> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun.
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.
Elden Ring is a great example of a game where the difficulty is largely self-imposed, if you play using all the tools the devs give you like summons, magic, certain weapons, etc the game becomes almost trivialized. Not saying that's a bad thing necessarily, in fact the opposite, I think FromSoft's "difficulty slider" replacement is one of the best ways of going about it, however I think the difficulty overall is overstated by the "real souls players" who hamper themselves so as to experience all of the mechanics.
Whenever a game of this kind has a massive launch, a bunch of criticism will come from people who are either unfamiliar with the genre or just plainly don't enjoy it. That said, there's a very legitimate conversation to be had about difficulty in Elden Ring's DLC - I love FROM games and I genuinely couldn't enjoy the final bosses of SOTE due to the amount of bullshit they throw at you.
In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.
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.
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.
The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting.
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.
Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.
Mentally what you need to do is prioritize killing adds once you’ve memorized the avoidance of the boss pattern. Additionally, a heavy use of tools is immensely helpful in removing adds before it becomes overwhelming.
> This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky
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.
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.
You don’t have to keep track of seven things at once. You need to keep track of your own character and react accordingly. I understand that the game is hard but it adds a ton of fun to my taste.
Have you tried turning the “Backer Credits” setting on? The game reportedly becomes substantially easier afterwards. Source - https://youtu.be/1rsWTBGY_cY?t=777
It's hard, but I think you are projecting your own experience here a bit. Many players are able to track these things and come up with strategies to minimize the impacts of the adds (changing loads, altering movement, planning encounters, etc.)
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.
This is making me want to go back and try again to beat Hollow Knight (I got up to the Mantis Lords and that... teleporting warlock guy... looked it up, I'm thinking of Soul Master.) I'm pretty sure I remember things of this sort of difficulty level in it, too. The fights were brutally hard, but still felt fair.
It's unfair that you cut off the quote there. Because in the next paragraphs:
> And yet.
> I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down... This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.
I am in agreement with the author regarding Silksong. It's the author's understanding about games in general that seems to have a bit of a blind spot (despite being deep in other ways).
These games may be masterpieces but they don't come out of nowhere, there are many other games where skill mastery is much or even most of the appeal. I also somewhat wanted to pick on the line that the Mario games are the only other games that put as much care into how you traverse the world.
> some games, like Hollow Knight and Silksong, achieve excellence at both.
I disagree. I appreciate the skill that went into making Hollow Knight, but to me it felt too much like work, too repetitive, too grindy, too difficult. Not an enjoyable experience for me at all :(
I think if you place games in the category as tourism in so far as the "safari experience", then it makes decisions clearer that the difficulty is part of the experience as the artist's intention.
Silksong is not particularly that hard either with retrospect to the wider genre with staples like Megaman.
I guess somebody found a way to get the Silksong controversy onto Hackernews. Can't say I'm surprised.
My take is, it's a good game and I'm enjoying it. I suspect the only reason it's generating so many takes is that it was so spectacularly overhyped that it cannot possibly live up to how much it has been built up. And that enthusiasm, which started within a specific niche fanbase, has spilled out onto the internet at large in such a way that that is unsustainable.
I bet if we all wait a year, the back and forth will die down and we'll be left with a game that gets similar acclaim to Hollow Knight. People subconsciously think about hype on the same 1-10 scale as a review, but hype can drive a video game score well into the teens or 20s. Then even a 10 feels like a disappointment.
I have no idea what this game is, and I'm pretty insulated from gaming news, culture, etc.
The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere.
What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises.
How did it manage to do this? What's the formula? Or is there simply a lull in the cycle?
Sibling comments are giving good answers about Silksong in particular. But, a more general point to keep in mind is that gaming by revenue is an order of magnitude larger than movies. In that light it's a little strange that gaming news/events don't hit the general attention sphere more than they do.
It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It had a long seven-year development cycle, with "Silksong release announcement at (upcoming event)" becoming a meme, leaving people wondering if it would ever come out. Last month the developers randomly dropped a release trailer with "by the way it's coming out in 3 weeks". It came out and has been a hot topic because, while an excellent game, it's significantly harder than the original, causing a lot of debate.
