Let's Talk about Silksong
credit: flash on SteamWarning: There are significant spoilers for this game throughout this post. If you haven't finished it yet, I would bail.
So …
It's been a month and change since Hollow Knight: Silksong was released, and in that time there's been a lot of discussion about the game and its challenges. I bought it on day one, played through the entire thing, 100%-ed it, and then went back and played Hollow Knight to 107% (I skipped colo 3 and the pantheons because I don't like them). I have thoughts. Let's get to them!
First off, let me preface this by saying that, barring something truly amazing happening in the next couple of months, Silksong is my game of the year. It is a marvelous game, beautifully crafted with tremendous intent and attention to detail. It is bigger and more ambitious than Hollow Knight, tells a deeper story, and allows for even more player agency in terms of build setup and approach to combat. Movement is faster, more varied, and more intuitive than in Hollow Knight. The game features some of the most stunningly-crafted visuals ever in a 2D platformer / Metroidvania, has an insane level of attention to detail that you just don't see in most titles, and the music—a thing I rarely notice in games, even those whose music gets a ton of love—is spectacular.
Also, Hollow Knight is a better game.
Team Cherry made three missteps with Silksong that ultimately I think cause it to crumble just slightly under its own weight. Difficulty is not one of them. Is the game hard? Yes. But not that hard, not really. It's all just pattern recognition for bosses and some manual dexterity stuff for platforming. If you're planning to tell me to "git gud" or whatever, I'm already gud. I'm not a god-tier gamer but I'm quite good at games like this.
Let's talk about the things I believe are issues:
It's Too Long
Jesus Christ, this game is long. Sure, I play these games cautiously and slowly. I read every dialog, I talk to everyone repeatedly to make sure I haven't missed anything, and I focus on exploring and making sure I've checked every corner of every area. It took me about eighty-four in-game hours to reach 100%. My first playthrough of Hollow Knight, in which I achieved the true ending and had over 100% completion, was less than half that.
As good as the game is, I was pretty ready for it to be done at about forty hours. I was very ready for it to be done at sixty hours. At eighty hours, it was basically a grim death march of just doing things for the sake of getting to the end. Could I have skipped some of those things? Yes! But I didn't know which would be fun or interesting, and which wouldn't, so I felt like I needed to do them all. The endgame, especially, is a slog but little of its content is really optional. Once you trigger Act Three, you're in the shit, and the only way out is through.
If you just do the two acts, it's not that bad, but even there the game gets a little long in the tooth. I know we live in an era when everyone seems to want games that last 120+ hours but there's a very good argument to be made that a shorter, tighter game is a stronger all-around experience. Better to be left wanting more, rather than getting the final hit in on the last boss and shouting (and this is a direct quote), "Oh thank god, I don't ever have to play this fucking game again!"
It Falls Into a Classic "Sequel Trap"
Let's talk about shards. They're the second currency the game introduces. Hollow Knight just had geo for money. Silksong has beads for money, but also requires you to use shards if you want to employ the many tools at Hornet's disposal that complement her main attacks via needle or silk. You're capped at 800 of these shards when maxed out, and an average boss attempt or long arena will use about 100 of them assuming full use of two tools. If you run out, then you have to go farm more.
This adds nothing to the game. Absolutely nothing would be lost if tools just replenished at each bench without being tied to a currency. This is a classic sequel trap: adding increased complexity mostly for the sake of it, in ways that don't add to the core experience and can in fact detract from it.
"If they're struggling with a boss, running out of shards is a way to nudge the player towards exploring elsewhere until they can come back with more power" … nah. That's maybe what it's supposed to be for but that's not how it actually works. For one thing, Silksong is not Elden Ring. There's a limit to the amount of upgrading you can actually do, and a lot of those upgrade pieces are locked behind bosses. You might be able to snag one more mask, and maybe even improve your needle, but more likely you'll just wander or, worse, farm shards until they're full again and then go back to the same boss.
Silksong is a much more mechanics-based game than Dark Souls or even Bloodborne (which also suffered from farming issues). Certainly, yes, you can and should upgrade your gear, but more often than not you'll run into a boss when you're about at the level expected to take it on. In a game where mechanics are ultimately the main factor, it makes no sense to force the player to farm. It does not add value.
The result? Players hesitate to even use their tools because they don't want to "waste" shards. For more than half the boss battles, I never used a red tool at all, because I didn't want to burn the shards, even though they were maxed out. I'm not alone in this - it's such a common gamer behavior that there are memes aplenty about it. "Lol I had fifty rockets and I beat the final boss without using any because I was afraid of wasting them" is a super common sentiment among video game players.
If you're going to put so many fun tools into the game, you should make people want to use them! Tying them to a currency system is going to absolutely ensure that doesn't happen, at least not as much as it could. Making them a scarce resource decreases the desire to use them, rather than increasing it.
