> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun.
Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better about offering spectacle also. Some people play games mostly for skill mastery, others play games mostly for spectacle. This is a more nuanced distinction than "hardcore" vs "casual" - which fails to capture skill mastery extremists who are barely even gamers because they only play one game, or spectacle extremists who could hardly be called casual because they make gaming their entire life.
Most people care about both, but may care more about one side or another. Some games cater to one side or the other, and some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
TriangleEdge · 54m ago
Spoilers:
Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.
crooked-v · 41m ago
Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.
zaptheimpaler · 6h ago
Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.
Ferret7446 · 1h ago
I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.
FPS characters have invisible crab legs.
ehnto · 1h ago
Fluid and natural are pretty different concepts, perhaps "intuitive" better maps to what you mean? Humans aren't that fluid, certainly wouldn't be when it comes to vaulting, jumping etc.
Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.
When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.
kodisha · 1h ago
Funny, because the most fluid movement I have ever seen and experienced comes from a (25yo) FPS game:
I'm a huge fan of pixel perfect platformers. Chalk Cuphead and Super Meat Boy up on the list of games with a very natural connection between player coordination and game mechanics.
singhrac · 6h ago
Surprisingly overlapping set with games I’ve played and enjoyed a lot! Dead Cells was another that has a lot in common.
rpdillon · 6h ago
Yeah, agreed on all counts. I know it's divisive, but the movement in Doom Eternal was incredible. Double dash creating some amazing levels that would have been unthinkable in Doom 2016.
Sohcahtoa82 · 5h ago
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago.
Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, sometimes dying with the boss only needing one more hit to die, and I'm frustrated with myself because knowing he only needed to get hit one more time started making me greedy with my attacks, and so I take big hits to the face and don't back off to heal.
But what makes them fun is the dopamine rush when I finally succeed. A couple times, it felt damn near orgasmic. I've been playing video games for probably around 35 years and nothing felt as good as when I finally downed Morgott.
asukachikaru · 53m ago
I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it" but rather "I hope there aren't more bs like this".
My first play through of Elden Ring was a pseudo challenge run - capped at 125RL (pvp meta) and dual UGS style. No ash of war usage. No guides for bosses.
Malenia took me over a month, and probably over 500 deaths and I had to relax the ash of war usage (still limited by my very low FP)
The entire end game was brutal as this was before the buff for UGS animation speeds and most boss openings were shorter than anything than a crouch poke but I loved every minute of it. Just like learning to play something new on an instrument just cos you can't nail it in one try, one week or even one month doesn't mean you won't eventually get it.
One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like. The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress. I always play better on mute (but that's no fun)
vunderba · 2h ago
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
I haven't played Silksong yet and I know difficulty is rather subjective, but is it really that difficult compared to the realm of punishing platformers like NES Ninja Gaiden, Cuphead, Spelunky 2, the dark world portions of Super Meat Boy, etc?
I played the first Hollow Knight and didn't find it particularly hard. (not easy, but definitely not Dark Souls level punishing).
zeta0134 · 22m ago
Silksong starts very difficult compared to Hollow Knight, largely because there are many early foes that will deal 2 masks of damage. Those sorts of big attacks were generally reserved for mid to late bosses in Hollow Knight, and it caught even skilled players off guard. Hornet has a lot of mobility though, and a much easier time dodging out of the way, so once you adapt to her playstyle (be patient, dodge, and punish only when you know it's safe) the difficulty settles down and the game feels pretty fair.
As usual, you're gaining all sorts of tools and abilities along the way, and a few areas you can technically access early are best saved for later, when you have better gear. Some players aren't super thrilled with arena challenges, which this game has more of: suddenly 3-4 enemies in a small room all at once. I enjoy the meta challenge though: which tools can thin the crowd? Which minions should I focus to make the rest of the group manageable? If I can avoid taking damage, I can cast spells to thin the crowd much more effectively, etc etc.
petersellers · 1h ago
I find Silksong to be easier than at least Cuphead and Super Meat Boy, but I could totally see how one who isn't experienced with platformers may find it frustratingly challenging.
hinkley · 2h ago
I played Hollow Knight. I don’t recall if I defeated a single boss. I must have done a couple but several of the first you were meant to defeat remained unchallenged.
There are non boss fights that get more elaborate as you go, and let you pick up some new skills and abilities.
Another one like this that shouldn’t have been was Orie and the blind forest. If you play it on story mode, which I did because it was great eye candy and I just wanted to see it all, there a spot in the middle of act 2 where you have to land several double wall jumps in rapid succession with nearby spikes. Someone at that studio needs to be beaten about the shoulder with a clue bat about wtf “story mode” means. I never got to see the story and was too mad to watch someone else play it on youtube.
