The elegance of movement in Silksong
theahura.substack.com
theahura.substack.com
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.
After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable. Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity.
I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep to reset my mind, and learn pogo-ing for real.
That also was the lesson I needed to go forward: take your time, consciously clear the environment, and learn the movesets. I have a lot of hours in the original game, and was way too used to sprinting through the environment.
Yes, it started as a DLC for Hollow Knight - but the devs have known for the past 5 years that it would be a standalone sequel. Is there any evidence that they designed it as "extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff", rather than approached it as a game on its own right?
Almost like the collective memory of Hollow Knight's difficulty has dulled over time as people have, over the eight years, dare I say it, git good...
Are there things that are measurably more difficult? Perhaps. Common enemies can now do two masks worth of damage which before was relegated to boss specials, so environments feel more dangerous. This has always been a significant part of the early game, as an extra mask in Hollow Knight was significant enough to keep you safer from regular enemies, but in Silksong once you get hold of an extra mask you go from being able to be killed in three hits to...being able to be killed in three hits.
So I think there are things that make it feel tougher. At the same time though, all the same things were said before about the difficulty, about not knowing where to go (Silksong gives even fewer clues I'd say), but people persisted through areas, learnt boss patterns, and eventually just learnt the game up until P5.
And in a few years the collective memory of Silksong's early game difficulty will have gone as people adapted to it.
It's obvious why Team Cherry didn't allow pre-sale reviews. It will be interesting to see how successful it will stay in a month, and next year.
> So Team Cherry is not out to make a more difficult sequel, then: they're hoping for it to be a "comparable" test of skill to Hollow Knight, Pellen says, while Gibson explains that starting with the clean slate of an entirely new kingdom with its own lore and new characters is another way in which Silksong is designed to be "a perfect jumping-on point for new players. We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game — that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way."
https://www.reddit.com/r/metroidvania/comments/oebdg6/the_ho...
There's much more elegance to the design than you are giving it credit for, it just is expecting you engage with the entire toolkit.
game just trying to tell that brute force solution might not work. use tools, use specific charms, use crests that are better suited for specific arena/boss. some tools (such as spiked traps) can literally one shot most mobs and leave you 1v1 with a boss.
dont give up, use your brain, hacker
Most AAA videogames seem to teach people "mash attack button until enemy goes away, move forward to the next shiny dot on the map, repeat". It's crazy that when a game asks the player to actually take stock of the situation and learn from their mistakes, it gets billed as "brutally difficult".
For what it's worth, I find Silksong challenging, but I really don't get the "impossible difficulty" complaints. I think I'm about halfway through the main game and the most I've spent on a single boss is ~30 minutes.
And I don't think I'm a crazy pro gamer with insane reflexes - I play only a few videogames a year (I mostly care about the art), every time I've tried a multiplayer FPS I get utterly destroyed by other players.
There's an attack during which you can consistently heal, so once you recognize that it just becomes about mastering the reactions to each of their attacks faster and faster and faster as the fight goes on. It's sooo satisfying.
I understand most people don't find it fun. Neither do I.
But saying it's not challenging is just plain wrong. If it were true then the best player would have the same chance to pass it as I do. And it's not the case.
I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss.
It's just a time consuming chore.
Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.
But it's all personal of course. :) Some people like boss fights (or Souls-like games) and I'm happy for them.
I just would be happy with a "bypass this" button.
You've clearly never heard me playing my horns!
I never found the end result of all that practice to be rewarding (as the kids seem to say these days), [0] and -brother- I tried for years and years. So, I switched hobbies to video games and have a leisure-time activity that I like a lot more.
[0] Those unfortunate enough to be within earshot were usually fairly unimpressed with the result, so this isn't just me shittalking myself.
Common responses from the playerbase: skill issue, build issue, etc. While the game clearly has a balancing issue (which is fair considering its not at v1.0 yet). Bosses should not outregenerate your damage. 90% of the playerbase is playing the same build.
Its just not fun following a particular guide just to play with the highest efficiency possible. What makes videogames fun to me (especially action rpgs) is the ability to make my own build.
Its also the reason why I do not play any multi-player games anymore. There are barely people who play for fun, everyone just wants to win win win.
