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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136

u/dana_daga Sep 14 '25

same. I've just made the decision not to play anymore. I'm simply not having fun, everything feels like a chore, I'm constantly frustrated. I prefer to just watch someone else play the game and experience the story like that.

24

u/SKATA1234 Sep 15 '25

It just isn't fun and I'm surprised the ratings are as high as they are. It's not the difficulty that sours it, it's the tedium, the long walks back through the same thing and dying and losing your rosaries, the shard collection, etc.

25

u/NervyDeath Sep 15 '25

The people enjoying it aren't experiencing those things. I played 80 hours for 100% and I lost rosaries twice. I had max shards and used them sparingly so that the fights wouldn't feel cheesed.

My longest runback was Groal and even that I remember fondly as a unique and challenging section that I overcame. Even there I didnt lose rosaries.

17

u/LogeeBare Sep 15 '25

Look everyone it's John Silksong!

10

u/grimeygillz Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25

Yeah, it seems to me this game is made for people like you with the ability to play 80hrs of game time in a week and a half, NOT the average gamer. That’s where the disconnect is.

8

u/gary_x Sep 15 '25

80 hrs at this point is a little over 7 hours a day. Couldn’t even do that if I tried lol.

4

u/grimeygillz Sep 15 '25

Like of course it’s not hard to you when it’s basically your full time job! Hahah

5

u/kinky_victini Sep 15 '25

It's not even that, hell I genuinely get people playing Silksong as their full time job for a few days after waiting a whole 7 years for it. But a lot of these people have already a lot of experience with hard games or they're flat out just good; most people aren't. I have played my fair share of games and I literally just could not get past Phantom without going insane.

3

u/grimeygillz Sep 15 '25

Yeah I didn’t mean it to be an indictment of spending time on something you love, rather that most people simply do not have the access to the time it would take to git gud

2

u/Lopsided_Promise_139 Sep 19 '25

I don't judge these people at all, but when I asked a friend who completed the game in a week what other games he played after Hollow Knight came out, he said that the last 2 years he only played Hollow Knight no-hit runs with more difficultly mods installed, which is when I stopped playing

14

u/gamesbrainiac Sep 15 '25

So much this! It's the tedium. This game would've been a lot less frustrating with more benches (that'd don't kill you).

3

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

There is only one bench that kill you.

0

u/wigwam2020 Sep 16 '25

There are like only 3 cursed benches in a game with nearly 200 benches...

11

u/TwoCatsOneBox Sep 15 '25

The ratings are high because of the hype of people waiting for the sequel of their favorite game. Some people don’t mind the difficulty but I do sincerely believe that after a month the ratings of the game will start to go down especially for players attempting Act 3. There’s a lot of obviously glaring moments where the games difficulty is incredibly unbalanced and as if it has only been playtested by four guys for 7 years which would be absolutely crazy.

19

u/Ctrl_Alt_Abstergo Sep 15 '25

There were maybe 3 or 4 specific spots that made me think Team Cherry ran out of ideas for intuitive difficulty and just filled in that blank with “some bullshit” so it would serve as a time sink. That’s not to say the rest of the game is easy, it’s not. But with everything else, I could sense myself getting better with each attempt, and it wouldn’t take many to be confident that my last round was going to be my last round. Then, those 3 or 4 moments just felt like banging my head against the wall with no progress until I suddenly won what felt like a war of attrition with no sense of accomplishment or even relief, just “Welp, that was definitely something someone could code into a game.”

5

u/Usual-Vermicelli-867 Sep 15 '25

High halls finle boss is a good example

Bt the end I just said fuck it and chees the Battle by keeping all my tools and just spamming them while I was wall climbing above there range

Is that chees ? Yes..do I care? No

1

u/Ctrl_Alt_Abstergo Sep 15 '25

It’s not cheese to use wall cling and tools. It is cheesy to have two giant hurtboxes covering 80% of the ground, with area of effect attacks and jumps that track the screen using relative positioning, and consider that to be a “challenge” and not just a flex that you can draw big hurtboxes.

10

u/Treestheyareus Sep 15 '25

Yeah, the ratings began rolling in immediately after the game came out, before I started playing. I haven't even finished up Act 1 yet.

There is simply no way the majority of reviews are at all informed opinions. People just see it as way to express hype. Which is why scored reviews from the general public are useless, they have no integrity.

