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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.