I’m fairly sure that my problem with both was the same. Only partly fat fingers and part was that certain movements don’t work identically on all controllers. Some things are counterintuitively easier on a D pad than a thumb joystick. It’s just not as crisp to go from one input to another 90 or 180° opposite. If your game mechanics are built on that, then some ports will be much harder to play.
You should either not port them, or adjust the timing grace period up on that hardware.
mikepurvis · 1h ago
Regarding controls, I have to play precise 2D games with a d-pad or I get immediately frustrated— that said, it was odd playing most of Celeste that way and then having to switch back to the thumbstick for the section at the end with the bubble comets.
moonshinefe · 2h ago
I wish I could go back and experience soulslikes for the first time! They really are a treat if you experience them as you describe (not everyone feels that way, but I certainly do).
You're in luck because that subgenre has exploded in popularity and there are a lot of good ones out there if you want to keep playing them these days. Elden Ring is one of the best though for sure.
OgsyedIE · 6h ago
I'm not familiar with the the named platformer titles beyond word of mouth and I may not have the free time to become so for a while but anecdotally I found some years ago that the movement controls in the games Titanfall, Doom (2016) and Titanfall 2 produced the same feeling of flow between the hands and brain the author articulates. It may come to pass that games will one day be benchmarked by neurological metrics in the superior parietal lobule and ACC of their players next to their frames per second, load times, ping stability, 1% lows and memory scaling.
danielodievich · 16m ago
This gaming household had two huge teenager fans of Hollow Knight, with t-shirts and hoodies merch. Us adults didn't see what the big deal was about but we are not their demographic. My wife tried it and found it too demanding for a middle-aged person. I watched a few minutes of Silksong over my kid's shoulder yesterday and commented that it looks a lot like Hollow Knight and I could see their eyes roll at me from behind them... as their character died for the 3rd time to some [admittedly cool looking] boss throwing needles at them. Oh to be a teenager again with lightning fast reflexes...
eviks · 2h ago
Think the article makes a good distinction between games being hard because they're bugged and not designed well enough, so your expectations are broken and you're frustrated by how (game) life is unfair vs. a perfected design with precise match between your skill and results
> movement is so finely tuned and so precise that I know deep in my bones that any hit or death is entirely on me. Of course, that in turn makes tangible improvement extremely visible. You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious
fishtoaster · 6h ago
> Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money.
This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.
I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.
Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.
Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.
burch45 · 1h ago
A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.
rikthevik · 1h ago
I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.
- Sell to the champion.
- Sell to the rest of the org.
- Sell to procurement.
- Sell to the implementation project team.
- Sell to the users and get adoption up.
Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.
Easy!
hujun · 6h ago
yes, and I think one big reason enterprise might not buy your product even if it is guaranteed to make/save $X is $ is often NOT most important thing to the people make buying decision, specially when it is not your own money to save or gain
mindwok · 6h ago
This is very true. Look no farther than the perennial problem of department heads spending all their budget to keep their budget. Decision makers rarely care about saving money in isolation.
temp0826 · 6h ago
Can confirm. At one point in my career (after reflection on the situation) I realized I had been made a champion by a subsidiary of IBM for one of their products. I found myself in some really bizarre meetings with our execs and their executive sales people that left me feeling like a puppet that was made to tell our CEO that we needed this. They really took us apart, It was all very slimy.
johnnyanmac · 6h ago
> going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.
mrinterweb · 6h ago
I've played a couple hours of silksong. I don't get the hype. Its a fine game, but I really think people are over hyping it. The internet hype loop on this game is turning me off on it. It's a nice metroidvania game.
StopDisinfo910 · 48m ago
It is extremely over hyped. The first game was already regularly over hyped. The community is famous for treating as some sort of masterpiece and reacting very strongly to any form of criticism.
Then you have a lot of opinion in the mix. I strongly disagree with the article for exemple on both the extreme difficulty, the game is difficult but manageable, the enjoyment, plenty of questionable design decisions are there purely to spite the player and it’s a game which often confuses wasting your time and being frustrating with being difficult, and the supposed elegance of the movement.
Silksong is really weirdly tuned in that it has mechanics which will actually only bother you and make your experience more painful if you are already struggling while being completely invisible if you are flying through. And the punishment will be grinding, so wasting your time, not actually forcing players to encounter things which would make them better. Amusingly for a game so long in the making, I think it suffers from a significant lack of play testing.