It started as a meme by a small but loyal Hollow Knight fan base on reddit. They had this ongoing joke about waiting for Silksong to release. As subreddits do, they were repeating the same joke for years. For some reason, this admittedly pretty lame joke escaped into mainstream. That is basically all there is to it.
>How did it manage to do this? What's the formula?
The formula is making incredible art that you're passionate about, giving or selling it to alot of people, and getting lucky enough that word of mouth takes over from there. In other words, there is no formula.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
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.
When I was in college, I bought Demon's Souls and also started the most difficult semester I'd had yet with 3 classes deeply into my CS major. I was terrified of what lay ahead of academically, so I procrastinated by playing Demon's Souls.
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.
This is so real, Dark Souls has helped me immensely in keeping my concentration up for work and other things in life. It's very good at teaching you lessons that translate to real life.
I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it" but rather "I hope there aren't more bs like this".
Sekiro was so good at engendering this feeling. The first time you fight Genichiro you will probably die within seconds. The next fight it might take you 20+ tries to beat him. And then the last time you fight him you can basically no-hit him.
> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]
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).
Silksong starts very difficult compared to Hollow Knight, largely because there are many early foes that will deal 2 masks of damage. Those sorts of big attacks were generally reserved for mid to late bosses in Hollow Knight, and it caught even skilled players off guard. Hornet has a lot of mobility though, and a much easier time dodging out of the way, so once you adapt to her playstyle (be patient, dodge, and punish only when you know it's safe) the difficulty settles down and the game feels pretty fair.
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.
I found both HK and Silksong roughly similar to Dark Souls in much the same way.
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.
I find Silksong to be easier than at least Cuphead and Super Meat Boy, but I could totally see how one who isn't experienced with platformers may find it frustratingly challenging.
I think my hardest gaming achievements have been Pantheon of Hallownest, Malenia in Elden Ring, and 106% Super Meat Boy. Silksong is nowhere near as hard as any of those… but I think I’m about 2/3 of the way through, so who knows what’s in store for the true endgame.
Have yet to run into a truly brutal boss like the last few Pantheon participants in HK.
Silksong is infinitely more forgiving then Spelunky 2. The game just doesn't stop you from going into the harder areas of the map early in your playthrough.
I played Hollow Knight. I don’t recall if I defeated a single boss. I must have done a couple but several of the first you were meant to defeat remained unchallenged.
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.
Regarding controls, I have to play precise 2D games with a d-pad or I get immediately frustrated— that said, it was odd playing most of Celeste that way and then having to switch back to the thumbstick for the section at the end with the bubble comets.
I was just wondering about control setup and latency as a major factor in a game with very strict timing requirements. Last time I played was on a TV (over HDMI in game mode though), with a wireless Xbox controller. I wonder how much easier I'd have found it on a 240Hz monitor with a wired controller?
My first play through of Elden Ring was a pseudo challenge run - capped at 125RL (pvp meta) and dual UGS style. No ash of war usage. No guides for bosses.
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 somehow missed Malenia. I'm level 125 (not doing the PVP meta, just happen to be this level) and was pounding my face against Radagon and the Elden Beast. I downed Radagon on my first attempt, then after like 10 more tries couldn't get him again.
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.
>One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like
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.
Lots of people say this but they can unfortunately never articulate why that works in Elden Ring. Making a game that is insanely difficult will not be enough to give you that feeling of accomplishment. If that's all it took there's be thousands of games that gave you that feeling. And yet there aren't. So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.
> So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.
Actually, there is:
Knowing the difference between a game being difficult versus punishing. Here's a 12 year old, 7-minute video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
(EDIT: If it helps, consider changing "punishing" to "unfair")
The TL;DW is that punishing games are not fun because they often rely on cheap things like unavoidable damage, actions not being telegraphed, inconsistency of rules, long iteration times (ie, unskippable cutscenes, excessively long boss fights where you're redoing the same first 10 minutes over again). Punishing games are poorly designed by people that want to defeat the player, rather than allowing the player to overcome the challenge.
