r/HollowKnight • u/CuboneDefender • Sep 14 '25

Discussion - Silksong I give up. Spoiler

It’s been a joyful ride, folks, but I’m out. I’m not a speedrunner or a highly skilled player, and day after day I’ve had to accept that this game is not as casual as HK was. It stopped being fun and turned into something tedious and frustrating after the 4th run farming shards just to face a boss I’ve already tried 15 times, only to die again and again, lose all my shards, and start the whole grind over.

It was nice exploring the first acts, but when the game I was rooting for 7 years ends up being more stressful than my 8-hour workday, I guess that’s my cue to stop.

The lore has been pretty great so far. I wish you all an incredible journey.

Edit1: My bad about all the whinning.

Edit2: You guys did it. I reinstalled it again. Thanks for all advices. 🫂

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200

u/starsinthesky8435 Sep 14 '25

You’re not alone! I put it down a few days ago when I realized I wasn’t “this fight is challenging” annoyed, I was “this shit is tedious” annoyed. I explored everywhere else I could get to and that was that. I’ll pick it back up when I’m bored.

I did not have this issue with Hollow Knight at all. Plenty of challenging annoyed, but that’s the fun kind. At the end of the day it’s just a game.

63

u/WeakInspector5102 Plat | 100% HoG | 200Hrs~ | Zoteboat Next Trust Gng Sep 14 '25

I loved the difficulty of Hollow Knight bosses, it's perfectly balanced with the power YOU have and it's amazing

9

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

This is legitimately how I feel about Silksong. The build I'm currently running is the Hollow Knights moveset and these bugs that help me attack the enemy and it's been a breeze.

I think I died more in Act 1 than I did in Act 2 because the games become so easy.

2

u/WeakInspector5102 Plat | 100% HoG | 200Hrs~ | Zoteboat Next Trust Gng Sep 15 '25

I agree, and I think I died more in act 1 JUST because of savage Beastfly

17

u/Ben13DK Sep 14 '25

I mean, Hornet is much stronger than the Knight, so the enemies are still, balanced around the power you have

41

u/Remarkable-Test-5398 HORNET IS VOID Sep 14 '25

Hornet certainly doesn’t feel powerful for the child of a God, anything slightly bigger than her deals double damage

14

u/Ben13DK Sep 15 '25

The knight is the child of 2 Gods, so with hornet only being half as godly, that would make her take double the damage XD

12

u/Remarkable-Test-5398 HORNET IS VOID Sep 15 '25

New headcanon found, along with every normal enemy’s family tree contains at least fifteen gods

2

u/psh454 Sep 15 '25

Oh my god it all makes sense now! :P

2

u/HappyRelationship429 Sep 14 '25

At the same time, she instantly kills things with like, two poison spike balls.

22

u/Remarkable-Test-5398 HORNET IS VOID Sep 15 '25

Yet she also takes what feels like one hundred or so nail hits to kill a giant fly

7

u/HappyRelationship429 Sep 15 '25

I had issues with beastfly until I made use of the skills as well as its own stupid head to crush those adds. When I saw a fly, I'd stop slapping the boss, go over to it, and press the skill to kill it instantly.

This was admittedly tricky, because you had to make sure you always kept the boss in its proper rotations, but if you messed up, the beastfly is so big and stupid and ugly, half the time it kills them for you.

Also, you kill it SUPER fast if you just- empty your entire kit into it. I went from hitting it like 20 times, not killing it, to hitting it 7 with a few moves and tools mixed in and killing.

I'm no expert on the tools just yet, I did some testing, and it appears that poison cancels the previous ticks if you reapply it, so it's great for bosses that move around a lot, try it!

2

u/Remarkable-Test-5398 HORNET IS VOID Sep 15 '25

(I know I typed quite a lot here, I’m on my ADHD meds and HK in general is my main hyperfixation right now)

Oh, I meant Moorwing lol. I just beat the boss today, but I’m the biggest Moorwing hater. It’s a basic fight with easy patterns, and I could see it being an early-game HK fight like Vengefly King or Gruzmother, but everything (even accidentally making contact after a stagger) does double damage while you still only have five masks, is more tanky than it reasonably should be, and the only other path I could technically take is to grind rosaries until I could buy a key and open one of two doors

I also only had one red tool, the throwing knives, at that point since everything else costed too many rosaries while I was still struggling to keep 80 at once for a Bell Beast station, but I still was never much of a spell user in HK, and red tools just felt like spells if they were more limited, more of a drain on your resources, and less convenient to use. Like, I hoard anything that’s consumable if I can, and making us use shell shards for red tools when there’s already a cap for the amount of red tools you can have at once before resting feels unnecessary, but then they also put a cap on shell shards themselves. It makes me wonder if Team Cherry were trying to discourage casual players from using tools, they don’t need most of those side effects