Gigachad · 1h ago
I’ve had multiple friends insist that I absolutely have to play this game. But I just know I won’t like it because I don’t like any of the other games that are like it. This game seems to be the labubu of gamers in terms of social media hysterics.
thedrexster · 6h ago
Savage Beastfly killed me 43 times in a row. :/
galleywest200 · 6h ago
I too had trouble with this boss but eventually made it. The fact it summons little friends is the problem, so hard to dodge 2+ the boss!
par · 6h ago
Cute article but skong isn’t as hard as op makes it out to be. I wonder if he’s played any soulsborne games or even hollow knight. Git gud!!!
kittoes · 6h ago
Don't so easily dismiss the opinions of others. For certain individuals it is indeed the hardest game they've ever played. I've cleared Steelsoul 100% in the OG Hollow Knight and would argue that Silksong is definitely the more difficult of the two.
MikeTheGreat · 3h ago
Ok, this is as close as I'm ever gonna get to having a real reason to post this on HN, so here goes:
Played all the soulsborne and 100%-ed HK. Except the last pantheon, I couldn't ever beat ascended moth
KingMob · 2h ago
This reminds me how my wife kept asking if I was enjoying Cuphead, because she hear a non-stop stream of curses from the other room.
kevinwang · 6h ago
I remember reading an essay (probably from here?) about how a great way to build a game is to build it around a "toy" -- something that is pleasurable to simply interact with, even without objectives. I can't find it anymore -- the closest I can find is https://medium.com/@keerthiko/toys-to-games-25d35b40425d but I don't think it was that, although it's based on the book "The Art Of Game Design" which may have been a common inspiration.
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
wonger_ · 1h ago
Yes, movement in SSBM is so satisfying. Nothing else comes close for me. All other games just feel boring in comparison. A classic example for those who haven't seen it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpOaQxrsaqI
dmbche · 53m ago
It's promotional material, but I enjoyed what the Get To Work devs put together to show how they built the game up from kind of the same approach (all on youtube)
SOLAR_FIELDS · 6h ago
Sounds like Tynan Sylvester’s game design book (Tynan Sylvester created Rimworld)
cousin_it · 6h ago
I think Hollow Knight and Silksong are mostly special for their art style, the movement feel is pretty average.
Among 2D platformers in general, I think the medal for best movement feel goes to the Fancy Pants Adventure series. (You can still play it online on sites that have Flash replacements, start with the 4th game because it has everything.) But that's a deliberately easy game, you just run through the levels and have fun.
Among difficult precision platformers, I'd say the N/N+/N++ series has the best movement. (The first game is also still playable online.) Be careful, this one is like a drug, it has a huge number of levels and it's really hard to stop playing.
wackget · 1h ago
Just tried both the ones you mentioned and I have to say I absolutely hate the movement. It is extremely floaty, meaning there is a ton of acceleration and deceleration. Maybe that's the point, but it's not what I enjoy at all. Same reason I didn't enjoy the Ori games.
shayway · 5h ago
I'd also put Super Meat Boy up there for good platforming feel. But yeah, Fancy Pants is fantastic, it's what I always wanted Sonic games to feel like.
sfn42 · 6h ago
The thing that makes HK and Silksong stand out to me is the full picture. Everything is well done. The movement feels great, the combat feels great, the exploration feels great, the progression feels great, the boss fights are awesome, the art and music are amazing, the characters are fun and the story is engaging, it just has everything.
These people are extremely talented and put years of effort into this game to make it perfect, impatient fans be damned and it shows.
harimau777 · 6h ago
If you haven't triend Sundered yet I recommend it. If you go with the unlock path that specializes in movement abilities then the game gets really wild by the end.
zaptheimpaler · 6h ago
Oh man I forgot about N+, that game was incredible. Super cool to see there's a new N++.
There are probably a bunch of videos in this genre, but I found [0] to be a particularly good explanation of why Hollow Knight felt so good. If you’re experienced at game design none of this is probably news to you, but if you’re unfamiliar with terms like “coyote time”, “jump buffering” etc., this video is a great introduction to how video games break physical realism to provide a better-feeling experience, and how tuning this is critical to getting a game which feels great. Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
> Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.
But Silksong feels terrible. Its movement is awful and difficult to control. Hollow Knight felt smooth. Silksong is the opposite of that.
This very post is mixing its message:
>> The secret to why this game is like crack is the movement. The movement is so buttery smooth that simply getting back to the boss that just ripped you to shreds is a complex, skillful, and fundamentally enjoyable experience.