It Leans Into Tedium
There are two types of hard. There's fun hard (or at least, compelling hard), and there's tedious hard. The line between these two is incredibly blurry and shifts heavily depending on the person, but I believe that Silksong fairly regularly falls pretty far on the tedious side. For every Cogwork Dancers, one of the most perfect boss battles in video game history, there is a Bilewater runback. You can justify that runback however you like. "Oh, Silksong is a game about suffering," or "Oh, there's a hidden bench that only makes the runback awful instead of utterly miserable," or "Oh, actually, I like platforming." Go for it. Have a blast. That runback is tedious as shit, and the majority of players agree with me. It's not fun hard. It's not even actually that hard! It's just boring, obnoxious, and frustrating. The Last Judge is fun hard. The First Sinner is fun hard (so fun!). Even Lost Lace, and again, we'll get to her, is mostly fun hard. The Bilewater runback? Tedious, man. Just deeply tedious.
Some other things that are tedious about Silksong:
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The endless arenas. Every two feet, you're locked into another room with waves of enemies. A bunch of bosses even have waves of enemies before the boss shows up! I didn't mind the arenas in Hollow Knight because they were all pretty short (also there were about 1/12 as many, and none before bosses). Silksong will regularly throw six waves or more at you. It's not necessarily hard, depending on your skill level, but it wears out its welcome. Tedious.
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Surprise bench traps / broken benches. One of these is fun, especially if they're positioned in a way that makes getting back to them not too much of an ordeal, or if the tell is super obvious. Several of them, all with no tell whatsoever? Tedious.
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So much platforming. Listen, I get it - a lot of people thought Hollow Knight had too little platforming. A lot of people think Celeste is a fun game. Personally I'd rather whale myself in the junk repeatedly, but you do you. That said, there are multiple sections of Silksong where no matter how good you are at platforming, they just drag on. Tedious.
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Long runbacks. Come on, man. We've figured this out! I've heard all kinds of justifications for this, from the old chestnut about Silksong being about suffering, to "it helps me clear my head between boss fights." Cool. Don't care. Forcing the player to run through the same area over and over again to get back to the boss is unnecessary and doesn't contribute much of anything to the experience. When, multiple times, those areas are filled with platforming, it's just double the not-fun. Tedious.
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Bosses with adds. I have never encountered a boss in any video game, in 40+ years of playing them, where adds made the fight more fun. Dual phase bosses? Great! Bosses where a second boss shows up midway through? Great! Bosses where they throw a bunch of standard mobs into the arena with you just to up the difficulty? Tedious.
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The flea circus. Man, fuck them fleas! I did all that for them and my reward is having to slog through this for a pale oil? I hope you all drown in the bath carriage! Okay, I'm partially kidding here - it's a fun little addition, but locking that upgrade behind certain scores? Tedious.
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Filling the screen with bullshit. Okay, let's talk about Lost Lace. It took me thirty minutes to get to the point where I could reliably get her to phase three. It took me three hours to beat her. The reason wasn't because there was some amazing mechanical shift in her third phase. It was because I fucking couldn't see her! You're fighting a black boss, who shoots black attacks, on a dark grey background, atop a black swamp. To be fair, there are outlines, so it's reasonably trackable. Then phase three starts, and all of a sudden, there's shit all over the place! It's so hard to see where Lace is, what she's doing, and where attacks might be coming from. The audio cues don't really help, as they don't preface specific attacks. You're left with rain, bits of silk, and random splatters all over your screen, and you basically just have to hope that you can manage to figure out what's going on long enough to get the hits in you need to make the shitshow stop. This is the worst example but not by any means the only one in the game. Te-di-ous.
That's a lot of tedium for one game. It's made up for by a whole lot of other excellent things, but it does drag the game down a bit. You want to avoid players using terms like "slog," "grind," or "farm" whenever possible. Silksong mostly does. But sometimes it doesn't.
Wrapup
I may be in the minority here. Silksong is justifiably getting a lot of Game of the Year buzz, and I've seen more than one person say they think it's the greatest game they've ever played. I suspect that latter sentiment will dissipate somewhat as we get further out from the game's release and people have time to cool down a bit, but I'm sure there will always be folks who think it's the best thing ever made. I'm not one of them.
Let's take an example so old, half the people playing Silksong right now probably weren't born when the titles came out: Fallout and Fallout 2. I would say the majority sentiment is that Fallout 2 is the better game, a statement with which I vehemently disagree. Fallout 2 provided a few quality of life improvements that were extremely welcome, but beyond that it is sprawling, messy, overly self-referential, and campier than the first game in a way I think detracts from the experience. It's also too long.
Fallout provides a tighter, more focused experience. It is, in my opinion, the better game by a pretty wide margin. Fallout does not give you time to get bored of it. Fallout 2 very much does, and you can see things the developers put into the game specifically to combat that (the car being the most notable). It's still a spectacular game, and one of the best RPGs of all time, but in the grand tradition of sequels, it's overstuffed.
Silksong feels like the Fallout 2 to Hollow Knight's Fallout. The former are both excellent games. The latter are all-timers.
I again want to point out that I replayed Hollow Knight immediately after finishing Silksong. This isn't rose-tinted glasses. This is a direct comparison between the two games. I'm very aware of Hollow Knight's faults - the knight's movement is slow and cumbersome to start the game, half the charms are basically worthless, the true ending is hidden behind a single double-jump in Kingdom's Edge that is very easy to miss, the lore is really obscure without relying on YouTube videos, and so forth.
Hollow Knight is not a perfect game, because perfect games don't exist, but it is in my opinion the best Metroidvania ever made and one of the greatest games of all time. Silksong is a worthy sequel. I just wish Team Cherry hadn't doubled down quite so much on the slog.