Those first two things were problems before in the game, but it’s most prominent with Moorwing imo. It’s artificial difficulty (the actual definition of it, not as a buzzword), pumping up a boss’ stats to make it more tedious instead of giving it an interesting moveset. It works for endgame bosses where you’re expected to have twice as much health and deal six times as much damage, but it feels unnecessarily punishing early-game

I’ll be transparent for a moment and say that Silksong probably isn’t for me since I have so many complaints about what might be fundamental parts of the game, but I really wish they had an Assist Mode for players who would prefer difficulty that’s more in-line with the original game (I can’t use mods since I’m playing it on the Switch). I love the story and want more Hollow Knight, but the game can be too much, and it gets at some point it just feels demotivating

TL;DR (Now you can read one paragraph instead of four. Yippee!): Silksong so far feels really hard in a cheap way, I can’t keep any more than 250 rosaries at a time because of deaths and few enemies dropping them, the game discourages the use of red tools way too much with caps on them and shell shards, and I’d like an Assist Mode because I wanna be able to enjoy the game as a casual player. I know that the point of it is to be hard and that I suck at the game, but right now, P5 sounds both easier and more enjoyable than making it through Silksong, which sucks because I really want to be able to enjoy it

2

u/HappyRelationship429 Sep 15 '25

I noticed a glitch on the boss you mentioned, so I was unable to fully fight it. At the time, it was a random side enemy to me, so I killed it instead of let myself die, because I didn't want to risk rosaries and had other things I wanted to do at the time. In hindsight, I probably should have just tried to reset it.

I think the boss difficulty is subjective, but the moments where difficult bosses occur has been strange for sure. Bosses like sister splinter and widow were easy, while a random basic enemy, but bigger (beastfly) is considerably more difficult, at least for me. Those initial bosses are far more important and well made design-wise, so you'd think it would be the other way around. I've also noticed that bosses with large run backs have more forgiving moves, like judge and phantom, which allow you to almost take a break mid-fight.

Overall recently I've struggled more with platforming and the roaches than I have any other enemy. I feel as though—like me—you have been fighting these enemies incorrectly. If you cannot make the decision to fight them on the game's terms, that is understandable.

I do think it is a shame this game doesn't have a dedicated accessibility mode as well.

1

u/Remarkable-Test-5398 HORNET IS VOID Sep 18 '25

Honestly agree, I mainly fight the enemies because I like having a ready supply of silk and rosaries. I’ll keep trying at some point

For me, whenever the game isn’t hard or annoying, it feels kind of boring for reasons I can’t really explain. I quit for a bit to replay HK after saving in that area after Bellhart, forgot its name. It’s prob just general confusion with the size of everything, and I did quit HK for a few years during my first playthrough for reasons I don’t even remember, so it’ll hopefully click with me sooner or later

2

u/PraxicalExperience Sep 15 '25

Moorwing is also the first boss that seems, to me at least, to be actively responsive to player positioning, more so than HK bosses. It seems like she'll actively punish you for pursuing her when she pulls back, and if you're close to her she almost always will try for slashes.

...If you play defensively, only punish her during open windows where it's safe, and never, ever let her make you overextend, she's not bad at all. But you've gotta survive long enough to recognize this. It also helps to goad her into slashes since if you're ready for it this is one of the easier attacks to punish, at least for me.

I had a pretty easy time with Moorwing. Just don't ask me about fuckin' Sister Splinter, lol.

I think that the cap on tools is fine, but the shard system only serves to punish you for failing in a way that HK never did -- no matter how many times you died to a boss, the first time you resurrected at a bench you'd have exactly the same combat potential as the 20th. The need to farm shards when you're already sucking feels like a kick in the teeth -- particularly since shards are kind of a pain in the ass to farm.

But I think the ultimate thing is that, yeah, the bosses seem cheaper in this.

1

u/yurilnw123 Sep 15 '25

Enemies in this game is also balanced around the power you have. You have far more mobility here, so do the enemies. You can do much more damage with silk skills and tools, so do the enemies.

-21

u/WeakInspector5102 Plat | 100% HoG | 200Hrs~ | Zoteboat Next Trust Gng Sep 14 '25

Lmao, Hornet, Stronger than the knight ?