>> So am I having fun? I certainly don't feel joy in my heart when I fall into the lava for the seventeenth time because I missed a jump (if lava was a boss it would easily take the top spot for the number of times it killed me).
Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
Interestingly, there is coyote time in Silksong, but not enough that you can reliably do dash-jumps. It's just that occasionally you'll notice a jump starting from the wrong location, a little to the side of and below the edge you wanted to leap off of. Much more often, you'll notice that you hit the jump button but the jump never went off, which is the exact problem coyote time is supposed to solve.
stevenwoo · 6h ago
I am unsure if I am just terrible at this game or more of a casual gamer with poor reflexes now, but Silksong feels particularly unforgiving. I did all the jumping puzzles in the most recent Prince of Persia game and figured out almost all of the puzzles and bosses in Metroid Dread after practice (lots of trial and error) without resorting to walk throughs, Silksong just revels in punishing you for making mistakes and forcing you to work to get back to where you just died.
the_af · 6h ago
For the record, I didn't enjoy Hollow Knight much either. It felt too repetitive and difficult to me...
thaumasiotes · 6h ago
This article concludes with the thought "if you liked Hollow Knight, you won't like Silksong".
That is the same conclusion that I and my brother both came to. The game is bizarrely punitive, from the very beginning, for no reason. It's as if they thought of it as being the next Hollow Knight expansion after Godhome, providing an additional challenge for the people who have beaten every pantheon with all bindings. ("The new challenge is: all of your controls now do something different!")
But it's a sequel. Supposedly. Most sequels are aiming to appeal at least as much to players who enjoyed the first game as they do to a hypothetical new audience.
johnnyanmac · 5h ago
Is it really that bad? The beginning definitely ramps things up, but I don't think anyone who beat Hollow knight would call Silksong "punitive", at least not for the 10 hours I've played so far. The area I struggled in the most was clearly one I wasn't "supposed" to go into yet, but otherwise the difficulty curve is only slightly steeper than HK's early game.
Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.
sfn42 · 6h ago
> Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
I would describe that as a skill issue. And I think Silksong feels great. I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Regarding coyote time I haven't noticed it myself but what you describe just seems like the margins are thin. You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier but there's lots of people who enjoy it for what it is.
To me it's an amazing game, absolutely incredible.
johnnyanmac · 5h ago
>You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier
I mean, the ones for Hollow knight felt wider. I think the main issue is that The Knight moved much slower and you had to time dashes anyway. Hornet's sprint has much fewer coyote frames compared to her and the Knight's dash.
sfn42 · 6h ago
> You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As a result, I suspect many of the people who enjoyed Hollow Knight will actually bounce off Silksong precisely because it is so hard, and they simply won't have the tenacity.
I think this is an overstatement. I've put about 16 hours into Silksong so far, I've pretty much completed around 8-10 zones or so, unlocked most of the abilities and stuff.
I don't think Silksong is that much more difficult than HK. Honestly it's been so long since I played HK that I'm not even sure it's more difficult at all but it probably is. If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy. And aside from that and maybe a couple other spots it's been fairly alright in terms of difficulty IMO.
Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those - yet.
Maybe it gets crazy later on, but that wasn't the claim in the article. The article claims you can hardly access anything without extreme effort and I don't think that's true at all.
creakingstairs · 6h ago
I had no trouble going through Silksong (and I'm having a blast!), but there were _a lot_ of times when I thought that this would be really hard for people who are new to the series.
> Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those
If you are a type of player that plays HK, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, then yes Silksong isn't brutally hard.
But I think the game is brutally hard for majority of people who hasn't played any of those. I think HK had a better difficulty ramp for beginners.
sfn42 · 6h ago
Yeah sure but they will play the game and struggle and learn just like everyone else has. HK/Silksong are not games for someone who just wants to chill and breeze through. They are difficult on purpose. People who don't want difficulty can play other games.
I'm not particularly good at this, by the way. Before Silksong I haven't picked up my playstation controller since Elden Ring came out. I've been pressing the wrong buttons and running/jumping/dashing into enemies over and over. I've been struggling. That's what I signed up for when I bought the game.
creakingstairs · 5h ago
I agree with you. These games are difficult on purpose and its a lot of fun is in rewarding the player with getting good. But if it is too difficult from the get-go, newer players will bounce off the game.
What I would have liked in Silksong is for the devs to remove some of the "frustrating" part just at the start: more free benches, less hp for some enemies, less flying enemies in platforming parts etc. Once the users have unlocked abilities and are used to the movement (and hooked in!), crank up the difficulty to what it is now.
jemfinch · 5h ago
It is most definitely not an overstatement. I have over 425 hours in Hollow Knight. I stopped playing Silksong in 8 because it felt like unfun masochism.
conradludgate · 6h ago
As someone who completed most of the HK main story, I've decided to stop playing silksong during act 1 because I'm just not having fun
sfn42 · 6h ago
That's alright, you do you.
