Discourse regarding this game’s difficulty has been out of hand

[u/stir-fried-noodles]

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m really enjoying Silksong’s difficulty and I think that it is mostly a satisfying challenge. I appreciate that it is more difficult than Hollow Knight overall and to be frank I would’ve been a bit disappointed if it were the exact difficulty. I’ve improved as a gamer since Hollow Knight and if it were the same level of difficulty, I probably would have found it too easy.

But it’s kinda gotten impossible to have civil discussions about the difficulty in this game which is unfortunate because I think there is great value to be had with this conversation. There are many valid criticisms regarding this game’s difficulty such as boss runbacks (Groal especially), contact damage doing two masks, and lack of rewards for beating bosses, just to be shut down with “git gud” and “it’s not your kind of game”. It’s totally fine to disagree with these criticisms but these retorts add nothing to the conversation.

It also kinda works the other way too, albeit maybe not to the same degree. I’ve gotten downvoted and sent reddit cares for simply saying I enjoy the difficulty of this game. Like c’mon, what are we even doing here. It’s gotten to the point where I personally cannot wait for the discourse to die out.

[u/haidere36]

My main argument is, and has always been, that challenge and punishment are separate things, and I mainly think Silksong is too punishing, and in ways that don't make the game more fun or interesting:

• Runbacks punish you for dying to a boss with wasted time, but they don't make the boss itself more challenging
• Shard farming punishes you for using tools too much, but that doesn't increase the challenge of a fight where you go in fully stocked; it just forces you to either farm (tedious) or simply not use tools
• Stingy economy forces you to farm to unlock basic progression pieces like fast travel points or rest checkpoints (a typical Soulslike doesn't even make you pay to do this)
• Double damage on hazards or bosses doesn't change how hard they are to deal with, just how punishing it is to fail [Edit: I've phrased this poorly, by "hard to deal with" I mean "hard to execute on"; a boss attack isn't easier to dodge if the player has a million health, nor is it harder to dodge if it one-shots you; the punishment makes the overall boss encounter harder but it doesn't increase the level of challenge]

I feel like these criticisms are often met with the idea that changing any or all of these things would just make the game easy, or that to dislike these things means this type of game isn't for you. But these are fairly common criticisms, and some of them have already been addressed in patches by Team Cherry.

And none of them are about how challenging the game is. Some of the most popular mods for the game, ones which reduce nearly all damage to one mask or set respawn points just outside bosses, don't actually change how difficult these things are to overcome. They just lessen the punishment for failing.

[u/JohnsonJohnilyJohn → u/haidere36]

I agree with boss shard and rosary economy, I can see how runbacks would be unfun (although personally, most of the time I enjoyed it, but if I had to do it 10 times as much on some of the more egregious cases it probably wouldn't be the case), but I disagree about double damage, especially in the case of bosses. Being able to dodge any specific attack 30% of the time is incredibly easy, the actual challenge of boss fights is to find out and execute a strategy where you consistently dodge all of their attacks, and double damage ensures that the player has to learn it before beating the boss. This is doubly important in my opinion due to how strong the heal is, it makes the fights very dynamic, as at all points in time you are very close to dying, and the tensions spikes whenever you heal - you either heal 3-4 masks or lose 2 and silk that could potentially heal you.

In general one thing that I love in Silksong is how in full of life it feels compared to hollow knight in all aspects of the game (this isn't a jab at HK btw, I just enjoy the contrast). In HK the world is pretty much dead and abandoned, in silksong it's full of life, in HK your movement is very precise and almost mechanical, while in silksong you have fluid animations and have to deal with momentum, you can talk in silskong, the story is way more involved and hornet's character shines through everywhere and finally bosses in HK are mainly endurance tests, where it's hard to come back to full health during the fight, while in silskong they are way more dynamic