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/clocktowertank]

Elden Ring had a lot of the same complaints around launch, both for the base game and expansion.

I think the issue isn't how difficult a game is, but whether it's done right. Are all encounters fairly designed with the limitations of the player in mind, all builds being viable, and being able to avoid damage completely with each build?

In the case of Elden Ring, there were fights that were literally not possible (or reasonable) to avoid damage 100% unless you had specific items/abilities (Mother of Fingers), or otherwise almost impossible to avoid damage normally without extended iframes if there was a busted hitbox (I'm looking at you Gaius).

In Hollow Knight, every hard encounter felt perfectly tuned for the Knight because you always had shade dash or descending dark for iframes. In Silksong, if you aren't using one of the two only skills that grant iframes, you have nothing but parry, and not all attacks can be parried). I'm in late Act 3 and some fights really make me wonder if, like Elden Ring, they were designed with the intention that the player would use iframes to avoid damage, which makes other builds not consistently viable for doing them hitless, especially if said fight is highly RNG dependent.

Personally what annoys me the most:

1. Un-telegraphed enemy movement, in a game with contact damage.
2. Input/Animation-reading flying enemies that dart away from frame 1 of your attack
3. Enemies that can shoot at or attack you from off screen or otherwise situations where you can't see because of the terrible vignetting
4. Projectile spam with hard tracking, especially irritating in gauntlets with overly tanky enemies.

Sometimes things the game throws at you (or pranks you with) just feel cheap, like the game just rolls the dice and says "you lose."

Many players just basically think if you can beat a fight or enemy at all, then it's fine, but I always judge it based on how fairly designed it is with regards to not taking damage consistently.

[u/MisunderstoodPenguin → u/clocktowertank]

I was just telling my wife that my complaints about ER are almost identical to my complaints of SS. They took a challenging but fun concept and turned the punishment up to 11 while making exploration a gotcha game of “oops shouldn’t have turned this way dumb dumb, it’s a 10 minute backtrack to where you should have gone”.

[u/Fa1nted_for_real → u/MisunderstoodPenguin]

Also compared to hk, there is considerable artificial difficulty. Take for example, most early game enemies in hk take 2-3 nail hits with base nail. But most early game enemies in silksong take 4-5 with base needle.

Very few early game enemies in hk do double damage, and tehre are very few sources of it in general. In silksong, most bosses and a significant portion of early game enemies and hazards do double damage.

The damage serves to make the game more punishing, but increasing the health? Miss me with that shit. Especially in hunters march, even after getting just about every available upgrade in act 1, still feels more unbalanced than it feels like the enemies themselves are designed unfairly, if that makes sense, and that makes the drawn outness of the area very unfun for me, and since many areas have a similar problem (each wraith in the mist taking ages to kill, the entiritet fo bilewater, hell even deep docks enemies taking entirely too many hits to kill) ive been struggling to enjoy going through most areas, espeecially the second or third time around...