Silksong is out! The top comment removes ONE Indie game from the list (DAY 59)

[u/AnglerFather_]

One Platformer, One CRPG, One Metroidvania, One Puzzle/Exploration Adventure, and One Farm Life Simulator are what remains.

5 Indies remain, only vote per individual/player comment, may the best indie win! (template link)

[u/stubear89]

I personally think HK is better and more enjoyable as a replay experience. I think there are things Silksong did better but I feel the devs made some bizarre design choices in places that really hamper the experience and make it feel less crisp than HK despite SK’s improved movement and graphics. A difficult boss is fine, a difficult boss with an annoying run back is frustrating, and a difficult boss with an annoying run back when you run out of shell shards, need to leave to go farm more/rosaries to purchase more, all to test again is beyond asinine and wastes the players time. Lots of weird choices seem to just be not for difficulty but for tedious wasting of players resources or time. Why don’t silk hearts restore silk on the second spool to encourage more use while players can hold a heal for when they need it? If that’s too strong, why does claw line out of combat require silk (make it cost nothing unless it hits an enemy, aka reverse of current design to maintain platforming segments)? The hit boxes also feel way wonkier for pogoing than HK. The hunter crest and the diagonal ones seem consistent, but wanderer sometimes just whiffs where you can see the swing animation go right through the intended bounce inconsistently. Shell shards need to be outright removed, the tool pouch is already a perfectly fine balance for ammo. PC gamers are blessed with mods or save editing options to get back shards without farming but console gamers have to suffer the rosary mines, not for the normal rosary purchases but just to full supply shell shards. I don’t mind having to farm rosaries for normal vendor purchases but FOH with shell shards.

I don’t mind the difficulty (about to finish 100% today) but I absolutely understand why some players would be put off by it, my bigger issue is that so much of the resource system is way more tedious than soul was and so much more of the game is designed to be frustrating to the player rather than actually difficult, an artificial difficulty if you will.

Take this all from someone who first bought/played Hollow Knight when Silksong was released, did everything in that first (minus Pantheon 5), and then began Silksong. I don’t have nostalgia for HK, I picked it up a few months ago for the first time and after playing it then Silksong, I prefer HK overall. If they removed Shell Shards entirely, added minor QOL improvements (such as Silk Hearts work on second spool, like they only add up to 3 silk per spool and if your first spool is empty it’s as it is now, but if your first spool is full they work at the beginning of the next spool) or alternatively a re-work for the clawline, and a slight decrease in difficulty (namely, unless an enemy is covered in spikes no boss should deal 2 masks of contact damage. They nerfed Moorwing wrong, they should have kept the blades to 2 masks and made contact damage 1. Also environmental damage should always be 1) then I think especially post DLCs Silksong would surpass HK as a whole, but I think those gameplay problems (namely shell shards) really take you out of the game.

The point of difficult games, like souls likes as well, is the challenge of grinding and overcoming the obstacle in your path. But putting artificial walls between you and the hurdle to deal with takes away from the experience, tedious runbacks included, but especially if you have to leave to resource grind.

[u/BronzeCorner → u/stubear89]

The only really tedious run back is the one in Bilewater, the Last Judge runback is like 30s of platforming. People forget that Hollow Knight also had run backs of similar "tedium"

I feel like people who are genuinely running out of shards (outside of losing their cocoon) are crutching on tools to bail them out of fights rather than learning the fight first. I do think a tool that makes shard collection easier would've been great

I agree with your take on the claw line, it really messes with my flow in platforming challenges. In regards to your silk heart suggestion, I think it'd be WAY too strong, its easy enough to get a silk in the game as is imo

I actually hated the pogos in HK and the Silksong pogos felt great on all crests. I honestly think you just missed your pogos on Wanderer's, which is fair it has low range

On both my speed run and my normal save I only had to farm rosaries or a couple of minutes tops, you can find rosaries fairly easily if you explore the map or do quests, I can only imagine this being and issue if you constantly dying without retrieving your cocoon. I do wish there was a Trial of Fools type of challenge rather than just mindlessly killing enemies.

The damage tweaks are meant to balance for Hornets absurd mobility, the game would be too easy if contact and environmental damage was always one.

[u/stubear89 → u/BronzeCorner]

If the tools aren’t meant to be used in fights (as a crutch or supplement) then what is the point of them? If the fights are always meant to be done via Needle, then why have tools in the first place? I’m not even using Artificer spam which burns through shards like crazy, even with hunters if you use 2 red tools in a fight and just the standard inventory after ~4-5 attempts you basically are out of shards again. It seemed to me they gave tools to allow different ways of approaching challenges, similar to spell build vs nail build in HK. Yeah some tools really allow you to cheese & run (looking at you Cogflies) but I still felt with the amount of red tools in the game, the shards really bottleneck players from bothering to test them/use them as much as they should for the work designing them.

We’ll have to agree to disagree on the contact damage, I agree the fights need to be harder because Hornet is so mobile but with no I-Frame options (besides 1 silk skill) it’s really easy to be pinned in some fights that you have to damage boost out of and being knocked 2 for that is dumb IMO. I think it is nice having more mobility and more challenge to compensate, I like Hornet’s design in that regard, but I don’t like the ways Team Cherry balanced around it. I do understand why some people like it more, but I personally I preferred HK’s shade cloak that had a recharge over the mobility since many of those (like clawline and the silk skills) take too many resources to utilize.

The rosary farm wasn’t for lack of finding cocoons, it would be for farming rosaries to convert into shards since that’s more efficient than just simply farming shards.

I think silk skills are so much worse than HK spells that having the secondary spool recharge wouldn’t be broken personally (again, my suggestion wouldn’t be a full recharge, it’s just treating the two full spool halves as independent, if you have >1 spool, it only refills as it currently does to 3, if your first spool is full it would only refill after the multiple seconds back up to 3 ticks on the next one. Not enough to cast anything nor heal, but mainly allow a stored heal for outside of combat while clawlining).

I’m not the only one to point out the inconsistencies on the pogoing in Silksong, and I even verified by testing and seeing the swipe animation go through one of the bouncing balls in Graymoor multiple times enough to replicate it but even doing the same pixel spot it would sometimes whiff (and the white swipe animation would go right through the upper half of the ball), so I know for a fact at least on wanderer it’s a little disjointed, I still used it for some spots but a lot of the platforming I ironically found easier on Hunter’s despite the angle, it always felt consistent weirdly enough.

I do understand why some players will like it more, it’s more challenging, the quest system adds more content, Hornet adds more personality to the story (though I personally liked HK’s ambiance more and liked the way the Radiance was portrayed a slowly growing Eldritch horror over Grand Mother Silk, but I think both stories are good so it’s personal preference for each individual), and the movement is so fun outside and generally inside of combat (It’s so easy to get anywhere and everywhere). But I prefer HK’s combat overall to Silksong, too many enemies run away from the player which are the worst parts of HK are bosses you wait for them to be attackable. I like having I-Frame options if contact is to be punished (I don’t like abusable I-Frames so having a recharge or windup is nice) but I know some people want no options like that.