SyrupThinker · 5h ago
A good example of how the experience of something can be so different between people. I also feel the need to write an article about it, but I'm not done yet...
At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.
But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.
Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game),
but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.
They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.
What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.
And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!
That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.
At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.
At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?"
And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.
At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"
The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?
Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
crq-yml · 1h ago
Challenging fun is the kind that defers satisfaction to near the end of the process - so the more challenge there is, the more uneven the satisfaction is likely to be. It's the same satisfaction one experiences with language fluidity, and being able to "converse" with the mechanics. That is the cause of an essential problem in the design of such games: enjoying the game means becoming literate in what the game is doing. Some people are hooked on the pattern recognition particular to that form of challenge and find it easy to progress and satisfying to win. Others have difficulty maintaining attention, get frustrated quickly and quit. This is evident in reviews of UFO50, the anthology of "authentically fake retro games" from the makers of Spelunky. Most of the games in UFO50 are difficult in more-or-less the same ways that games of the NES era were, with some intentional anachronisms. People find games they love and games they hate in the collection, but their opinions on which ones, and how hard they are, are all over the map and in vigorous disagreement. It is an excellent litmus test for what kind of gamer you are.
The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.
A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.
pansa2 · 1h ago
> you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania
This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages exploration: when you die, the game wants you to go back to the same place over and over, instead of going a different way or trying something new.
the_af · 6h ago
Am I the only one who didn't like Hollow Knight?
In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like?
In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me.
edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is all about difficulty and enjoyment regardless!). Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN? Guys (and gals) please realize I'm not saying you are wrong to like Hollow Knight or Silksong, just adding a data point to the fact some of us don't like punishingly difficult games.
sandoze · 6h ago
Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!
the_af · 6h ago
> Different strokes for different folks
Agreed!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
loloquwowndueo · 2h ago
You’re not the only one. Hollow Knight is a gorgeous game but it’s difficult to the point of becoming unenjoyable.
I persevered and beat it out of pride, not because I was having fun (some bosses took me more than 100 attempts to finally beat, that’s not fun, it’s a chore). About a year later I did it again just to prove to myself it hadn’t just been a fluke. But after that - no more. And I’m certainly not buying Silksong, I won’t give money to creators who hate their gamers so much.
egypturnash · 5h ago
Same.
So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.
The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."
shayway · 5h ago
> Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN?
To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.
(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)
the_af · 4h ago
Yeah, and how does drive-by downvoting encourage intellectually stimulating discussion?
I think my opinion was fair and interesting, and also on-topic, since TFA goes into a discussion about how a repetitive, punishingly difficult game such as Silksong shouldn't be engaging but it is (for the author), to which I replied: games as hard and "feels like work" like Hollow Knight turn me off. Difficulty is definitely the problem.
My wording, "am I the only one [...]" invited discussion of the kind we are supposed to welcome here, is it not? And we welcome discussions of art which are inherently subjective.
akavel · 5h ago
In the same boat here - I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. I mean, it's an ok game, and I get that some people may like it, why not; but the repeated claims of it being the best of all time, to me totally baffling. Already the respawning of the critters, and the grind to get some coins to get such a basic game feature as a map, two early aspects that I definitely don't like, and personally find somewhat disrespectful to my time.
thaumasiotes · 2h ago
> I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it.
That's very easy to explain. It's a Kickstarter effect.
Boardgamegeek is a website that, among other things, aggregates ratings of board games into a big master list of which games are the best, kind of like imdb.
The list has been corrupted by Kickstarter - it turns out that, when a game with a Kickstarter campaign comes out, everyone who reviews it is someone who backed the Kickstarter, and those people are personally invested in the idea that their game is good. You have to wait for quite a while before a Kickstarter game's rating can be usefully compared with a normal game's.
The waiting period for Silksong seems to have had a similar effect on the people who bought it right away.
zaptheimpaler · 6h ago
I hated Elden Ring because it felt way too hard and the movement & animations feel very slow. I died to bosses like 100s of times and just quit. HK didn't feel hard at all though, most bosses i beat within like 2-3 tries, maybe 10 tries at most for a few. But yeah I'm not a fan of frustratingly hard games either, it just feels like a tedious chore. It's funny how small tweaks can change what different people find hard I guess.
