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.
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.
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 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.
"Git Gud" by Viva La Dirt League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs
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)
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
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.
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.
Analemma_•4h ago
[0]: https://youtu.be/Vxt8uud5o_4
thaumasiotes•4h ago
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.
the_af•4h ago
thaumasiotes•3h ago
That is the same conclusion that I and my brother both came to. The game is bizarrely punitive, from the very beginning, for no reason. It's as if they thought of it as being the next Hollow Knight expansion after Godhome, providing an additional challenge for the people who have beaten every pantheon with all bindings. ("The new challenge is: all of your controls now do something different!")
But it's a sequel. Supposedly. Most sequels are aiming to appeal at least as much to players who enjoyed the first game as they do to a hypothetical new audience.
johnnyanmac•2h ago
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.
stevenwoo•4h ago
sfn42•4h ago
I would describe that as a skill issue. And I think Silksong feels great. I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Regarding coyote time I haven't noticed it myself but what you describe just seems like the margins are thin. You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier but there's lots of people who enjoy it for what it is.
To me it's an amazing game, absolutely incredible.
johnnyanmac•2h ago
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.