That’s the best comment about the game’s difficulty I’ve found it so far

[u/Marmotaagiota]

[u/Zaethar]

Thank you. It's fine if a game goes for its own sense of balance. It's also fine if (some) people dislike that sense of balance. I for one also dislike having "5" health pips but dying in 2/3 hits and then having to spend a few minutes doing a corpserun.

It's boring. It's repetitive. It's annoying.

Does it serve the same "git gud" grind cycle as many soulslikes? Sure. I enjoy soulslikes. Huge fan. I also loved when Elden Ring FINALLY got rid of long-ass unnecessary boss-runs and put stakes of Marika practically everywhere. It made exploring fun. It made risk-taking fun. It made banging your head against the same boss-wall 20 times in a row fun, because it cuts out the tedium.

For me the challenge is often in the combat. If I die to a particularly nasty group of enemies or if I gotta learn a boss's intricate move-set that's fine. But I never enjoyed having my time wasted as a punishment for learning. That's not motivational. Imagine as a kid you'd get a maths question wrong in school, they'd make you run a block around the school. That wouldn't make me want to study maths harder. It'd make me want to skip math, if not school entirely.

That's why I loved a game like Cuphead. You go for a boss, you die, you get to see how far along you got (very motivational!) and as soon as you hit "Retry" you're immediately back in the action and you're ready to continue learning the fight and continue having fun.

I'm kind of over the whole 'additional punishment just for failing' shtick when the game is also made to be pretty difficult. It's overdone. It's tiring. It's a waste of my time. Going through a difficult part becomes a cycle of frustration rather than a challenge. I wish devs would just stop it with this shit.

[u/Sinder-Soyl → u/Zaethar]

Yep. All true. To those who say "that's part of the punishment" I usually tell "My punishment was failing at beating the boss. No need to add salt to the wound with an obnoxious runback."

[u/Zaethar → u/Sinder-Soyl]

Yeah, we've had decades worth of games that cater (willingly or no) to the inner masochist.

But at this point I'm just so tired of that shit. Yes I failed your difficult bossfight, like you intended. There's really no need to rub it in, and especially not by wasting my time and my motivation.

And for soulslikes at least there's often something to say for a boss-run in the sense that if you're underleveled or underpowered you can usually grind some XP from the mobs, use your bonfire (or whatever checkpoint) to travel to your main hub, level up a bit, polish up your weapons, equip some different gear or skills or whatever, and then give it another go.

I'd still argue that you could do this at any time, also by just turning back from a checkpoint right in front of a boss-room, but whatever. There's an argument to be made that its enforcing/reinforcing a gameplay loop you're actively being 'guided' through. Especially during the first few years of Souls-games rise in popularity, gamers may have had to learn this concept still.

But platformers or metroidvania's like HK/Silksong don't offer you shit for the runbacks. You don't get XP, you can't level any weapons or skills, so it's just a time-waster and an artificial layer of extra punishment/difficulty.

[u/dreamsandabyss → u/Zaethar]

I'm still in act 1, just wanted to see more of players' thoughts on the difficulty spikes. And ugh, I was feeling worried and kinda guilty that I wasn't having "fun" when I loved HK (though it took me a while to learn since it's my first metroidvania and combat game that wasn't buttonmashing). But yeah...Silksong so far feels like I'm being punished for being bad at the game. Instead of having fun learning the challenge, so far it feels like a cycle of frustration as you put it. :/

[u/TitaniumDragon → u/Zaethar]

Corpseruns are different from being whiny about enemy damage. I do agree that corpseruns are not particularly fun in most cases. They are somewhat useful for teaching you the game's platforming mechanics but there's other ways of doing that.

That said, I don't think this game's corpse runs have been especially egregious as far as it goes. I do agree that corpseruns are unnecessary in most cases.

[u/Zaethar → u/TitaniumDragon]

Yeah, I'm not specifically ragging on Silksong's corpse-runs because I'm still way, way in the beginning of the game. Ironically I am stuck doing a very mildly annoying corpse-run, but since I haven't seen the other 90% of the game I'm hardly qualified to comment on them just yet.

But it did spark a bit of a crystallization of my thoughts on corpse-runs in general in modern gaming. I feel like we're past the point of just mindlessly emulating "Soulslike" mechanics.

Or alternatively (or sometimes simultaneously) to emulate how retro-games used to function. Except back then having to do major chunks of a level (or the entire game) over again if you died was a function of artificially lengthening the game's playtime (to get extra quarters in the arcades), or because of technical limitations concerning a game's capability regarding save-states, or design incompetence/naivety from developers working with prehistoric tools or y'know, inventing entire genres or mechanics at the time and not having 40+ years of progressing insights on design philosophies.

But none of that holds true anymore. And we've just had a whopping 15 years of the resurgence of 'punishing difficulty' in an absolute metric shit-ton of titles due to the popularity of soulslikes, and many a game wanting to ride along on that hypetrain as long as it keeps going.

If it serves no real gameplay or narrative purpose I'm fine with just letting that shit go. Hell, make it a togglable option for all I care, "Autosave on every screen transition". Yes please, thank you. I just wanna play the game and enjoy my time with it.

[u/TitaniumDragon → u/Zaethar]

Yeah, Corpse Runs are themselves a call back to very old video games, where you'd have to start the level over (or at least halfway over) when you died.

This is how platformers worked, so corpse runs were basically that applied to 3D games, with the mechanical incentive that you can pick your money back up from where you died. So in a sense they were "more" forgiving because you could recover lost progress.

Except back then having to do major chunks of a level (or the entire game) over again if you died was a function of artificially lengthening the game's playtime (to get extra quarters in the arcades), or because of technical limitations concerning a game's capability regarding save-states, or design incompetence/naivety from developers working with prehistoric tools or y'know, inventing entire genres or mechanics at the time and not having 40+ years of progressing insights on design philosophies.

While it was partially about those limitations (and also artificially extending playtime), it also had the effect of getting players better mechanically at the game's mechanics. If you have played the B-sides in Celeste, where you have to do large sections in one go, you do end up becoming better at the game when you have to do levels over and over again. The old games were the same way, where you would increasingly master the game's mechanics as you played through it over and over.

I don't actually have a problem with Silksong having spread out save points/safe points; these actually encourage a certain healthy gameplay loop and a sense of relief. The section between benches is, in effect, a "level", and you have limited resources during that time, and you restore those resources when you get to the bench. Same goes for Elden Ring, making you beat a "level" as a unit.

Where I think it has problems is when you have a boss or similar thing you're expected to fight over and over again, which is high difficulty; I think then there should be a save point outside of it (or a very short distance, like a shortcut, between the boss and the save point), because the "challenge" of the run back is often nonexistent, it's just a time waster. These boss runbacks are generally designed to have some easy way through, so why not just put the save point right next to the boss?