Agingcoder · 6h ago
No I strongly dislike this game too. It’s too hard, I don’t like the movement which feels ‘rigid’ , and it’s super gloomy and depressing.
I enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.
spacebuffer · 6h ago
I also didn't like hollow knight despite loving hades and dead cells (somewhat similar) although I only played it for ~ 2 hours
I am loving silksong so far however
xandrius · 6h ago
Same! But it all boils down to what kind of player you are and what you seek in games.
Even though the context is/was online multiplayer games, I still think Bartle's player types are a great starting point to better understand why you play games. And people do not necessarily have one and that's it but you can figure out which one is the main one.
For instance, I've got friends who play to feel mastery over a game: they'll grind it, suffer, put the time, just to then be really good at it. For others that's an absolute waste of time.
Other friends just absolutely like to spend hours competing with others and being better than them, from playing CoD, WoW battlegrounds and such. They study the changelogs to know what changed to get the edge over an opponent who didn't. It's fun to win for them.
Others think that games are mainly to be shared, they do coop, spend more time chatting than actually playing but still love the time. They don't necessarily finish games as that's not the point.
Then you have people who love exploring, both the world and the game content, so these are the ones playing the story completely, going to do sidequests and such. The extreme of this is the completionist, who's mainly drawn to do everything and anything, regardless whether it actually unlocks anything interesting new.
And more but the point of my long comment is that it's ok if you don't enjoy HK, or Dark Souls, etc. While I appreciate the craft, I personally don't enjoy dying a million times just to beat a silly digital thing. I want the just right amount of difficulty so that I can escape death a few times, defeat it and move on with my exploration.
And games go at waves, you had tons of competitive games a few years ago, now it's a lot of skill-based souls-like bastard games who hate you for even picking them up.
So, don't feel bad and go play Clair Obscure with enemy mods on and enjoy the sublime storyline, world and soundtrack. It's your game, you bought it, so enjoy it as you please.
lycopodiopsida · 6h ago
There are at least two of us :) I like exploration and I like bloodborne, elden ring, dark souls 3, demon’s souls, dark souls - in that order. Thus, I don’t mind difficult bosses and obscure storytelling.
I’ve clocked 10h in HK but I can’t get over these fuzzy hitboxes (I say it as souls veteran!), shallow fighting system and difficult platforming.
Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better about offering spectacle also. Some people play games mostly for skill mastery, others play games mostly for spectacle. This is a more nuanced distinction than "hardcore" vs "casual" - which fails to capture skill mastery extremists who are barely even gamers because they only play one game, or spectacle extremists who could hardly be called casual because they make gaming their entire life.
Most people care about both, but may care more about one side or another. Some games cater to one side or the other, and some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.
FPS characters have invisible crab legs.
Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.
When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvAbbye-oCY
I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago.
Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, sometimes dying with the boss only needing one more hit to die, and I'm frustrated with myself because knowing he only needed to get hit one more time started making me greedy with my attacks, and so I take big hits to the face and don't back off to heal.
But what makes them fun is the dopamine rush when I finally succeed. A couple times, it felt damn near orgasmic. I've been playing video games for probably around 35 years and nothing felt as good as when I finally downed Morgott.
Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.
Malenia took me over a month, and probably over 500 deaths and I had to relax the ash of war usage (still limited by my very low FP)
The entire end game was brutal as this was before the buff for UGS animation speeds and most boss openings were shorter than anything than a crouch poke but I loved every minute of it. Just like learning to play something new on an instrument just cos you can't nail it in one try, one week or even one month doesn't mean you won't eventually get it.
One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like. The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress. I always play better on mute (but that's no fun)
I haven't played Silksong yet and I know difficulty is rather subjective, but is it really that difficult compared to the realm of punishing platformers like NES Ninja Gaiden, Cuphead, Spelunky 2, the dark world portions of Super Meat Boy, etc?
I played the first Hollow Knight and didn't find it particularly hard. (not easy, but definitely not Dark Souls level punishing).
As usual, you're gaining all sorts of tools and abilities along the way, and a few areas you can technically access early are best saved for later, when you have better gear. Some players aren't super thrilled with arena challenges, which this game has more of: suddenly 3-4 enemies in a small room all at once. I enjoy the meta challenge though: which tools can thin the crowd? Which minions should I focus to make the rest of the group manageable? If I can avoid taking damage, I can cast spells to thin the crowd much more effectively, etc etc.
There are non boss fights that get more elaborate as you go, and let you pick up some new skills and abilities.