I played Minecraft with some online friends and I was off messing around, exploring, and doing nothing worthwhile, and got back to "base" where they had like.. monster farms and stuff?! Because they were trying to finish the newly released IDK.. expansion, ASAP?
It was a very clear "oh you and I are not here for the same reason" moment. :D
As an example, if I want to go exploring, I'm thinking I'm going to want food, so I'll want crops either to eat them directly or to breed livestock. If I want to do that in a way that doesn't require waiting I'll need bone meal. But at some point they changed it so you require more bone meal to fully grow. And now the game has funneled me into building a mob grinder when I actually wanted to explore.
Sure, there are mobs out there you can fight who drop those items, and that's more engaging, but "fun" and "effective" are so misaligned in the game currently that I find myself avoiding it. So much so that I end up mostly either playing really old versions that aren't this way (b1.7.3 in particular) or modpacks that do a better job of this kind of progression.
BUT, I will say I do get a kick out of seeing the strategies and workarounds other people find that I would never even have bothered to try looking for.
Maybe I'm just lazy, or maybe I just feel like there's a way the game's meant to be played, and that's what I want to play. I'm also pretty allergic to games that make extensive uses of mods for the same reason.
I think I'd be bored if it were easier. I don't want to 'press A to win'.
I get that! (Edit: I mean this enthusiastically, like, I relate :) )
I think the point is, for me (and it looks like some others in the thread), beating bosses doesn't feel like "winning", it feels like completing a chore.
For me, for example, the part that feels like winning (in games in general) is stuff like investing the time to travel through all the areas of a game, completing many if not all the side quests, grinding to get to max level and/or earning all the best equipment, etc.
But learning the specific way to beat this one boss (often in a way that doesn't matter for the rest of the game because it's based on some timing or animation specific to that boss)? Yeah, that's a chore.
I did stumble upon a game where I enjoy the bossfights though - in V Rising. There is a TON of bosses in the game, but the game is so full of quality of life stuff that even dying repeatedly is not a big deal.
I generally dislike when my time is a stake in the game. I have so little of it in the first place, I don't like risking it in this way.
Heck, I even seem to like job-like games (Hardspace Shipbreaker was amazing to me).
I guess the "if you don't pass this, start over!" aspect of boss fights is the thing that irks me.
Looking at how other people describe their experience, it seems like the figuring out part brings them joy. I usually have that with the core game mechanics themselves. The "knowledge" I get seems useful here, because I get to apply it to the rest of the game, but learning the boss mechanics seems like a throwaway thing, and I think this bothers me.
I also don't enjoy replaying parts of the game, especially as a punishment, especially when the replayed part had nothing to do with the my failure itself - like clearing the trash before a boss, or replaying parts of the bossfight before the crucial part, or getting back to the boss' place from a checkpoint. Such a slog!
You beat the boss! BUT WAIT!!! It's not actually dead!
And then you say "wow, no way!" ironically as you watch its health bar refill.
Who could ever have expected this?!
It's the pleasure of mastery. To me, the fun of a challenge like that is in gradually mastering something difficult and then being able to perform it perfectly. In fact, I'm sometimes a bit disappointed by the way that a boss fight ends when you get it right. The feeling of getting it right is my reward for the work I've put in, and I want that feeling to be drawn out. This is why I don't mind dying and restarting, at least in a good boss fight. The experience of being in the fight feels good and only gets better. That's why these games are rewarding to replay. It's like you're playing the hits or something.
My favourite boss fights are from Sekiro—there's a nice little video about it here¹ if you're interested in what other people love so much about tough boss fights.
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I really appreciate it.
I solo'd my way through all the available Sunkenland content a few months ago so base building grindy survival is probably kind of my jam.
I totally feel your way of beating the game on normal, and the bosses on easy. I did that with Persona 5 at points, and Unicorn Overlord as well. I really appreciate that games provide this option.
Also, people often mean "energy" or "willpower" by "time". It's like a general, non-material cost of things. "I don't have the time for X" can many times be translated to "I can't imagine managing another context", "I don't want to commit to X", "I can't be assed to start doing X after everything I do in a day", etc. Time in these context is just a convenient scapegoat. This is also addressed by the idea “It’s not about “having” time. It’s about making time.”. For what they really want, people seem to "make time" for, even in the busiest schedules.
I played through Cyberpunk, and for each boss fight I just flipped the difficulty to the easiest possible setting. It's just not fun to me.
