Sigh this shit again, if it's the creators decision to have a game with finely tuned hard difficulty, so be it, that's the creators creative decision and it should be respected

There are mods and cheats for this game already—and they even run on Linux. I turn 50 next month: though I'm still playing, I don't have as much time for gaming as I used to and my reflexes aren't what they were. I haven't entirely removed the challenge with mods, but I feel no shame in tweaking this game to go easier on me and chew up less of my time as punishment for failure. I wish they had these as accessibility options built-in, but I'm fine with hacking it.

Anybody telling me I should "git gud" can pound sand: I'm already good at a bunch of things that get me a paycheck. I play games so I can relax and be terrible at something for fun. I'm certainly not playing for bragging rights.

A lot of comments tying runbacks to difficulty, when they have nothing to do with each other. I haven't playing silksong but I played about half of the original and uninstalled it, despite the fact it is so many people's favorite metroidvania and metroidvania is one of my favorite genres.

Not putting checkpoints close to boss fights is not difficulty. It is disrespectful of the player's time, which is a problem hollow Knight was full of.

If you're not able to commit to learning new strategies and using game mechanics to adapt to a game's difficulty, and experience it as the developers intended, maybe it's not for you. You can always watch a lore video or let's play by other gamers to get the story if that's the goal. This is Dark Souls 2 all over again, and I will personally say as someone who initially hated it, then gave it another chance; When you persist and triumph through grit, the game leaves a lasting impression and sense of accomplishment that you cheat yourself out of with a difficulty slider. That's my favorite game in the series now, which is a deeply unpopular opinion, unsurprisingly.

This debate pops up every now and then and my opinion remains the same, there are plenty of games that aren't meant to be a challenge to choose from. Part of games that are built to be a challenge is being able to reflect on how far you grew in the process, and people hate to hear it but 'git gud' is a real thing for those who believe things worth doing are hard.

We should definitely talk about how levying criticism, especially thoughtful criticism, is treated as a personal attack by other people playing the same game. It's a bizarre form of tribalism.

People forgetting that when you ran out of lives you used to have to go back to the start of the whole game.

Runbacks are a lame attempt at artificially increasing difficulty. I'll happily die on that hill. I love difficult games, but there is a fine line between frustration and difficult.

Elden Ring (at least all the bits I played through) and Sekiro absolutely nailed it. None of the run backs were particularly egregious, and it let me really focus on experimenting and learning to feel out the difficult fights. Celeste is another good example. I have dropped hours on some of the later levels trying to master them, but never once got frustrated.

Hollow Knight I never finished because I got stuck on a boss and the runback was just way too long and annoying. I loved everything else about the game and want to finish it eventually.

Edit: I think they have their place as "mods" that you could enable to increase difficulty, and i'd actually probably enjoy it that way. Just designing the game around them is where i draw the line.

I like the game, but I definitely think it deserves some criticism. I really don't get the thinking behind not placing a bench directly in front of every boss arena. The run-backs don't make the game harder, just more frustrating. It's also something I disliked in older Souls games, but thankfully they realized the problem and fixed it in Elden Ring. And some mechanics are just baffling, like benches that are locked behind a paywall, which you have to pay every time you want to access the bench. Why on earth would they do this, with currency already being as sparse as it is?

Don't like it, don't buy it. I'm happy for team cherry and their success. It's not for me but I don't resent them that it isn't. This nothing burger discussion is yet another herring designed to drive clicks and traffic off of the work of people who ACTUALLY create something of worth. Modern parasitism at its best.

I spent 3 hours stuck on one boss fight.

In most games, finally beating it would have me saying "thank fuck its over".

In silksong, I'm saying "fuck yeah that was a good boss". It's a very different feeling, and one that I haven't had the pleasure of enjoying in quite some time.

That said.

I think both hollow knight and silksong should have easy modes. It would be fine. It doesn't hurt me any that someone else can have an easier time. People need to remember that video games are entertainment, and the sweaty "hardcore gamers" can fuck off with their usual judgemental elitism.

I personally think Outer Wilds should give you the whole lore as an audiobook, not everyone wants to go hunting for clues and reading a bunch of old conversations between dead people in order to figure out what's going on...

My biggest complaint is the sheer lack of rewards when I finish a fight. Give me any currency.

I have spent so much of this game broke, unable to buy the things I need to advance any side plots.

I'm currently stuck on the fight for the Music in the top left of the citadel. The double boss at the end is brutal. But because no enemy in that fight drops monster parts, I have to quit to grinding it to go grind more materials to build equipment, despite having slain 20+ enemies each run.

