Silksong

[renegadefolkhero]

Since street cred is relevant, the facts: I have not beaten Hollow Knight. I attempted three times, and got farther each time. The last time, I got pretty darn far (in my estimate) and after about 30 hours was satisfied with my time. I didn't use mods because I was on Switch and I had no idea that was a thing. I also intend to rebuy the game on PC whenever it goes on sale again. So, cred established, despite being a loud and proud shitty casual, I like this stuff.

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Silksong is a beautiful and enjoyable game when it's fun, and when it's fun is gonna vary for each player. For me, the first eight hours were wonderful. I died a lot, especially fighting Lace, but it never felt like a slog.

Around Shellwood, the difficulty seemed to notch up, but despite having explored many nooks and crannies I felt like Hornet wasn't keeping up. It was taking a lot of hits to kill even basic enemies. This area was not very fun for me, and when I got stuck on a boss I decided to give mods a try.

Getting through that boss battle with mods really put things in perspective for me. There was no way I could have done it at my current skill level. It was too long and tedious, and the jumps were too tricky. I was dying so much in Shellwood I started avoiding enemies rather than learn to fight them, just so I could make some kind of progress exploring, so I was nowhere near ready to beat the boss skill-wise.

I was fully prepared to put the game aside until next time, but I read a review that talked about using mods to tweak ("fix" if you prefer) the difficulty to what personally feels right and I thought... huh. I could do that. I added mods to explicitly address design issues that bothered me personally. No 2-mask hits. When you die you restart at beginning of the area. Slow regen (I'm assuming there's not a charm for this). And Hornet gets a damage boost after her needle is sharpened.

Honestly, it was like night and day. The game was fun once more. I was able to survive long enough to get practice in, so my skills started improving again. If I made mistakes, I knew I'd start back at the beginning of the area, so I didn't worry as much about confronting difficult enemies and getting clobbered.

The game is still challenging. Sinner's Road is ugly and hard as balls, but by the time I finished exploring it my skills had definitely improved. I attribute this to not constantly dying, frankly. I'm traversing areas repeatedly looking for secrets, and that gives me the experience I need to play better.

I would say the number one design issue is Hornet doesn't feel like she gets stronger. The way the enemies scale, it feels more like she's pacing at best, even if you're getting the extra goodies. And one of the things that makes these games fun for me is the sense of progression, of growing more powerful and being able to reduce the number of whacks it takes to kill enemies and so forth. It's satisfying to return to earlier areas and be able to kill a basic enemy with one or two hits instead of IDK FOUR.

The modding community for this game is so on-point you can make Silksong whatever it needs to be. I have no idea if I'll beat this game, but I am definitely going to get a lot more mileage out of it this way. The graphics, story, lore, characters, and play feel are all really good, so I'm glad the main design issues are easily moddable. There are some really tricky platforming areas that require you to git gud, but most of them are optional and can be managed more easily after you've acquired a new abilities. So that bullshit in Sinner's Road? Yeah fuck that noise I'll be back when I've got some kind of double jump.

(Speaking of which... where the FUCK is the double jump ability aaaaaaa)

Comments

[jaininae]

I never played Hollow Knight, but I'm aware of the game (and think it might've even been mentioned in Blood, Sweat & Pixels?) and how the recent release has been received. This reddit post that was posted to tumblr gave me a chuckle.

What I did find interesting is that Yahtzee Crowshaw gave the gave 2 different reviews. In his Fully Ramblomatic, he talked a lot of shit about the game, but in the Semi Ramblomatic reiterated that he didn't finish the game so he went back to it later after people got on his ass about it, and ultimately came to the conclusion that he doesn't know how to review the game because it's somewhere in between good and bad for him as an experience. More succinctly: it's "A good game" that he wouldn't recommend to anyone.

But RE: your experiences with Silksong -- It does remind me a lot of my experience with both The Last of Us and The Last of Us 2. Even on Easy Mode I had issues with moving forward in the game. And as I was only playing on console (and didn't have access to mods) I was left with the only option of slogging through the game.

And like, as with Yahtz, I do think these are both games I think are Good, but aren't games I wouldn't recommend to folks, at least not without understanding their tastes in gaming and clarifying a few things (especially with 2 given the controversy around that game is, imo, very well earned).

[renegadefolkhero]

I totally forgot I was way too shitty of a casual to play The Last of Us. :( Man that was a bummer.

I think "good, but can't recommend," is the fairest evaluation unless you're talking to someone who's gaming tastes and preferences you know very well. And even then, you don't know how something like this is really gonna land until you try it yourself.

[jaininae]

If I'm being honest, TLOU and TLOU2 are both "Good games I wouldn't recommend" mainly because of the difficulty curve. But if you were interested in it from a story perspective (and maybe looked into whether you can change the difficulty via mods on the PC version of the games) they're both really well written (also the gameplay is solid I'm just really bad at FPS). I'd just give you a heads up on TLOU2 because some writing decisions has made the game a hit or a miss for players. Which I completely understand as someone who wanted to stop playing the game at least 3 times lol.