EDIT: apart from the bossfights in Cyberpunk, I actually did enjoy the game. Took me about 6 months to finish it though lol. (no DLC, and started about a year ago so when it was actually stable & playable).
After a few tries, and getting demolished in a few seconds by its relentless onslaught of attacks that span much of the screen, I realized that I'm simply too old and too slow to beat this boss. No regrets, I've had a great run -- my gaming life started back in the days of analog TV Pong "consoles". But my reflexes just aren't what they once were; and there was a boss simply beyond my physical capabilities. So it goes.
To Hollow Knight's eternal credit, I just kept at it because the fight was so engrossing. There was a borderline meditative quality to it. The speed, the relentlessness. The rhythm of it. Sometimes I would just not fight back, only dodge and see how long I could last.
One time, confusingly, the boss started doing a move I had never seen before. Bosses aren't supposed to do that, right? They've got patterns and phases, they don't spawn new moves out of nowhere.
Yeah, so that was its death animation. I won and I never even realized I was winning.
Later another DLC added a boss challenge area where you can re-fight Nightmare King Grimm with only one hit point. You get hit once, you lose.
It took me two or three tries, tops.
Hollow Knight will always remain very special to me for having a higher opinion of what I can achieve than I did myself, and proving to me it was right about it.
(EDIT: Oh hey didn't even notice your username. Hi dude!)
FWIW, I'm also much bigger fan of difficult levels over difficult bosses.
I also think that the level of perceived difficulty depending on the player plays a large part in the enjoyment. When I play a video game, I'm also imagining that I'm actually that character so every death essentially means that I was defeated in that world for real.
I absolutely hate games where one of the win conditions is to be forced to die numerous times to discover an otherwise inscrutable pattern.
You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck.
[0] Touhou is probably the definitive example here. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU
It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough.
Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, process, and react within milliseconds. I definitely think there is a type of brain that can play games like these and another type that can't, and I'm in the latter.
Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use.
Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.
The trick to basically all of these games is not to actually try and look at the arrows. There are a lot of them, they are moving fast, your conscious mind can't actually track and respond to each one of them individually.
But with practice you can train your self to more-or-less automatically respond to the sequence - there are only a handful of variations, and you learn the patterns that they typically arrive in.
(For a little while I had too much free time on my hands, and was in the top-100 BeatSaber players)
I used to look at games like Hades and Returnal and see nothing but chaos. But with enough time on the sticks both games became instinctual and I was able to find a flow.
Yes, there's variation in potential range but most brands are capable of most things if you give them enough time to grow the necessary neurons and pathways.
Some of the optional bosses in Silksong (e.g. Savage Beastfly, mentioned in the article) do have that issue: high damage + high health + spawning mobs with uncoordinated random movement. It makes for a prolonged sequence which is ultimately unlearnable but must still be performed perfectly.
That's not a bad thing, it's just you finding out things about yourself. Move on to another game and let other players have fun with this one.
Regards, Someone who has never player HK and doesn't plan to
Someone get that article writer a copy of Battletoads.
In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.
Silksong is not particularly that hard either with retrospect to the wider genre with staples like Megaman.
I disagree. I appreciate the skill that went into making Hollow Knight, but to me it felt too much like work, too repetitive, too grindy, too difficult. Not an enjoyable experience for me at all :(
> And yet.
> I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down... This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.
These games may be masterpieces but they don't come out of nowhere, there are many other games where skill mastery is much or even most of the appeal. I also somewhat wanted to pick on the line that the Mario games are the only other games that put as much care into how you traverse the world.
That's not a bad thing, it's just you finding out things about yourself. Move on to another game and let other players have fun with this one.
Regards, Someone who has never player HK and doesn't plan to
My take is, it's a good game and I'm enjoying it. I suspect the only reason it's generating so many takes is that it was so spectacularly overhyped that it cannot possibly live up to how much it has been built up. And that enthusiasm, which started within a specific niche fanbase, has spilled out onto the internet at large in such a way that that is unsustainable.
I bet if we all wait a year, the back and forth will die down and we'll be left with a game that gets similar acclaim to Hollow Knight. People subconsciously think about hype on the same 1-10 scale as a review, but hype can drive a video game score well into the teens or 20s. Then even a 10 feels like a disappointment.
The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere.