In Elden Ring, all damage is avoidable. Every attack is telegraphed. Boss fights aren't really that long, and if you die, the walk back to try again is always short and doesn't rely on fighting through waves of enemies. Some fights have cutscenes either at the start of the fight or during a transition to a second phase, but they're skippable.
It's still a challenging game. Some boss hits will eliminate over 60% of your HP in a single hit, but those attacks are telegraphed and you're supposed to dodge them.
But to a certain extent, ER is a "choose-your-own-difficulty" game. You can grind out higher levels to get your stats up if you want to give yourself more of an edge. The people complaining about Margit (A very early boss) being super hard were probably under-leveled. I got him to 1% HP on my second try (Seriously, his health bar was a single pixel wide), and got him down on my 5th.
Elden Ring, and Dark Souls before it are hard but fair. That separates it from lesser games.
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.
I wish I could go back and experience soulslikes for the first time! They really are a treat if you experience them as you describe (not everyone feels that way, but I certainly do).
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.
Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.
I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.
Fluid and natural are pretty different concepts, perhaps "intuitive" better maps to what you mean? Humans aren't that fluid, certainly wouldn't be when it comes to vaulting, jumping etc.
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.
> FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that.
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?
Tell me more about how a game where I'm playing as some kind of demigod space marine who is fighting literal demons in literal hell has "unnatural movement". What, pray tell, is the doom slayers natural movement supposed to be? And how are we supposed to tell from behind our keyboard and mouse?
Bah. Doom2016 has some of the absolute best (meaning fun) movement in the business and it is the absolute definition of fluid.
Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high.
Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.
Never let realism get in the way of fun, to paraphrase GabeN :) The whole Earth gets taken over by demons from hell isn't super realistic either, that's not why I play it.
I see a mention of Celeste, I give an upvote. What a great game, and a perfect showcase of what the OP writes about too. The movement is Celeste is so fluid and expressive, which is super important because the game is crazy hard so the movement has to feel great, otherwise the game would be annoying to play.
Yeah, agreed on all counts. I know it's divisive, but the movement in Doom Eternal was incredible. Double dash creating some amazing levels that would have been unthinkable in Doom 2016.
I'm a huge fan of pixel perfect platformers. Chalk Cuphead and Super Meat Boy up on the list of games with a very natural connection between player coordination and game mechanics.
Titanfall was one of my favorite games ever, largely because of the movement. (I even hated using the eponymous Titans, because they take away your ability to run on walls!)
That's why I struggled with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. They subtly broke the movement and some hitboxes, and I could never get the proper hang of it.
I won't play action games without an easy mode anymore. I've beaten all Dark Souls games and I just got tired of proving myself over and over. Nowadays I just want mild challenge and the certainty I will win after trying a couple of times.
I really appreciated that TUNIC had infinite stamina and infinite life options under the accessibility settings. I would not have completed the game without the infinite stamina. And that would have been unfortunate because the way the game unfolds is incredible. Such a cool design for a game.
There are plenty of games with no difficulty settings at all that are easier than, say, Touhou Kinjoukyou’s easy mode. Elden Ring, for instance. Why is the presence of an ‘easy mode’ even a significant factor here?
Mods already exists which can make game more forgiving. Limiting damage to one is great start. Don't be ashamed to use them on Silksong, developers went hardcore for this one.
I aborted my 3 Hollow Knight attempts because of boss runbacks. Is there a mod that, I don’t know, adds benches before bosses or something? Then I might finally finish the game. I do enjoy hard-but-fair boss fights after all.
On the other hand, you have games like Borderlands that force you to finish the game once (or even twice) to unlock an "acceptable" level of difficulty (via lazy bullet sponge metamorphosis).
Same with Bioshock Infinite that needed a hack to unlock "1999 mode" or Bloodstained its harder difficulty (still easy, though).
Balance and fair difficulty really are some of the hardest and most important things to get right in video games.
