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...