What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises.
How did it manage to do this? What's the formula? Or is there simply a lull in the cycle?
https://youtube.com/@dailysilksongnews
I enjoyed Hollow Knight an awful lot, and checked-watched DSN nearly every day since it started. But I never visited the subreddit.
~ a year later the team announced a DLC called silksong but silksong grew so much that they decided to turn it to a full sequel.
The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme
Tiny correction (AFAIK): It was never really "delays" as there was no release date until ~3 weeks ago, when they announced it'd be released in a month. But yeah, development time was long.
to be clear: I'm not complaining at all, I'd much rather have a good very-delayed sequel than a bad one. but the "it's releasing again" -> "it's delayed again" memes do have reasonable origins.
I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.
Also, and this is just my personal opinion, but I'm about a dozen hours into it, and so far I haven't found it THAT much harder than the original. Maybe it's because I've played Hollow Knight and gotten used to the controls by now, but I remember struggling a lot with lots of parts of Hollow Knight, about as much as I'm struggling with Silksong. Enough people have been saying it so I suspect I might just be misremembering.
Excellent game in general, by the way, really enjoying Silksong so far.
You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
If you ask people who more acquainted with metroidvanias it's not going to be topping their lists.
The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age.
That being said, they are still very good games; excellent atmosphere, artwork and presentation, some genuinely haunting, creepy, and awe-inspiring areas. But I think Hollow Knight is a tier above them.
Personally I find combat to be one of the less important aspects of Metroidvanias. I prefer the main source of difficulty coming from platforming around environmental hazards.
I felt like exploration in Hollow Knight was a bit too broad, and lead to too much unnecessary backtracking. Backtracking is a balance. It's a staple of Metroidvanias, but if the backtracking search space is large enough and places aren't distinctive enough then the search for a previously insurmountable obstacle can start feeling like looking for a needle in a haystack. That was my experience in Hollow Knight, and something I felt like the first Ori game did better.
To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive proof that something is widely considered to be among the best games of all time. My guess is that most people think of categories of "best" media in much much smaller terms, and the only people allowing so many things in their categories are people like the American Film Institute and other people who like making lists.
It's hard to judge games which came out relatively recently against all the games which came before. I also think there's an abnormal level of hype around Hollow Knight. It's an excellent game which was received well, but I think on the grand scale of games I would be quite surprised if it cracked the top fifteen of most critics' choices of best games of the past decade. Within the Metroidvania genre I'd expect it to be a very different story.
My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living.
I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though.
> You are welcome to your opinion.
For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there.
[0] By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
You continue to miss my point, as your comment about concurrent player count indicates. I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.
> If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best" in your book, you are entitled to think that.
That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source?
> By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best?
I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.
There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list.
> I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories.
I don't agree at all. It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong. This doesn't mean you have to like it, personally. I can acknowledge that Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last Of Us are both widely regarded as two of the best games of all time, even though I personally found them both boring.
Okay, but that's an argument that it's considered one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can understand my confusion.
> It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong.
*shrug* I don't think it's that weird. This certainly isn't something I'm coming up with on the fly. I've felt like this for a long time, as have the authors of the many articles complaining about the meaninglessness of the even larger number of "best of" lists.
> This doesn't mean you have to like it
You've made several comments which make it sound like I'm arguing this because I don't like the game. I'd appreciate you not doing that both because I did quite like it and because it implies that my feelings about the game are biasing my argument. I'd make this same argument if you'd used that Wikipedia article to support your feelings about Red Dead Redemption 2. I'd probably personally consider that one of the best games I've ever played[0] but would object to using its presence in that article as proof that it was widely considered to be one of the best of all time.
[0] Honestly I'm still not sure if I should compare it to other games I've played or put it in its own category of interactive movie. It was incredibly good, but the parts I think of as being the best are the performances and the technical achievement and clever landscaping of the game world.
Person: "Who was Kobe Bryant, why does anyone care that he died?"
Me: "He was one of the best basketball players of all time."
You: "No he wasn't. Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, and LeBron James are better."
Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games, because it's not my #1 all-time favorite game[0]. However, in the context of "why does anyone care about the sequel to Hollow Knight?" it's fair to say that many people consider it one of the best games of all time. It doesn't really matter that you, personally, may rank it behind 10, 15, or even 50 games.
