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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

is nobody going to define what "runbacks" are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have this debate monthly since the last decade. I don't particularly like the way hollow knight handles saves, not the difficulty itself. It's time consuming, not inherently hard...

Time consuming does not equal difficulty, remember this.

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

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

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

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

In this thread: people complaining who are apparently bad at game mechanics and can't or won't learn to improve.

Just beat Widow second attempt.

The run back has you start on one screen, traverse two screens, and done. I got as high as 12 Mississippi counting during it.