I’ve heard people complaining that the lack of save points close to bosses, and boss fights that are made more difficult due to adds more than boss mechanics seem like artificial ways to increase the difficulty. Do you agree?
Silksong is hard, yes. The checkpoints are not close to the bosses, but I wouldn’t say the run backs to bosses are different to the original Hollow Knight though.
What is different is that a lot of enemies even at the start deal 2 damage, something that was specific to the hardest bosses of Hollow Knight. So no, it is not artificial but just increased difficulty from the start.
And in the end all game difficulty is artificial, since you could easily change it. Either you like the difficulty level of the game or not.
What I do not recommend is playing Silksong without Hollow Knight first. Because the whole of HK is the tutorial for Silksong.
The only artificial difficulty I experienced were spikes on some walls doing 2 damage.
That’s just a useless addition. You can’t heal in most platformer passages and if you die, you just run there and try again twice as much as normally.
Didn’t mind the 2 damage done by enemies as much, you can heal there after all once you do enough damage. Although they were a bit weird with picking which enemies/attacks do 2 damage.
It’s hard to judge, because the difficulty is half the reason the game exists. I think they got it about right, it’s a hard game but I got through it, and I’m not especially good at the genre.
I felt silksong was definitely harder, but I didn’t feel it was artificial. The run backs were pretty mild once you figure out a route save for bilewater, and even that you get the run down after a few times and its not terrible.
Honestly, the biggest wall for me was that stupid red guy at the start. They did break out the double damage early and robustly.
I saw mr stupid red guy and thought: I’ll be back when I find a dash.
The “artificial” part of the difficulty isn’t the run back, it’s not different from that the original game or dark souls. The “artificial” part is really the dev throwing a few wave of common enemy in an enclosed space, making the game more about positioning than knowing the pattern. People might say “that’s part of the fun, duh”, but well no one actually say they LOVE Capra Demon, and there’s no contact damage when touched by the dog or the boss. It’s just too much.
One boss that also using something that isn’t part of the fight as a difficult is Trobbio. It’s basically exploit sensory overload on some people as a weapon. That’s why some people have increased difficulty with him, some basically do it first try.
And imo, the runback for Bilewater isn’t as bad, there’s tools to help or you can just accept the worm and then expel it afterward. It makes the runback less of a ninja warrior and more of a triathlon. The bossfight however have the same issue i mentioned above.
I strongly suspect that the people having the most difficulty with Silksong are the ones that are either reluctant to use hunter tools or unwilling to change their build to fit the target.
An example for the Bilgewater fight is swapping in the downward drill tool to just instantly kill one of the ambusher adds that pop out of the water.
The right combination of charms and tools really trivialize a lot of fights.
Even the original Hollow Knight is too hard for me. I got lost very quickly without a map. I will try finding mods that give me a map from the start, and to lower the difficulty.
But that would be after I finish other games in my backlog, which will take several decades.