[0] That title belongs to Doom 2.
> Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games
A) I haven't chosen a specific number. I've even been deliberately hazy about the range because that's how I hear most people discuss their "best ofs" and favorites.
B) As per my previous message I wish you'd stop acting like I'm fabricating this argument just to exclude Hollow Knight. My objection is with your reasoning. I've tried to be as clear as possible about this.
C) You have to bound your category of what qualifies as "the best" somehow, even roughly, because otherwise the term loses what little meaning it had in the first place. I tried to make this point earlier, though maybe I didn't do it well enough:
>> I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further.
If you want to say it's widely considered one of the best of all time, that implies some very large percentage of the general public or critics would say "I think X[0] is one of the best games of all time". If you asked a random person to list which games they personally believed to be the best games, they'd probably only come up with a handful. I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time.
[0] you can take this to mean either an arbitrary game or the Egosoft one :p
You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games".
> The games are included on at least six separate best-of lists from different publications (inclusive of all time periods, platforms and genres), as chosen by their editorial staff.
i.e. there already is agreement across all time.
I, in fact, did not miss that. If you look at that article, it references over 90 lists. By my count, a bit under half of the lists were written after the release of Hollow Knight. Of those lists, Hollow Knight appears in only seven of them, which is tied for the lowest number of appearances of any game in that list released in 2017 onward other than Baldur's Gate 3, which was released in the last year the list has entries for.
> i.e. there already is agreement across all time.
Eh, fewer than a fifth of lists with what appear to usually be 30-100 games each doesn't seem like good evidence of agreement to me. There are degrees of agreement, and I think "widely" implies a pretty high one.
I think GamingBolt having Hollow Knight on their 2022 list at #14, but then it being completely absent from their 2023 and 2024 lists is testimony of how silly these lists are in the first place.
Why do you think I don't believe that? It's undeniably popular and was critically acclaimed. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that that Wikipedia article didn't support your assertion that it was widely regarded as one of the best of all time. Just because there are many people who think it's one of the best doesn't mean that most people (or even a large percentage of them) think it is.
There is intense debate in the community to know if it should figure amongst the best of its genre (metroidvania).
It’s absolutely not in contention for best game of all time. It’s not even in the top 3 of its release year which includes Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Cuphead and Divinity 2. To give but one point, the Game of the Year award went to BotW while Cuphead beat HK as best indie.
As I said in the parallel thread, you can argue that Michael Jordan and LeBron James are better than Kobe Bryant (and I would agree, and frankly few would argue otherwise), but that does not invalidate the statement "Kobe Bryant is one of the best basketball players of all time."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...
Gaming might make more money, but celebrity news dominates the attention sphere.
It's also heavily weighted by gender, age, and socioeconomic status. Pop culture has wider, more even penetration.
Granted, there is waning generational attention being put into film.
The formula is making incredible art that you're passionate about, giving or selling it to alot of people, and getting lucky enough that word of mouth takes over from there. In other words, there is no formula.
Sounds great, because I think it doesn't get much better than that.
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.
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.
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 avoided reading the Elden Ring wiki as much as possible. I decided to open it up and found how to get to Malenia, so I'll be fighting my way over there and gaining a few more levels before trying Radagon and Elden Beast again.
> The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress.
The feints are what really get me. Some of the wind-ups for attacks feel like an eternity, or at the very least, extremely unnatural, making it very hard to time a dodge.
I was interested to find out that Margit is one of the most technically fun and difficult fights to nohit run because his flow chart is actually the most complex of all the bosses. But most players can brute force their way through him.
Malenia was a lot of fun, especially without summons
They used to give you unlimited time to deal with difficulty and always gave the alternative of rolling back and getting more levels. That's until Nightreign -- you are almost always under time pressure.
Forget Malenia -- everdark Libra is the current standard of the most diabolical Souls experience. The time is against you, the music is maddening. You either clear the summons in under 20 seconds or you get another stacked debuff and the goat is casting.
Can't wait for the Depth version to be released this Thursday.
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.
Hornet's 45º downwards attacks are significantly harder to aim/time, and pogo chains (where they are even possible) take a lot of practice
Above all, all three games demand and reward precision and timing, and to some extent figuring out enemy movement and attack patterns. None of the games demand much in terms of speed or reaction time.
