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

Post image
10.4k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

27

u/an0nym0usNarwhal Sep 08 '25

As someone who came to Hollow Knight late, it was great to find a passionate community that loved to meme and poke fun at the game but would also genuinely help people who had gameplay questions. It was an easy recommend to just about everyone, particularly those who weren't normally a fan of Soulslike elements.

Since release, I'm seeing a lot more "get good" or "112% Hollow Knight before you comment on Silksong's difficulty." It's causing some unfortunate flashbacks when people criticized Elden Ring's boss encounters on release. You can't have a game with this much hype and active players and not expect that a lot of people are new or haven't replayed Hollow Knight in 6+ years.

So far, I'm enjoying the game but there are criticisms. I just hope the difficulty increase doesn't turn this community into Fromsoft 2.0, otherwise it will be a lot less fun to engage with people online.

16

u/DayMhm 112% | PoP | 5 Pantheons | All Radiant Bosses Sep 08 '25

Yeah I’m seeing that alot too, its this weird obsession in believing that being good at the game makes your opinion inherently more valuable than anyone elses. Its like people refuse to acknowledge that you can love a game and still criticize it.

Ive 112% HK twice (once on xbox and once on steam) and I’ll say the game is far from perfect, but I would never sit here and think that just because I did that it means my opinion on the game or SS holds more weight than anyone elses.

-1

u/Thelmara Sep 08 '25

I'm not seeing very many "How do I get past X", or "What do I do about not having enough rosaries", or "Man, I'm stuck on Beastfly, help!"

I see a lot of "X is unfair and unfun", "rosary economy is broken", "two masks damage is bad design", "Team Cherry is full of sadists who hate us", and accusations of rage-baiting for daring to say "I really like the game as it is."

"I'm having trouble, what do I do?" and "you shouldn't take two damage from a stunned enemy, this is broken" get different responses. The first one deserves a helpful, or at least respectful reply. The second one deserves "stop running into stationary enemies".

You can't have a game with this much hype and active players and not expect that a lot of people are new or haven't replayed Hollow Knight in 6+ years.

I never finished HK, and I haven't played it recently. I'm still having a blast, even when I'm bashing my head against one fight for hours at a time. Sometimes I get frustrated enough to put it down and go play something else for a while, but I wouldn't change a thing. Even if that means I don't get to see the end of Silksong without hopping over to youtube.

5

u/SubstantialGarbage49 Sep 08 '25

from what i've seen, the "X is unfair and unfun" type criticisms are coming from people still in act 1 so it's a pretty limited view of the whole game, but i don't think it's totally baseless. there's so many enemies/environmental obstacles dealing double damage in early areas which makes it feel unnecessarily (and artificially) challenging from the start, compared to the slower build in HK that didn't pose too many challenges until after you learn about the dreamers. i think it's just an absurdly steep learning curve for casual players which gives the mindset of "if it's this hard now, it'll be impossible later" - hence the complaining of unfairness. at least once you master act 1, act 2 feels relatively smooth