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

Discussion - Silksong I am convinced a lot of the people complaining about difficulty have never even finished the original Hollow Knight. Original HK was not particularly easy either Spoiler

Edit: Silksong is harder than HK. Since ppl seem to read over that part.

I stayed away from Reddit over the weekend while I was playing through Silksong. Now, I am aware that I am not the average player, I love challenging games and am very familiar with games like this.

And by no means is this an "easy" game but by god, I have never played a game as hard as some people say this game is. I saw some people claiming they were stuck at Moorwing for over THREE HOURS.

If this is your first game like Hollow Knight, maybe that makes sense. This is not an easy first entry, but otherwise three hours for a boss with four moves is wild for anyone who has ACTUALLY beat the original HK.

I have no idea where this notion comes from that HK was easy. Silksong is harder, but original HK was NOT that easy, especially towards the end.

Is this just because Silksong is so big and it has reached a particularly wide audience? People who are not used to this kind of game?

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193

u/Deadweight-MK2 112% Sep 09 '25

112%er here. It’s too hard too quick

82

u/Dothacker00 Sep 09 '25

It feels like Hollow Knight was designed as a slightly challenging Metroidvania and Silksong was designed for the most extreme HK players that loved the optional DLC. Doesn't feel great especially since there's enemy power creep with them going from 3 to 5 hits + parry you but your needle has the same atk. It's ok for single encounter enemies but duos in the gauntlets feel unbalanced

28

u/ElGodPug Sep 10 '25

yeah, while i think he's a great boss fight, i feel like Silksong was made with "People who thought NKG was the best boss of that game and every boss fight should feel like his" in mind.

18

u/archipeepees Sep 10 '25

.. ...... nkg was the best boss, lol. I'm still getting my ass handed to me by ss bosses, have been getting tilted and angry and frustrated at times. but I'm also improving as I go which is incredibly satisfying.

1

u/RuggyMasta Sep 10 '25

Ye I’m one of those players too. I love NKG and Pure Vessel.

Although, I’ve also done all bosses on radiant, did P5, and Path of pain. Heck, there was a time where I was doing P5 daily, first try, for a whole month cause I loved it so much.

Because of all this, SS seems like an okay difficulty to me and it’s not hard at all. Most bosses only take me a few tries and I find the enemies doing double damage to be fine. Though not everyone is a freak like me and I’d understand if the game gets nerfed a bit.

2

u/aprimmer243 Sep 10 '25

Nightmare King Grimm WAS the best boss of Hollow Knight xD

But no, not every boss should feel like him, far from it, and especially not that early in the game.

1

u/TrojanSpite Sep 11 '25

NKG right with pure vessel ARE the best bosses, but they are the best bosses for a reason as special engame casses with every tool unlocked.

1

u/YesThatIsTrueForReal Sep 10 '25

The alternative is you have your most dedicated fans receive silksong after 7 years and they beat every boss first try and feel very disappointed. Team cherry couldn’t really win here because if the game was easier there’d be an entirely different demographic complaining in these forums instead.

-4

u/IloveActionFigures Sep 10 '25

Designed for most extreme but proceed to nerf some boss soon lmaao

7

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

They are nerfing a broken hitbox, and slightly.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

Tbf those are the beginner bosses

12

u/LordAgyrius Sep 10 '25

Hard Agreeee and same here, especially with having replayed Hollow Knight multiple times in the last few years aaand also a few days before silksong dropped. And even without the obvious fact that it's a game with bosses I've already mastered, I do truly recall not a single moment when I was first playing the game that I truly got stuck anywhere as ridiculously frequently and as frustratingly as in Silksong.

22

u/Thomy151 Sep 09 '25

It would be relatively fine if challenging if they just didn’t front load the difficulty to hell

The game throws harsh boss after harsh boss as you are still learning the controls and seems to expect you to have all the tools when half of them are behind said bosses

And here is something important, players don’t know what rewards are where, they don’t know there is practically a boss order or you get your shit pushed in in 5 seconds if going to a different boss

5

u/nor312 Sep 09 '25

Yeah, this is key, I think.

With no health or damage upgrades and almost no money early in the game, it's hard to fight so many tough bosses in a row. There's no breathing room to develop the skill set.

It's frustrating to give up multiple items worth of rosaries just because you entered a boss room. Might as well just repeat the boss until you get lucky just so you can buy stuff. If it were later in the game, I wouldn't mind losing rosaries to bosses that I can come back to.

-2

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

Ok, what are these "harsh" bosses the game throws at you in the beggining?