In many ways it's much more forgiving than your traditional "hard" platformers.
Have yet to run into a truly brutal boss like the last few Pantheon participants in HK.
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.
It would take many hours to get used to dpad so I'm sticking to what I know, but it's definitely not ideal.
Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.
Those bosses felt way too frustrating to me because they force you to unlearn the entire deflect gameplay, turning it into an annoying, slow-paced & somewhat janky fight.
Yes, Demon's Souls was hard, but eventually I somehow I started passing dungeons and beating bosses. The rush that I got from that gave me what I needed mentally to persevere through my classes: by the end of the semester I had A+s in 2 and an A in the other. I don't think I've had a better semester since. Beating big demons in video games made me feel like I could beat my own big demons in real life.
Lots of others feel the same way about Souls-like games; there are many video essays on Youtube that cover how Souls-likes got them through depression and other things.
Each boss has a moveset puzzle, where you have to figure out how to beat it, and to win it's not just enough to find the solution; the execution matters as well.
Other games usually just add boss HP or damage, instead of interesting movesets.
Actually, there is:
Knowing the difference between a game being difficult versus punishing. Here's a 12 year old, 7-minute video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
(EDIT: If it helps, consider changing "punishing" to "unfair")
The TL;DW is that punishing games are not fun because they often rely on cheap things like unavoidable damage, actions not being telegraphed, inconsistency of rules, long iteration times (ie, unskippable cutscenes, excessively long boss fights where you're redoing the same first 10 minutes over again). Punishing games are poorly designed by people that want to defeat the player, rather than allowing the player to overcome the challenge.
In Elden Ring, all damage is avoidable. Every attack is telegraphed. Boss fights aren't really that long, and if you die, the walk back to try again is always short and doesn't rely on fighting through waves of enemies. Some fights have cutscenes either at the start of the fight or during a transition to a second phase, but they're skippable.
It's still a challenging game. Some boss hits will eliminate over 60% of your HP in a single hit, but those attacks are telegraphed and you're supposed to dodge them.
But to a certain extent, ER is a "choose-your-own-difficulty" game. You can grind out higher levels to get your stats up if you want to give yourself more of an edge. The people complaining about Margit (A very early boss) being super hard were probably under-leveled. I got him to 1% HP on my second try (Seriously, his health bar was a single pixel wide), and got him down on my 5th.
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.
I think I went through the narrow to the balloon place, then maybe back through the marrow or something up to Bellheart, deep docks etc.
That's probably a significant part, too. Silksong is more open than HK, where the lack of abilities put a natural wall around the areas which are too hard at that point of time. But in SK you can easily stumble into areas where you are not supposed to be, which can be frustrating.
You can go there before you even get the hover ability, and I totally see how that would be demoralizing.
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.
That seems like a strange comment in a thread about a 2d platformer. Nothing moves like a 2d platformer character either. So both don't move "naturally" and both feel good to many people?
Bah. Doom2016 has some of the absolute best (meaning fun) movement in the business and it is the absolute definition of fluid.
Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.
Blind Forest though? Chef's kiss
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.
Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.
10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).
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.
They are similar, but different on annoying details.
There’s also an accessibility aspect to it. Accommodation for players who may have different physical capabilities is just the right thing to do.
Same with Bioshock Infinite that needed a hack to unlock "1999 mode" or Bloodstained its harder difficulty (still easy, though).
Balance and fair difficulty really are some of the hardest and most important things to get right in video games.
"Git Gud" by Viva La Dirt League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs
Don't get me wrong, I still love the game and consider it pretty much a masterpiece, but many people believe (myself included) the game could have a better difficulty curve from the beginning and be less punishing (just give me a freaking bench before each boss so I don't have to run through 10 screens to have another try at it) while still maintaining the overall difficulty and challenge.
But this: "Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game"" is an immense exaggeration, I could understand this for, maybe, IWBTG.
I guess more than anything it's just been cool to see the community come together on silksong.
If I absolutely do not want to play a boss; for whatever reason, I should be allowed to find an alternative way to get through that area. If grinding endlessly for damage is the alternative, fine. But at least there is one.
Act II get's better as you unlock more movement and the lore develops. There is some unique stuff there. Boses are also fine for me, random summons are annoying but that's what you have tools for, kill them immediatelly.
I wonder whether Silksong’s traps scratch that itch, or whether they’re just annoying.
