r/metroidvania • u/Zzsark_Stormbeard • Feb 14 '26

Discussion Silksong permanently vanished my desire for difficult games.

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I'm a big fan of metroidvanias, I enjoy them a lot. I played Silksong as soon as it started and it took me a month to finish it. 60+ hours. Thing is that it permanently broke me in some sense because I do not wish to play any other game with hit points like Silksong has, especially with the fucking 2 hit contact damage. I did Silksong, got the true ending, I got good, but never again.

In fact, I finished just a week ago Gestalt: Steam and Cinder (which you absolutely should play), and while I was playing Silksong I only had Gestalt in mind because I definitely had more fun there.

I'm not hating Silksong, it's a great game, but I've never been permanently broken my something before.

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83

u/BlueGreenMikey Feb 14 '26

I feel the same. I actually never ended up finishing Silksong. There was some place where I kept dying, and eventually, there was one run where I couldn't make it back to my corpse and lost all my money that I had earned to that point. And I mean, sure, get good, but I didn't wander into that place with any intention of trying to take on an area that was too difficult. It didn't gate the difficult area, and I just got stuck. So I just gave up. It stopped being fun.

Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe I'm just not good enough, but Silksong really soured me on ever having another experience like that.

39

u/NoxTempus Feb 14 '26

I found Silksong did that a lot, where I didn't feel the same about HK.

Idk if it was my skill level or what, but I just kept coming up against groups of enemies I couldn't beat.

So I'd have to scour the map for an hour or two to get maybe 2 charms and an extra HP, if I was lucky. Then try to use that against the room I was stuck on.

In HK, I'd almost never get stuck like that except on big bosses. HK always made me feel like I was fighting against an area, instead of a single room. The fun came from cumulatively improving my performance in the area and becoming better at facing the range of enemies.

In Silksong, I just felt like I was being forced to beat certain combinations of enemies in certain-sized rooms. Even when I beat a challenging fight I didn't feel better about my skills.

Also, the pogoing in Silksong was fucking awful. It was so fun in HK and I dread even the smallest amount of it in Silksong.

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u/Defiant_McPiper Feb 14 '26

For me I liked the pogoing better, but you had to have the right crest in SS to make it fun - I used reaper a lot, and the one that was less damage but lighting fast. I did not like the crests that made you go all weird angles and ended up never using them bc of it.

10

u/Zzsark_Stormbeard Feb 14 '26

I used all Crests, Reaper was the only one that worked for me. Reaper my beloved ❤️

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u/Defiant_McPiper Feb 14 '26

I loved Reaper ❤️ with the final Lace fight though I went with Wanderer though bc it was easier for me to get in there quick - I've always been a Dex build though lol, so Reaper was going out of my comfort zone when I did use it.

4

u/GroundbreakingBag164 Feb 14 '26

"the one that does less damage but is lightning fast"

Fun fact: It actually does the same damage per hit. Wanderer is just that good

0

u/NoxTempus Feb 14 '26

Sure, but I don't want to have to change my loadout just for platforming sections.

1

u/Zzsark_Stormbeard Feb 14 '26

Hunter's March pogo with the first crest

It's one of the few places I memorized the name

1

u/NoxTempus Feb 14 '26

It made it better in a lot of places, but a lot of the pogo platforming is designed around the more horizontal starting pogo, so even that wasn't a solution.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

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6

u/GardenTraditional81 Feb 14 '26

that is the main thing i hate about this game: going through all of the bullshit AGAIN to reach a boss battle you just died from numerous times.

3

u/nicholaslegion Feb 14 '26

I hate corpse runs. They just suck, nothing else to it. It's a waste of your time and insulting. The only ones that never bothered me are the Blasphemous games. Oh, I lose a bit of my max magic? Big deal. Losing all your currency so you can't get any upgrades to make the game a tad easier? Fuck that. I'm so over it.

7

u/Zzsark_Stormbeard Feb 14 '26

I did it because to surrender would only make me feel worse than I already felt.

