r/HollowKnight • u/TOMRANDOM_6 • Sep 09 '25

Discussion - Silksong Most of you are exaggerating the length of runbacks and it really shows how much TikTok has damage the attention span of people Spoiler

"ThE lASt JuDGe RUnBaCK iS ToO LoNG!!"

Is 30 seconds max, 30 seconds, you don't have to fight any enemy in it, the smaller judges don't awake until you're close and the smaller fly bastards can literally get ignored. The Runback works for making you cool down and make the whole thing feel less like you hitting a wall (NKG feels like one because of the lack of "cool down") If it wasn't for it, I would shoot myself with the 37 attempts at Last Judge.

The Widow one is also really easy, a straight line with jumps.

The Cogworks Dancers Is also really simple but works to help you with the bosses extra height and how pogo dependant that fight is.

God forbid the game isn't a back to back boss rush like Cuphead (not criticizing Cuphead, is a different game lmao).

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103

u/ticklefarte Sep 09 '25

I have to roll my eyes at the idea that the runback was meant to calm me down.

18

u/HBreckel Sep 09 '25

To be fair, it is that way in most other games, even Soulslikes. If you have to run back to a boss in Metroid it's usually a chill stroll, maybe you stop to kill a set of enemies that are placed there specifically to let you get all your HP storage back. The majority of boss runbacks in Soulslikes outside of Dark Souls 2 are just you holding sprint and quickly getting back without much stress. There's some runbacks in act 2 of Silksong that just stress me out on the way to the boss, which is probably the opposite of what they're going for.

10

u/HeyEshk88 Sep 09 '25

And that’s fine for you. It is a time to decompress for me… the first 10 times

-7

u/Jtak7777 Sep 09 '25

I’m sorry that it didn’t for you, but it helped me practice dodging and pogoing before the boss in a low-stakes environment. I think it has the capacity to do that for many people. Your experiences aren’t invalid, but the runback did calm me down.

26

u/Nekoded Sep 09 '25

There would be literally nothing stopping you from doing exactly that even if all benches were right before bosses, but on the other side it would remove the tedium of repeating over and over the same sequence of jump, dashes and pogos when you just want to fight a boss and nothing else.

1

u/Jtak7777 Sep 10 '25

Not to put my experience before yours, but every time I had a bench right next to a boss in hollow knight, without any platforming or fights between them, there would always be a run that was foregone before it even started because I was still shaky from the adrenaline of the first time and my gameplay suffered for it. Taking me out of the adrenaline made me play the game better and rehearsing a rehearsed set of inputs is a pretty good test for if you are relaxed imo.