Another one like this that shouldn’t have been was Orie and the blind forest. If you play it on story mode, which I did because it was great eye candy and I just wanted to see it all, there a spot in the middle of act 2 where you have to land several double wall jumps in rapid succession with nearby spikes. Someone at that studio needs to be beaten about the shoulder with a clue bat about wtf “story mode” means. I never got to see the story and was too mad to watch someone else play it on youtube.
I’m fairly sure that my problem with both was the same. Only partly fat fingers and part was that certain movements don’t work identically on all controllers. Some things are counterintuitively easier on a D pad than a thumb joystick. It’s just not as crisp to go from one input to another 90 or 180° opposite. If your game mechanics are built on that, then some ports will be much harder to play.
You should either not port them, or adjust the timing grace period up on that hardware.
You're in luck because that subgenre has exploded in popularity and there are a lot of good ones out there if you want to keep playing them these days. Elden Ring is one of the best though for sure.
> movement is so finely tuned and so precise that I know deep in my bones that any hit or death is entirely on me. Of course, that in turn makes tangible improvement extremely visible. You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious
This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.
I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.
Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.
Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.
Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.
- Sell to the champion. - Sell to the rest of the org. - Sell to procurement. - Sell to the implementation project team. - Sell to the users and get adoption up.
Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.
Easy!
I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.
Then you have a lot of opinion in the mix. I strongly disagree with the article for exemple on both the extreme difficulty, the game is difficult but manageable, the enjoyment, plenty of questionable design decisions are there purely to spite the player and it’s a game which often confuses wasting your time and being frustrating with being difficult, and the supposed elegance of the movement.
Silksong is really weirdly tuned in that it has mechanics which will actually only bother you and make your experience more painful if you are already struggling while being completely invisible if you are flying through. And the punishment will be grinding, so wasting your time, not actually forcing players to encounter things which would make them better. Amusingly for a game so long in the making, I think it suffers from a significant lack of play testing.
"Git Gud" by Viva La Dirt League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
Among 2D platformers in general, I think the medal for best movement feel goes to the Fancy Pants Adventure series. (You can still play it online on sites that have Flash replacements, start with the 4th game because it has everything.) But that's a deliberately easy game, you just run through the levels and have fun.
Among difficult precision platformers, I'd say the N/N+/N++ series has the best movement. (The first game is also still playable online.) Be careful, this one is like a drug, it has a huge number of levels and it's really hard to stop playing.
These people are extremely talented and put years of effort into this game to make it perfect, impatient fans be damned and it shows.
(Mandatory addiction hazard notice)
[0]: https://youtu.be/Vxt8uud5o_4
But Silksong feels terrible. Its movement is awful and difficult to control. Hollow Knight felt smooth. Silksong is the opposite of that.
This very post is mixing its message:
>> The secret to why this game is like crack is the movement. The movement is so buttery smooth that simply getting back to the boss that just ripped you to shreds is a complex, skillful, and fundamentally enjoyable experience.
>> So am I having fun? I certainly don't feel joy in my heart when I fall into the lava for the seventeenth time because I missed a jump (if lava was a boss it would easily take the top spot for the number of times it killed me).
Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.
Interestingly, there is coyote time in Silksong, but not enough that you can reliably do dash-jumps. It's just that occasionally you'll notice a jump starting from the wrong location, a little to the side of and below the edge you wanted to leap off of. Much more often, you'll notice that you hit the jump button but the jump never went off, which is the exact problem coyote time is supposed to solve.
That is the same conclusion that I and my brother both came to. The game is bizarrely punitive, from the very beginning, for no reason. It's as if they thought of it as being the next Hollow Knight expansion after Godhome, providing an additional challenge for the people who have beaten every pantheon with all bindings. ("The new challenge is: all of your controls now do something different!")
But it's a sequel. Supposedly. Most sequels are aiming to appeal at least as much to players who enjoyed the first game as they do to a hypothetical new audience.
Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.
I would describe that as a skill issue. And I think Silksong feels great. I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Regarding coyote time I haven't noticed it myself but what you describe just seems like the margins are thin. You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier but there's lots of people who enjoy it for what it is.
To me it's an amazing game, absolutely incredible.
I mean, the ones for Hollow knight felt wider. I think the main issue is that The Knight moved much slower and you had to time dashes anyway. Hornet's sprint has much fewer coyote frames compared to her and the Knight's dash.
I think this is an overstatement. I've put about 16 hours into Silksong so far, I've pretty much completed around 8-10 zones or so, unlocked most of the abilities and stuff.
