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!
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.
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.
"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.
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)
Heck, there's even a dedicated subreddit for hating on this boss: https://www.reddit.com/r/fucksavagebeastfly/
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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
I think I'd be bored if it were easier. I don't want to 'press A to win'.
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.
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
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.
Silksong is not particularly that hard either with retrospect to the wider genre with staples like Megaman.
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.
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
There’s also an accessibility aspect to it. Accommodation for players who may have different physical capabilities is just the right thing to do.
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.
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.
Analemma_•15h ago
[0]: https://youtu.be/Vxt8uud5o_4
thaumasiotes•15h 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•15h ago
thaumasiotes•14h 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•13h 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.
bernds74•1h ago
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).
stevenwoo•15h ago
sfn42•15h 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•13h 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.
slightwinder•2h ago
They are similar, but different on annoying details.