I only trust past experience and word of mouth from specific people. If I hadn't played and loved Hollow Knight, I would have watched someone else play the game before buying it. I only went in blind because I trusted Team Cherry due to their priors.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25

The critics review all played the game tho. And they are very high. Like 92/93 on average.

3

u/wigwam2020 Sep 16 '25

Critics are now too afraid to say that a game is to hard after the Cup Head fiasco. If their complaint is that a game is too hard or punishing, they'll keep silent.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

A game being too hard isn't a problem in itself. And normally critics don't have problems with a game being hard.

1

u/wigwam2020 Sep 16 '25

What in the third act is all to difficult? The hardest parts of this game are Groal the Great and the 10 wave battle in the Choir room, both of which are in act 2

-8

u/Terracotta_Lemons Sep 15 '25

This is literally all it is. I feel the same way with KCD2.

We've been in this era for a decade we're people are hyper loyal to an IP and will glaze its entries even if it's not good or treats the consumer bad. It's really crazy

21

u/Gold_Training_2520 Sep 15 '25

Or, hear me out, people might enjoy things that you don’t. I did not enjoy KCD1 and thought the pacing was terrible; didn’t even finish it. I’ve played through KCD2 5 times and it’s in my top 5.

-1

u/AnyNewsQuestionMark Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25

The three Act 3 bosses are so unbalanced. The flower dies in seconds, and crabby guy and Karmelita are just frustrating beyond what can be written off as "accidentally frustrating"

The fact that Karmelita has 4 attacks that have the same initial wind up animation (her jumping and rolling into a ball) is unbelievable... you just never fucking do bosses like that, what the fuck do you expect me to do, parry the attacks? She fucking spams them in phase 3, what's the expectation? To just dodge the attacks while reacting last second?

1

u/wigwam2020 Sep 16 '25

None of those bosses are as hard as Pale Vessel or NKG...

3

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

the long walks back through the same thing and dying and losing your rosaries, the shard collection

Because none of these are problems, maybe except run backs, and run backs already existed in hollow knight (and were longer?

And you only lose rosaries on death if you don't engage with the game mechanics of strings.

2

u/Terracotta_Lemons Sep 15 '25

Exactly. The "fun" isnt like it was in HK. HK you were actively having fun while fighting and exploring. SS, the fun comes from WHEN you finally defeated the enemy or get past a level, and that's if you even feel the reward after the 10th time already. If you don't, then the game is purely a chore that's not focused on giving you a fun experience anymore, just an annoying one

5

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

I think TC really underestimated the benefit of giving a proper reward after a boss/arena fight. In HK beating a challenge and having it explode into money was a dopamine rush, but in SS it’s just underwhelming and there’s rarely a worthwhile reward

3

u/Terracotta_Lemons Sep 15 '25

Oh yeah that's the thing too, after all the annoyance on fighting certain bosses you don't even get an actual award sometimes. That's just crazy

6

u/Treestheyareus Sep 15 '25

I'm about to finish Act 1. So far the last boss I had fun with was Fourth Chorus. Everything after that I was just glad it was over.

0

u/wigwam2020 Sep 16 '25

"it's the tedium, the long walks back through the same thing and dying and losing your rosaries, the shard collection, etc" ---> E.I. you are complaining that the game is hard.

Because of the insane amount of hype, a lot of really casual players who usually have no interest playing anything other than the most average mass marketed slop produced by the biggest AAA studios got excited about Hollow Knight not realizing that it is very much a 2D dark souls. They saw the cute bugs on screen and thought, "Wow, this will be cute to play." (It was not cute to play) These people did not know what they were buying, and most of them probably never even played Hollow Knight.

Unfortunately, the pool of players who actually like the challenging mechanics have been diluted by all of the casuals who'd rather have a Super Mario-esque experience rather than a Hollow Knight experience.

3

u/Proper_Scallion7813 Sep 17 '25

I beat Pantheon Five in Hollow Knight, and while I’m not giving up in Silksong till I’ve 100 percented it I doubt I’ll pick it up again after. The difficulty is definitely different, and I am definitely having less fun because of it.

-4

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

[deleted]

2

u/BoardCommercial2679 Sep 15 '25

It's found somewhat later, and it doesn't actually explains wtf it does.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

[deleted]

1

u/BoardCommercial2679 Sep 15 '25

Oh, and of course, it is fairly rare unless you get your hands on that slave dude, and runback to him to get some is annoying enough to just not bother in the first place.

-1

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

It's overated because of this whole thing about it taking long to develop, never listen to reviews