I'm not familiar with the the named platformer titles beyond word of mouth and I may not have the free time to become so for a while but anecdotally I found some years ago that the movement controls in the games Titanfall, Doom (2016) and Titanfall 2 produced the same feeling of flow between the hands and brain the author articulates. It may come to pass that games will one day be benchmarked by neurological metrics in the superior parietal lobule and ACC of their players next to their frames per second, load times, ping stability, 1% lows and memory scaling.
Titanfall 2 had excellent movement! The only games I’ve played that surpass it are the tribes games, which just have a whole new level of fluid movement for 3d games.
Interesting how different impressions can be. Elegance is not really how I would describe movement in Silksong. Yes, the animation is smooth, but the actual movement and its controls are very crude and twisted. It's in the realm of those annoying games which feel very unnatural, unintuitive.
I'm a big Metroidvania fan and could never get into Hollow Knight for this reason. But I also played it around the same time as the first Ori game, so maybe it's a tough comparison.
Readit News
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.
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
In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> And yet.
> I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down... This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.
These games may be masterpieces but they don't come out of nowhere, there are many other games where skill mastery is much or even most of the appeal. I also somewhat wanted to pick on the line that the Mario games are the only other games that put as much care into how you traverse the world.
I disagree. I appreciate the skill that went into making Hollow Knight, but to me it felt too much like work, too repetitive, too grindy, too difficult. Not an enjoyable experience for me at all :(
Silksong is not particularly that hard either with retrospect to the wider genre with staples like Megaman.
Someone get that article writer a copy of Battletoads.
My take is, it's a good game and I'm enjoying it. I suspect the only reason it's generating so many takes is that it was so spectacularly overhyped that it cannot possibly live up to how much it has been built up. And that enthusiasm, which started within a specific niche fanbase, has spilled out onto the internet at large in such a way that that is unsustainable.
I bet if we all wait a year, the back and forth will die down and we'll be left with a game that gets similar acclaim to Hollow Knight. People subconsciously think about hype on the same 1-10 scale as a review, but hype can drive a video game score well into the teens or 20s. Then even a 10 feels like a disappointment.
Sounds great, because I think it doesn't get much better than that.
The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere.
What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises.
How did it manage to do this? What's the formula? Or is there simply a lull in the cycle?
~ a year later the team announced a DLC called silksong but silksong grew so much that they decided to turn it to a full sequel.
The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme
The formula is making incredible art that you're passionate about, giving or selling it to alot of people, and getting lucky enough that word of mouth takes over from there. In other words, there is no formula.
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.
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.
Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, there is:
Knowing the difference between a game being difficult versus punishing. Here's a 12 year old, 7-minute video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
(EDIT: If it helps, consider changing "punishing" to "unfair")
The TL;DW is that punishing games are not fun because they often rely on cheap things like unavoidable damage, actions not being telegraphed, inconsistency of rules, long iteration times (ie, unskippable cutscenes, excessively long boss fights where you're redoing the same first 10 minutes over again). Punishing games are poorly designed by people that want to defeat the player, rather than allowing the player to overcome the challenge.
In Elden Ring, all damage is avoidable. Every attack is telegraphed. Boss fights aren't really that long, and if you die, the walk back to try again is always short and doesn't rely on fighting through waves of enemies. Some fights have cutscenes either at the start of the fight or during a transition to a second phase, but they're skippable.
It's still a challenging game. Some boss hits will eliminate over 60% of your HP in a single hit, but those attacks are telegraphed and you're supposed to dodge them.
But to a certain extent, ER is a "choose-your-own-difficulty" game. You can grind out higher levels to get your stats up if you want to give yourself more of an edge. The people complaining about Margit (A very early boss) being super hard were probably under-leveled. I got him to 1% HP on my second try (Seriously, his health bar was a single pixel wide), and got him down on my 5th.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvAbbye-oCY
Blind Forest though? Chef's kiss
There’s also an accessibility aspect to it. Accommodation for players who may have different physical capabilities is just the right thing to do.
Same with Bioshock Infinite that needed a hack to unlock "1999 mode" or Bloodstained its harder difficulty (still easy, though).
Balance and fair difficulty really are some of the hardest and most important things to get right in video games.
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