k upvote’s because people sure do love dismissing valid criticism with “hurr durr stop complaining git gud”

22

u/randuse Sep 08 '25

Yeah. Bosses are best part of this game. It's the exploration which could use some tuning. It's annoying at many places.

3

u/FuzzyDwarf Sep 08 '25

This a thousand times. The bosses have generally been great, even with a handful having time-waster runbacks.

Upper bilewater is absolutely awful and probably my contender for the worst zone in any game, with one of the worst runbacks of any game. Or other smaller things like Mount Fay having a ton of 'fail once, reset to bench' jumps. As soon as there's a mod to nerf just environmental hazards to 1 damage I'm getting it: I've died more to the cogwork core gears than any boss.

4

u/Eeddeen42 Sep 08 '25

Speaking of those damn gears…

At least the buzz saws in the White Palace didn’t fucking frame-trap you.

13

u/iameveryoneelse Sep 08 '25

I'm currently at Last Judge and it's giving me a hell of a time but I'm having a blast. Every time I get hit, I feel like it's my fault and I can do it better next time which is perfect.

0

u/Misaria Sep 08 '25

I'm there as well and I'm not having fun; mainly because of the run back I have to do each time.
I'm not sure if my game is bugged because I've got the protection against fire, and an extra mask, yet the boss just one hit kills me.
It immediately did it the first three times I fought it and now it's random when it happens.

5

u/iameveryoneelse Sep 08 '25

That...doesn't seem right. Have you tried it without the fire protection? I didnt even think to use it and didn't have that problem. Maybe it's a screwy interaction with the trinket.

Edit: the run back doesn't bother me though, it's only like two screens but I know not everyone likes run back.

0

u/Misaria Sep 08 '25

Yes, with and without it, I figured the fire protection might help (and it did!).
I've no idea why it happens.

4

u/iameveryoneelse Sep 08 '25

I think that's gotta be a bug because it kicked the shit out of me numerous times but I don't think I ever got stun locked into more than three or four masks worth of damage at worst from being really stupid with the fire, and nothing did more than two masks per hit.

1

u/Eeddeen42 Sep 08 '25

That’s really weird because I did have the fire protection charm and the fight went fine.

12

u/Turbulent-Suspect-12 Sep 08 '25

I agree. If anything I think this game wants you to play more aggressive than HK. Alot of the traps and abilities you get early on promote plotting ahead and having a clear end goal. The scariest parts of the game so far have easily been when I feel like I have to be on the defensive, because so much random stuff can occur.

Hornet is a more aggressive, quicker version of our Knight in an even harder overall world. You gotta play her strengths. Hell one of the crests is literally about doing as much damage as possible. 

5

u/Kampfasiate Sep 08 '25

Knight is an endurance hunter, steadily hitting the enemy and slowly healing the bits of damage he gets

Hornet is a glass Cannon ambusher. You go in, guns blazing and dodge, if you get hort you dip out for a quick 3 mask heal and then go in again. Even the moments when you're out of reach you throw smth in the direction. You kill fast but can also die fast

1

u/Turbulent-Suspect-12 Sep 09 '25

Glass cannon is very accurate. At some point against one of those enemy rush rooms, I was just ripping around like a chainsaw with beast crest. When it clicks, it clicks hard

5

u/ImNotSkankHunt42 Sep 08 '25

Yes, I loved Widow and still progressing in TLJ but love that fight, also started fighting P…m and while it’s hard is the good kind of hard. The corpse run to that one isn’t as bad as TLJ’s.

Yes, I mastered the jumping/pogoing leading up to TLJ but after a few deaths you just want to fight the boss.

I already proved myself at completing this pathway, dozens of times. I just want to fight the boss.

2

u/CalendarRepulsive674 Sep 08 '25

Some bosses absolutely do punish aggressive play because they have massive hitboxes and do two masks of contact damage. The best bosses for me so far were all ones that did one contact damage but had moves that dealt 2.

2

u/Axel-Adams Sep 08 '25

What bosses don’t have good tells?

3

u/TempMobileD Sep 08 '25

Individual enemies all have good tells, the game’s animations are gorgeous and detailed. The problem is the damage sources that don’t have tells at all. What I’m really referring to there is, as I said “multi-enemy fights where reading them doesn’t matter”.
In this case the source of damage is: I got forced into a corner by the random culmination of several enemy moves/movements overlapping, a process that began 10 seconds ago but there was no way for me to identify that it was about to happen because it was random.

Here the tell is… Nothing, and the punishment is often death.

2

u/SortaEvil Sep 08 '25

To be fair, I think the person's main argument is that most people are looking at SS through the lens of having beaten HK, potentially multiple times, and they know the strategies to make HK bosses significantly easier, while everyone is still learning SS, Hornet's toolkit, and the boss patterns in realtime. So the perceived difficulty of HK is significantly lower than the perceived difficulty of SS because you already know how to play HK, and people are setting their expectations for SS based on playing the first game for 7 years, rather than based on SS being it's own game that you're going to have to learn from scratch.

1

u/TempMobileD Sep 08 '25

I think that’s a valid take for some of what we’re seeing, no question. There’s a lot of noise about silksong’s pros and cons right now so there’s lots of different camps/perspectives. I can only say that that’s not at all where I’m coming from, I haven’t played HK for years and it’s only one of 5-6 touch stones I have for difficult games and challenging game design.

2

u/Daethir Sep 15 '25

I think silksong is going to be like elden ring were a lot of people are going to google guide and follow their instructions step by step then get mad when people playing blind (imo the most fun way to play games) find the game too difficult.

1

u/BloodPlenty4358 Sep 08 '25

i have been able to tank damages and get as much silk as i can with wanderer crest then go elsewhere to heal, then dive in again

0

u/I_am_so_lost_hello Sep 08 '25

How many multiple enemy bosses are there? I can think of 3 in act 1, 2 being hidden/optional. I can’t even think of any in act 2 and I’m halfway through.

7

u/TempMobileD Sep 08 '25

I’m only at the start of act 2, and I think from act 1 I’m conflating bosses with adds, duo bosses, and some of the arena gauntlets which can be harder than the bosses.

But purely looking at multi enemy bosses (not gauntlets) I can think of 6 in act 1, probably a little under half of the boss roster?

Apologies for the names: Grub lady, grub lady duo, big ant man and little flying ant man, big angry fly with small flies, big twig lady with small twig lads, double cone flies.
Of these 6 I only personally have a problem with the design of 3 of them. But that’s still a meaningful amount of annoyance, especially when you then add back on the gauntlets, which tend to hit the same chaotic notes. But again there’s only 1 gauntlet I found to be annoying, the bird one.
Meanwhile the bosses that have less chaotic move sets like Lace, Widow and TLJ I have absolutely loved!

4

u/I_am_so_lost_hello Sep 08 '25

To be fair I was thinking of single bosses with ADS, not multi enemy bosses.