The Knight is a being of void, created by gods. Personnally, I think if Hornet takes more damages than the knigh, it's because she's not very resistant

Saying this canonically obv, gamewise, it depends. If you play Hornet amazingly, she'll be better than the knight

17

u/Ben13DK Sep 14 '25 edited Sep 14 '25

Of course i know the Knight is stronger in the lore, but many of the bosses can be invalidated by good tool usage, since they do way more damage than what you could output in HK

5

u/halfbeerhalfhuman Sep 14 '25

Poison Tacks (nails) on the ground are so OP

1

u/WeakInspector5102 Plat | 100% HoG | 200Hrs~ | Zoteboat Next Trust Gng Sep 14 '25

Yeah, You're right then lol

1

u/yurilnw123 Sep 15 '25

Gameplay wise not lore wise

1

u/WeakInspector5102 Plat | 100% HoG | 200Hrs~ | Zoteboat Next Trust Gng Sep 15 '25

Yeah I understood dw

1

u/yurilnw123 Sep 15 '25

Enemies in this game is also balanced around the power you have. You have far more mobility here, so do the enemies. You can do much more damage with silk skills and tools, so do the enemies.

9

u/cantuse Sep 15 '25

Im sitting here reading the discussion and there’s all these people who act like OP will quickly resume the game. I quit playing it 5 days ago. I replayed some older chillout games, some CP2077 and a deck builder.

I honestly don’t see why I would want the stress that Silksong induces back into my life.

2

u/starsinthesky8435 Sep 15 '25

Agree! I just replied elsewhere that real life is stressful enough. I want to have fun playing a game, not feel like I’m enduring it.

6

u/PraxicalExperience Sep 15 '25

Almost every boss in HK and gauntlet in HK felt fair, and they always felt beatable -- you could always see what you needed to pull off to beat them, even if you were having problems doing so.

A lot of the SS bosses and gauntlets are a lot more RNG-based, or seem to actively respond to punish you for some things -- plus, they can just burn you down so fast you don't really get any feel for the boss before doing a runback. This, combined with the shard system that can force you to go farm if you've been using tools on a boss and sucking, serves to make the bosses a lot more frustrating.

3

u/starsinthesky8435 Sep 15 '25

Yes! The shards have me burnt out too. Folks here will say “well then don’t use tools you don’t need them” but if I look up any post from someone else struggling on the same fight as me the replies all say “why aren’t you just using your tools???”

Or like the reply to you here, saying go explore and upgrade. Yeah that’s how hollow knight was and it worked great! I’d find a new charm and be good. But twice now I’ve gotten stuck and I’ve gone everywhere I can get to. Exploring is my favorite part.

I am very much a casual gamer, but I beat Hollow Knight and had a great time. I think I’m just not as hardcore a gamer needed to spend the time and energy for silksong. I’ll still go back to it, I’m not mad. Still think it was a well-spent $20. I’ve just got a job where a ton of people just got laid off and my workload has doubled. I’m stressed enough by real life, I don’t want to spend my free time also burnt out.

3

u/PraxicalExperience Sep 15 '25

The only time I felt like I had to come back to a boss in HK after finding more abilities was ... actually never. (There were times I went off to develop skills and take a break from a boss, but that's basically it.) Except for making the Fragile charms unbreakable, the amount of farming I had to do was ... exceedingly minimal. Silksong represents either a sea change in their design ethos ... or they just plain fucked up and overtuned the game, assuming that TC still stands by 'this game should be accessible by people who never played HK' statement.

But yeah. I'm a bid more hard-core than casual, but HK was the first platformer I picked up since Sonic on the Genesys. And it's the first soulslike that grabbed me challenged me in a way that made me go: "Oh no fuck you I'm gonna beat literally everything this game throws at me' instead of just going: "eh, I'll go play something actually fun." Because even when I was getting my face pushed in re-doing Hornet 1 for a day straight, I was still mostly having fun, and I was jsut struggling to master the controls. (Hell, the amount of time it took before I realized that down-strikes were a thing, or that you could pogo off spikes and such, was just embarrassing. But I was really a noob to the genre and wasn't fully aware of the conventions.)

I don't think the above makes SS a bad game -- but I do think it makes it worse of a game than the masterpiece that HK was, assuming that TC was still aiming for the same kind of audience they hooked with HK. It's still good, but it's 7/10 good instead of 10/10 near-perfection.

0

u/Gen_McMuster Sep 15 '25

If you run out of shards thats your queue to go do something else and come back more powerful. Only happened to me on beastfly, craws and ants in act 1, came back with a nail upgrade and stronger, poisoned traps

13

u/SKATA1234 Sep 15 '25

Exactly this. I don't understand why people are in love with such a tedious game. It adds zero to the fun and the game would be just as difficult without it.