The runbacks don't bother me too much so far. I do think there's some skills in the runback, but it relies heavily on the level designer as well. An ideal runback:

• is relatively short, you should have time to reflect on the boss, but not get sidetracked
• has enemies that drop currency, so repeated runs slowly build you up (assuming you always collect your shade)
• has enemies that train you on the bosses timings or counters (if the boss is parry heavy, put a tricky-to-parry enemy enroute back)
• has a "speed route" that let's you bypass most or all of the run once you've figured it out

These factors make a run both interesting game play and still a form of progression. A badly designed run lacks these factors, being just a slow slog to get back into the boss fight.

My biggest complaint so far is the double damage. Every boss and so many common enemies do nothing but double damage. Why even have 5 HP instead of 3? And it being 5 (and bind healing 3) have compounding effects with this problem. Taking a single hit on the way to a boss actually costs you an entire "boss hit" so runbacks are worse all around. Trying to heal mid boss only gets you "one and a half" hits back which takes a lot of silk to build up and probably is a worse deal for you than just using the silk to power more attacks.

Double damage would suck a lot less (and be a better mechanic) if you had 6 HP to start, or if you healed 4 at a time, or if bosses didnt always do 2 damage. There's no tension to avoiding punishing hits because every move is equally punishing. It makes fights feel very conservative which is maybe intentionally meant to evoke Hornet as a careful hunter, using traps and plans to take down big foes.

I find the opposite though, she feels fragile and reactive. I wish starting damage was higher too. I had this issue in Hollow Knight as well, everything takes too many hits. Common enemies are spongy, bosses take at least 33% too long across the board. Especially it gets annoying since a lot of bosses so far get spammier and faster towards their final phases, so you spend so much time dodging the same attacks and looking for openings to chip hits in. Skills and traps don't do enough damage to feel especially useful either.

I also hate, and this is another compounding factor, the complete lack of enemy HP bars. On regular enemies this is annoying (gotta count my hits) but on bosses it feels negligent. Bosses have multiple phases and take so long to kill, it would be nice to know if my last run was just a hit or 2 away from the end or if I still had a 3rd phase to plan for. It adds to the poor perception of skills and traps as well. Sting Shard and Thread Storm both seem to hit several times, around a half-dozen, but neither seems to do much more damage than a couple of regular hits.

Overall I'm really loving Silksong, the art and music are top notch. The DLC for HK convinced me that Team Cherry and I disagree about some fundamental ideas in game design, and HKSS bears that out.

In my opinion, the game is not particularly difficult. That is, if you've played through the original Hollow Knight. Which most people haven't. In fact, it looks to me like a lot of people jumping on the hype don't have too much experience with metroidvanias and soulslikes.

It's a sequel, so intended to be played after the original. Why do we care what people who haven't played the first game think?

I'm about 10 hours into silksong and it's amazing, don't get me wrong. But the majority of the boss fights seem... cheap?

Like, their difficulty doesn't come from their various attacks, or their environment. Instead, it usually comes from the fact that they do double damage, or the fact that they spam the same two attacks over and over way too quickly, or the fact that they can do the same add summon three times in a row and make what was a controllable situation practically impossible

Now, I've 112% the OG hollow knight and beaten true radiance, so I'm not against difficult boss fights. In fact I relish the feeling of learning their moves and patterns after every single death

But when the moves are "ram into wall. Then ram into wall again" it becomes incredibly annoying

Every time a hard game gets made, we have to have this debate? Maybe the real easy mode is just not trying to please everyone.

I'm loving it, and the runbacks and difficulty just feel like standard metroidvania to me. Yeah, it takes time and caution, but that's just the genre.

is nobody going to define what "runbacks" are?

I'm guessing it's something like when you lose to a boss you have to travel a senselessly difficult and long way back to the boss to try again?

That does sound annoying and I hate when I even have to sit through a cutscene on each retry of a boss..

I mean personally I don't have any issues with an easy mode in games, casual play is nice when you come back home from work half dead. Silksong is advertised as a soulslike though. Feels a little counterintuitive to take away the aspects that define a soulslike, even if it makes the game accessible to a wider audience.

I think it's a great game for veterans who like challenges like myself.

But I have to call out team Cherry for their interviews: They said they wanted anyone to be able to pick up this as their first Hollow Knight game and just start playing... Sorry, but, bullshit. the difficulty ramp is too quick, double damage comes out to early and the boss fights get more challenging quickly. See the weaver for instance, a fight I'd place around the difficulty of Grimm, but there's double damage and you probably only have 5 health.

Also they mentioned part of the game's difficulty was due to Hornet's competence and utility... Ghost is canonically a better fighter than Hornet, so by that logic they should have made the game easier (yes I'm being silly about this part).

I think this discussion has more merit when framing this from an ableism viewpoint. Games having accessibility sliders to either slow down puzzles or enemies helps players who have a disability.

A game that comes to mind is Crosscode! You had options that could change the speed and damage for various things in the game. Was nice because sometimes I'd change the settings when I had been stuck and frustrated on a puzzle which made the game far more enjoyable.

This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it's not their thing.

I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.

So far, every run back I've experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it's not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don't be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren't enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.