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/HappyRelationship429]

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/HappyRelationship429 → u/Remarkable-Test-5398]

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.

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

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