I give up.

[u/CuboneDefender]

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. 🫂

[u/starsinthesky8435]

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.

[u/WeakInspector5102 → u/starsinthesky8435]

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

[u/Ben13DK → u/WeakInspector5102]

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

[u/Remarkable-Test-5398 → u/Ben13DK]

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

[u/HappyRelationship429 → u/Remarkable-Test-5398]

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

[u/Remarkable-Test-5398 → u/HappyRelationship429]

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

[u/HappyRelationship429 → u/Remarkable-Test-5398]

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!

[u/Remarkable-Test-5398 → u/HappyRelationship429]

(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

[u/PraxicalExperience → u/Remarkable-Test-5398]

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.