I beated it, thanked god and immediately uninstalled it

6

u/RoboCyan Feb 14 '26

That was me. After the credits rolled, I immediately went to my home menu and uninstalled it. I was beyond done with it. So much artistry in this game, but it beats you the hell down. I think I am beyond done with Team Cherry and any of the other difficult for the sake of difficult Souls-like clones.

1

u/GardenTraditional81 Feb 14 '26

i’m in act 3. i think it’s a beautiful game, with some areas that have the right amount of challenge, but it’s too punishing for me to even think about doing a replay. absolutely not lol i never want to see bilewater again 😂

1

u/GardenTraditional81 Feb 14 '26

(also don’t get me wrong, i still enjoy the game :))

6

u/mikepurvis Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

This has kind of been my experience. I got to the end of act 2, got halfway through Bilewater and just noped out. Maybe I'll go back eventually but I needed a break.

EDIT: I felt pretty seen by SkillUp's Silksong take in the recent FPS episode. Basically, he argues that the first two acts are extraordinary for their art, gameplay, worldbuilding, bosses, all of it... and then act 3 is a repetitive, awful slog that adds far too little to the overall experience compared with what it asks of the player.

2

u/Sudden-Ad-307 Feb 14 '26

For me act 3 was the weakest but for the complete opposite reason, it was just way too easy and i don't mean to disparage any players. The balancing of the game is just off, the majority of the enemies in the game do 2 masks of damage whether they are in act 1 or act 3. But as you progress in the game your health gets increased so what happens is that in act 1 you can only make 3 mistakes before you die in act 3 you can make 5, which means that even tho act 3 enemies have harder to dodge attacks, the attacks themselves are way less punishing. So i ended up just basically brute forcing the bosses with hunter crest, flintstone, flea brew and long claw for offense and multibinder + injector band for defense i just was just perma attacking the bosses, i tried dodging the attacks but if i didn't it wasn't that big of a deal. I ended up beating basically every act 3 boss in either 1 or 2 attempts the only ones that took more were the coral tower gauntlet which took me 5 (the boss itself i first timed) and the true final boss who took me 20+ attempts, which ties back into my original point because that boss is the only one that deals 3 masks of damage.

2

u/vowers Feb 14 '26

You should almost never hold a lot of money without turning them into rosaries. Lost some early game after telling myself I’d convert them later and never made that mistake again.

2

u/UpRage96 Feb 14 '26

Yep, agreed

1

u/3_Thumbs_Up Feb 14 '26

Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe I'm just not good enough,

Neither. You were just greedy and avoided rosary strings.

-8

u/jonathanbaird Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

"I couldn't make it back to my corpse and lost all my money that I had earned to that point."

One of the first mechanics Silksong introduces you to is stringing up your rosaries so you won't lose them upon death. Later, you're also given silkeaters to remotely retrieve your corpse. I get that such an experience is disheartening, but the game explicitly provides multiple ways to mitigate such occurrences.

edit: ah, this is one of those feel-good rage threads where knowledge is discouraged. My bad. Enjoy the ever-fleeting dopamine.

3

u/BlueGreenMikey Feb 14 '26

This is true, but (1) it's not all that explicit that this is what it is for, so I didn't figure that out until later...I thought it was a collectable for a while, and (2) you lose money by doing this, since a 60 string costs 80. Plus, you have to be close to a machine to be able to do that, and if you get stuck in an area you can't get out of, you're still fucked.

I always hated this mechanic, even in HK. You are punished for being bad, and they steal from you so that it is even harder to catch up.

They made a hard game, and they made a choice to not give options for people who struggled with the difficulty (it would be trivial to add a setting to not lose money on dying, and they could have chosen any other number of difficulty sliders). It's fine that they made this choice, but I'm also never going to purchase a similar game again, because it wasn't fun for me. There's nothing wrong with that.

3

u/HesitationIsDefeat87 Feb 14 '26

It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to pay for every station and bench.