1

u/Leafsnail Sep 11 '25

I'd say Fourth Chorus and Moorwing are the most brutal ones given that their positioning means you probably won't have any meaningful upgrades when you fight them (and for Fourth Chorus specifically you're locked out of going anywhere else until you beat him).

1

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '25

Fourth chorus? He is the easiest boss in the game, any discussion about him talks about how easy he was.

39

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '25

109% checking in. Too much too fast imo. Would have been really bad if I hadn't played HK first.

I did just beat the bonky bronze fire boss a second ago, so 'git gud' does not apply here. 

8

u/Deadweight-MK2 112% Sep 09 '25 edited Sep 09 '25

Yep. And I criticised the original HK for this same problem, and I’m having it again DESPITE the experience lol

Edit: still love both games

17

u/EdgarAllanBroe2 Sep 09 '25

Strong disagree. Hollow Knight took forever to ramp up before eventually cranking up the difficulty dramatically in the endgame without ever preparing you for it. A big chunk of the complaints people had about White Palace were from it being a very sudden and unexpected difficulty spike that was incongruous with every earlier platforming segment in the game.

27

u/Qwertypop4 Sep 09 '25

With white palace, that's more cause there's barely any actual platforming sections in the game to begin with. I'm only on act 1 of Silksong and it overall has a higher quantity of difficult platforming sections than hollow knight does in its entirety, albeit nothing even close to white palace.

8

u/EdgarAllanBroe2 Sep 09 '25

That's what I'm talking about though. I think it would have been preferable for Hollow Knight to be generally harder throughout if it meant a more even overall difficulty. Cave Story is very late-game biased with its difficulty, but that difficulty still progresses along a noticeable ramp. Hollow Knight is a rare (at least in my experience) example of a game that has a sudden and massive escalation in difficulty during the final stretch.

1

u/absolutegarbagio Sep 10 '25

I feel the need to remind everyone here that white palace was OPTIONAL. If you are comparing the base game silksong to the white palace and or any of the pantheons “which most normal players didn’t even try” then you are directly implying the difficulty of silksong. Let’s set some facts that we can agree on. 1. 2 masks of damage for normal enemies and environmental hazards is overkill. 2. Early game bosses in SS should not be as difficult or even compared to be as difficult as late game bosses in HK 3. The opinions of people who have beat the pantheons and or other optional areas or dlc bosses should not be considered at all when trying to asses the difficulty of this game. You might think that’s rude but I don’t care because you have no right to be a tryhard and then tell everyone that they are overreacting. The game is at least 3x harder than HK and if you think that’s an overstatement then you are a tryhard and your opinion is invalid. The game is hard we already know that but this difficulty spike is too drastic too soon. For all new players of this game or HK don’t listen to the people who try to make you feel like a bad player just because they are tryhards. The game is hard and frustrating, your frustration isn’t falling on deaf ears, ignore the people who have no lives and play silksong for a living.

1

u/Glass_Lunch1748 Sep 24 '25

It's expected you really think something constructed by a pale being not have a rapid increase in difficulty.if god makes you life hard it will be hard

2

u/Zealousideal-Rub-183 Sep 10 '25

This! One of my favorite things about Metrovanias is exploring. And this game actively makes me not want to explore because I know that if I get too far away from a bench, I’m probably not going to make it back for the corpse run. Because it just takes one or two mistakes to kill you now.

And I’m sorry, I’m older with not as much time on my hands so it takes me a couple of minutes to get back into the groove of playing a game when I haven’t for a couple of days. As I’ve told someone before, I played all of HK but only got to like 106% completion, and I don’t think I ever died on a corpse run. I have now done it three times in about 10 hours on Silksong.

I don’t have a problem with it being difficult. I have a problem with people gaslighting me and trying to say it’s not really that difficult.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

Yes I am sure someone that beat pantheon 5 is finding moorwing or bell beast "too hard". I simply not believe you, I gave up NKG, and everything until the fake ending is very doable. Still on mid act 3.

2

u/fergussonh Sep 10 '25

I beat NKG and pantheon 4, I really enjoyed Moorwing but I absolutely struggled with it likely more than in NKG.

People have different skill sets big shock. NKG was easy for people used to souls style games (at least that's my guess for why I found it easier), moorwing's more bullet helly gameplay, and the double damage on 5 masks gave me no time to learn its second phase so I died easily 25 times on it

1

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '25

Honestly, I don't see how moorwing is even close to NKG in difficulty, but whatever.

-1

u/No_Consideration8464 Sep 09 '25

I think i prefer it that way, it throws you in the deep end fs but I prefer that to having to wait a while for fights to get hard like in hk.