I don't think Silksong is that much more difficult than HK. Honestly it's been so long since I played HK that I'm not even sure it's more difficult at all but it probably is. If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy. And aside from that and maybe a couple other spots it's been fairly alright in terms of difficulty IMO.
Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those - yet.
Maybe it gets crazy later on, but that wasn't the claim in the article. The article claims you can hardly access anything without extreme effort and I don't think that's true at all.
> Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those
If you are a type of player that plays HK, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, then yes Silksong isn't brutally hard.
But I think the game is brutally hard for majority of people who hasn't played any of those. I think HK had a better difficulty ramp for beginners.
I'm not particularly good at this, by the way. Before Silksong I haven't picked up my playstation controller since Elden Ring came out. I've been pressing the wrong buttons and running/jumping/dashing into enemies over and over. I've been struggling. That's what I signed up for when I bought the game.
What I would have liked in Silksong is for the devs to remove some of the "frustrating" part just at the start: more free benches, less hp for some enemies, less flying enemies in platforming parts etc. Once the users have unlocked abilities and are used to the movement (and hooked in!), crank up the difficulty to what it is now.
At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.
But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.
Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game), but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.
They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.
What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.
And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!
That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.
At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.
At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?" And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.
At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"
The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?
Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.
A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.
This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages exploration: when you die, the game wants you to go back to the same place over and over, instead of going a different way or trying something new.
In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like?
In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me.
edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is all about difficulty and enjoyment regardless!). Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN? Guys (and gals) please realize I'm not saying you are wrong to like Hollow Knight or Silksong, just adding a data point to the fact some of us don't like punishingly difficult games.
Agreed!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
I persevered and beat it out of pride, not because I was having fun (some bosses took me more than 100 attempts to finally beat, that’s not fun, it’s a chore). About a year later I did it again just to prove to myself it hadn’t just been a fluke. But after that - no more. And I’m certainly not buying Silksong, I won’t give money to creators who hate their gamers so much.
So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.
The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."
To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.
(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)
I think my opinion was fair and interesting, and also on-topic, since TFA goes into a discussion about how a repetitive, punishingly difficult game such as Silksong shouldn't be engaging but it is (for the author), to which I replied: games as hard and "feels like work" like Hollow Knight turn me off. Difficulty is definitely the problem.
My wording, "am I the only one [...]" invited discussion of the kind we are supposed to welcome here, is it not? And we welcome discussions of art which are inherently subjective.
That's very easy to explain. It's a Kickstarter effect.
Boardgamegeek is a website that, among other things, aggregates ratings of board games into a big master list of which games are the best, kind of like imdb.
The list has been corrupted by Kickstarter - it turns out that, when a game with a Kickstarter campaign comes out, everyone who reviews it is someone who backed the Kickstarter, and those people are personally invested in the idea that their game is good. You have to wait for quite a while before a Kickstarter game's rating can be usefully compared with a normal game's.
The waiting period for Silksong seems to have had a similar effect on the people who bought it right away.
I enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.
I am loving silksong so far however
Even though the context is/was online multiplayer games, I still think Bartle's player types are a great starting point to better understand why you play games. And people do not necessarily have one and that's it but you can figure out which one is the main one.
For instance, I've got friends who play to feel mastery over a game: they'll grind it, suffer, put the time, just to then be really good at it. For others that's an absolute waste of time.
Other friends just absolutely like to spend hours competing with others and being better than them, from playing CoD, WoW battlegrounds and such. They study the changelogs to know what changed to get the edge over an opponent who didn't. It's fun to win for them.
Others think that games are mainly to be shared, they do coop, spend more time chatting than actually playing but still love the time. They don't necessarily finish games as that's not the point.
Then you have people who love exploring, both the world and the game content, so these are the ones playing the story completely, going to do sidequests and such. The extreme of this is the completionist, who's mainly drawn to do everything and anything, regardless whether it actually unlocks anything interesting new.
And more but the point of my long comment is that it's ok if you don't enjoy HK, or Dark Souls, etc. While I appreciate the craft, I personally don't enjoy dying a million times just to beat a silly digital thing. I want the just right amount of difficulty so that I can escape death a few times, defeat it and move on with my exploration.
And games go at waves, you had tons of competitive games a few years ago, now it's a lot of skill-based souls-like bastard games who hate you for even picking them up.
So, don't feel bad and go play Clair Obscure with enemy mods on and enjoy the sublime storyline, world and soundtrack. It's your game, you bought it, so enjoy it as you please.
I’ve clocked 10h in HK but I can’t get over these fuzzy hitboxes (I say it as souls veteran!), shallow fighting system and difficult platforming.
It is ok, just not a game for me.