So… why not just sprint?
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.
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.
- 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!
Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)
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.
Now I'm finally reaching 100% completion and frankly, it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released. It has a lot of hype, but I think it somehow lived up to it.
For reference I do think the original Hollow Knight is a bit overrated, right now I reckon Nine Sols has it beat, but this? The game has SO MUCH to offer, SO SO much, with so much care for detail that I just can't think of any other game in the genre that is better.
Which is exactly how I felt about HK - I never thought I’d see Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night shuffle aside to make room at the top, but the genre definition is now a triumvirate, and the newcomer is hybridized with soulslike elements. It’s been a fantastic renaissance for the genre imo.
That being said, it is kind of difficult to get into. Finding a good GC controller can be hard, and playing online is rough because everyone is so good these days.
But gaming is big, and inside as also outside the genre there are many games with great movement and controls. It depends on how much of an alternative you really want, just the movement, or the whole game..
And I just got a speed upgrade (on top of the liquid speed upgrade) with the wanderer crest and it's too much and I love it. Every encounter is a mad flurry of damage on both sides, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it and it's a blast.
Very happy with my purchase. Every win feels earned, most deaths feel like my fault, which is exactly what I like in Souls-likes.
Heck, there's even a dedicated subreddit for hating on this boss: https://www.reddit.com/r/fucksavagebeastfly/
> 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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzJyBQKDaeQ
In that game, it's basically ~30 boss fights in a row (don't know the exact number). There are 4 paths through the game A->(B or C)->D->(E or F). So if you take path B you fight different bosses than path C. Same for E and F. One of those last paths has 2 endings with one more boss fight on one path.
You have limited lives so making it to the end of the game requires effectively memorizing the boss patterns. So, your description fits.
> 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
But I'm guessing Contra Hard Corps does not stick up to Eldin Ring. So what's Edlin Ring's special sauce?
Giving your character more movement possibilities tickles the brain with the complexity, enables more fluid and aesthetic movements on the screen, and increases the possible difficulty of platforming sections and boss fights.
Silksong has a very complex movement controller. The player has mass, can grab edges and climb up, and unlocks additional abilities as they play. Now they can dash, run, doing a running jump, wall jump, stall a fall with a float, and more. Attacks come in many flavors, with different styles enabling attacks of different speeds and distances and strengths, with different considerations to manage.
More complex controls take more investment for players to learn and are more rewarding. An extreme example of this is found in games like Monster Hunter, where each of a dozen different weapons controls very differently and takes many hours to become proficient in.
Elden Ring does not have an excessively complex movement system. You walk, run, jump, dodge, and have a handful of fast and slow attacks for a given weapon. It finds success through incredible world and level design and its difficult and rewarding bosses. The game loop is exploration, fighting difficult foes, and slowly growing stronger-- both through game mechanics of gear and stats, and through personal mastery of combat.
Soulslike games revolve around players gambling directly with arbitrary amounts of time-- when you die you drop your money, and if you die again before reaching that grave it's gone permanently. They make you bid the only resource that you care about: your hard-won progress over time.
Complexity and stakes deepen the intellectual and emotional enjoyment of a game.
And a sequence of 30 bosses is too spread out to be comparable to a single condensed boss fight.
Besides that, I don't knows how buggy those bosses are, so can't compare how much of the difficulty is positive
But in general, it doesn't have to be different? The author describes a common principle of separating "good/rewarding" difficulty from bad, any game can be improved by removing invisible hitboxes that frustrate you...
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)
Thats like saying shawshank redemption isnt really a movie because its not fun like the original charlie chaplain films
I think the vast majority of games are meant to be digital toys, the way early movies were mostly cheap entertainment. But just like movies evolved as an art and artists began to become more comfortable with the medium, games will also become more artistic and less like toys.
The interactive nature of games is so innovative in the art world that it hasnt really caught on how to use it. But its evolving. Dark souls, the spiritual ancestor to silksong and pther soulslikes, is harder and that was a response to games like call of duty which felt like they were just trying to get the player through the level with as little friction as possible, with the pakyers actions being an inconvenience the game has to overcome so as to give them their dopamine hit. Dark souls responded to that by respecting the player and trusting them with a challenge they can be proud of solving.