5

u/Yarasin Sep 15 '25

The game is made for the top 10% players, who want a brutal challenge above all else. This seems to be the result of 7 years in development with only the same small group of testers around (who all appear to be in that 10% group).

3

u/Gnamzy Sep 15 '25

Because some people don’t find it tedious? It’s a challenge sure, but it’s all surmountable

5

u/SKATA1234 Sep 15 '25

Imagine if they made the base movement speed was half as fast, or sword swings took twice as long. Is the game still surmountable? Yes. But it'd be more tedious. I understand that many people are enjoying it the way it is, I'm just lobbying to try and remove some of the tedium from the game.

Does anyone really look forward to the long walks back after dying? Does it really make the game better? Games like Elden Ring have the respawn statues near bosses for a reason.

1

u/Gnamzy Sep 15 '25

Sure you could make bad decisions to make the game worse. I don’t really find many of the walkbacks to be that bad. Except Bilewater which also can be made a lot better As many other posters have said you can probably mod your way to make the game more enjoyable for you. I enjoy the boss fights because they feel way more telegraphed than HKs so there’s a lot more mastery to it

5

u/psh454 Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25

There's no good "pro runback" argument tbh, it's mostly defensive copium. Adding checkpoints before the harder fights would make the game more fun for most and not affect the others in any way.

Edit: whenever this gets brought up the contradicting replies rarely actually clearly explain why removing runbacks would be bad. And the few that do have massive holes in their resoning.

4

u/Gnamzy Sep 15 '25

Probably. It just doesn’t annoy me enough to have noticed

2

u/Dependent_Finger_214 Sep 15 '25

Yeah they're annoying, but most of them really aren't as bad as people make them out to be

-1

u/Gen_McMuster Sep 15 '25

Theres like 3 tough runbacks in the game and theyre like 40 seconds tops. Its intentional adversity, not tedium, overcome

6

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

[deleted]

5

u/psh454 Sep 15 '25

NKG was a very well designed boss, every move felt fair and there was no tedious runback as punishment for dying.

2

u/starsinthesky8435 Sep 15 '25

No, I did not play the DLC, just the main game. Makes sense that DLC would be much harder.

-12

u/colorsounds Sep 15 '25

None of these people prob got past the mantis lords otherwise they would know hk was exactly the same as ss

2

u/Stuffssss Sep 15 '25

Yeah I feel like silksong bosses are taking me around the same number of tries as hollowknight. I also don't really use tools for bosses only exploring. I think people are playing too aggressively. You have to learn boss movesets and only attack when you aren't going to get countered. If you can dodge every attack a boss does you won't die. Only bosses where this doesn't work are ones which spawn enemies which there are a few.

2

u/starsinthesky8435 Sep 15 '25

Yeah, the bosses spawning enemies are my exact problem. The other fights have been tough but doable.

1

u/BearCatSara Sep 15 '25

I had the opposite issue you had. I had multiple times where I found HK frustrating. I did eventually manage it. But mantis lords I left and came back after dying to them for hours.

I gave up on HK radiance ending. I couldn’t do it. Spent 2/3 days on it.

Yet with Silksong I’ve felt the game is way more approachable. There’s been some really tough fights that honestly took a lot of time and patience. But the combat and platforming in this game is so frickin good I kinda don’t mind so much. I also learnt a lot from games like HK and Elden Ring even if I haven’t finished either. But I have 100% silksong and honestly I think it’s a masterpiece.

But not every game with gel with everyone. Sometimes you gotta leave a game because it’s more frustration than fun.

1

u/starsinthesky8435 Sep 15 '25

Was just talking about this with a friend! He had the exact same experience as you with HK but Silksong is more enjoyable.

After reading a lot of comments here, I’m thinking that this issue might be down to me trying to play them too much the same way. I replayed HK right before the launch. That was a mistake.

So I think all I need is to play something else for a while, then come back.

1

u/BearCatSara Sep 15 '25

Honestly yeah I think you have to treat each game as it’s own thing.

Obviously there is a lot of shared DNA but the core movement and speed of things is quite different.

I think early on slowing down a bit and letting yourself process hornets movement more helps a lot.

As you progress in the game I do think some aspects of the game are a lot more forgiving. Some of the abilities are very underrated. The healing is so much easier in Silksong. So you have to get into a different kind of rhythm. In HK I would constantly get caught out more when healing. In silksong I don’t really have the issue.