This idea of one peice responding to another is exactly how art works. And the fact that the interactivity of the medium is what is being played with in these peices is a sign that we are moving towards art evolving to embrace interactivity like it did video
Another example is DDLC. That game did amazing things with making the narrative meta that non interactive media simply cant do. A character in a movie turning to face tue camera and addressing the viewer is trippy for sure, but a character telling you your steam username is way fucking trippier, and sells the meta aspect way better
Games arent just toys, they can be art. Art just hasnt evolved enough yet, but its on its way
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/how-to-prototyp...
I'm sure many others have separately come up with this idea, too.
I definitely have issues with the in-game economy, so to just not worry about it, I've been farming enemies to build up a stock pile of cash.
Farming has helped me get better at my movement, and it is very, very fun.
The movement itself reminds me of super smash brother melee, the dashing on ground and in air feels like wave dashing and air dodging.
I think, no, in a vacuum they are fine, at least up to where I got. But even a short thing can get annoying if you need to do it often enough, which is at least my problem, and apparently also that of other players that don't mind the difficulty.
Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference. Dying over and over again from increasingly sloppy mistakes is not anyone's idea of fun.
This is generally true for any mechanically taxing skill. If you push yourself for too long you get tired, and when you get tired you get worse. Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
I agree, unfortunately I'm not even grinding the boss, I am grinding the path to the boss.
> Learning to identify this as a sign to step away is a very good life skill.
Which is why I stopped playing the game instead of letting it waste my time, like many others :)
> Take a 15 min break, either go somewhere else in game or better still, in real life. It really makes a world of difference.
It it is not like I, or every other person struggling with playing the game, have been continuously doing the same boss, for extensively long game sessions. I only have 8 hours evenly spread across the last 5 days.
I've also explored up to Graymoor at this point and picked up a few of the upgrades there, I don't think that is actually the issue here.
Unfortunately basically every encounter up to this point has the same runback tedium to it. So unless one one-tries a boss, which at least did happen twice to me, there seems to be no real way to avoid this tedium because of progression locks.
For comparison, I've played Elden Ring and the DLC, I've never had this much frustration there, because for the most part the struggle was with the bosses, not the perceived busy work of getting to them.
But it doesn't really matter, a good chunk of the players seem to enjoy it, the game doesn't need to appeal to everyone.
And don't feel bad if you are at 1 health and you have tons of money and you save scum and quit to go back to the bench and try again so you don't lose the money - it's okay, having to grind that money again is silly.
But it wasn't Ulysses.
Right. Cause you know all the games that exist. I know it's meant as a superlative and not to be interpreted literally but I hate this type of statements.
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.
I am loving silksong so far however
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’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.
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 enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.
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.
Considering it released a couple of days ago, I don't see how this can be true.
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.
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.
To make something exclusionary, especially if this has a whiff of elitism, is taken by some to be a moral failing. Every complaint that could be read as saying that a work is like that, therefore, raises the spectre of activists or dedicated rabble-rousers using it as ammo to get the developers to ruin it for those who do enjoy it, be it by actually simplifying the game for everyone, devaluing the sense of achievement by introducing an "easy mode", or just changing direction with future expansions.
This has in fact happened with many games I play(ed), live-service games seeming particularly susceptible. The incentive to shout down any complaints about difficulty therefore exists.
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.
UFO50 is voluntarily retro and purposefully use poor design as a kind of homage to video game progress and as a way to foster nostalgia. Part of the pleasure is seeing the changes between the games pretending to be older and the newer ones. Plus, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t made with the idea that most players would finish all the games. Part of the pleasure is sampling the large collection, closing games you don’t like until you find one that sticks. UFO50 objectively contains games which are not that good next to real gems but it is particularly brillant as a collection. Plus independently of how it plays, it’s interesting in itself as a kind of experience. That’s indie at its best.
Silksong is supposed to be a modern game and excels at some parts but the issue is that some design decisions are just, well, bad. I agree with the person you are replying to that it’s not particularly respectful of its player’s time for exemple forcing you to grind and slog repeatedly through uninteresting parts to actually play the fun parts. This is notably something FromSoft entirely solved a long time ago. To me that’s entirely orthogonal to being difficult. It’s an enjoyable game but a flawed one which makes for a tarnished experience.
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.
Hollow Knight has 47 boss encounters - OatBF doesn't have any (but I think the sequel does).