Silksong
Seven years.
Seven years is a magic number. It’s a long enough duration for things to change dramatically: lovers got married and couples got divorced; the world entered another wave of financial crisis / political turmoil / war erupts; some even claim that every single cell in our body is not the same as it was 7 years ago (not 100% true… but you get the idea).
And Team Cherry aren’t immune to this number. The original Hollow Knight captured the hearts of gamers around the world. However, Silksong fails to reproduce the same magic, because it tries to resist change instead of learning from their past mistakes.
The recurrent annoying aspect is the runback. Why must every checkpoint is so far away from every boss? Yes, this nudge the player to explore elsewhere™, preventing players headbanging into the wall. But what if the boss is an absolute roadblock, e.g., Sister Sprinter whose gated the wall-jump; The Widow whose denied playing music; or The 4ht Chorus that just won’t let you go out and explore elsewhere, literally.
It’s like Team Cherry just went into the cave for seven-fucking-years, shutting themselves off from the world, ignoring advancements in the genre. (Later installation of Dark Souls just scrapped the idea of distant bonfires, and just spawned you right in front of the boss’s room.)
It feels like they’re hiding uninteresting boss design by introducing a gap between you and the boss, so you won’t breeze through the boss after a few tries. Instead, you must spend tons of attempts (and hours of brainlessly running back) just to observe boss’s new patterns. This annoyance is amplified by the 2-hit kill in practice (yes, you initially have 5 HP, but the boss is doing 2 damage; and when you get hit, the screen blurred and you got stunned into the trap.)
Speaking of which, I can count only ONE boss that is memorably well-designed: the Cogwork Dancers. Its telegraph is clear, its speed is fair, and the entire fight feels like a beautiful trio tango. Plus that this is a great buildup for later harder variant that stems naturally from the design, and the boss themselves just tie seamlessly into the game’s lore.
The rest of the bosses either feel like reskins from the original Hollow Knight (looking at you, Radiance – Mother Silk); boring busywork with minions (Savage Beastfly, King Khann); or have marathon runback like previously mentioned (Last Judge, Bilewater’s boss).
The Metroidvania aspect with sequence-breaking was quite disappointing. Of course you can skip the Last Judge by going the unpresented way (into The Mist, which requires beating The Widow to unlock a violin first), but that just lands you on another boss with another frustrating runback… While other aspect of the Metroidvania was denied completely, e.g., the entrance to Wisp Thicket requires the double jump ability. Period. You can’t do cleaver tricks (like the Beast Crest jump) to grab the fire-escape ladder because there’s an invisible wall blocking access unless you’ve unlocked the ability.
The platforming is super sucks too. The Abyss escape sequence, where you have to climb away from raising lava, demands only perfection: the lava raises unnaturally to match your position, thus you cannot go fast ahead on easy rooms to save room (no pun intended) for error on harder rooms. And if you fail, you have to start from scratch. This annoyance is amplified by unpolished controls (no input buffer, no wall-snap, etc)… Honestly, if I wanna play a this kind of demanding platformer, I’d go for Celeste, which is fair and fun (and allow infinite retries and have assist mode), not this kind of f_cking furious frustration.
And the learning curve doesn’t aligned with the flow– where your current skill matches the game’s demand –at all. Act I is stupidly hard (you have little HP, everything deals 2 damage — until environmental traps got nerfed within the first week). Then Act II becomes easier and easier (you’ve unlock more abilities, have enough HP to not die within a few hits and can observe dangerous pattern longer)… While Act III back to inhumanly hard again because the dev assume you’ve unlocked everything, so they throw every trick in their sleeve to make you miserable.
The difficulty of Act III alone was borderline bearable, but the narrative was deeply unsatisfying. Why the setting is so gloomy? Why kill almost every friendly NPC? What’s the point of letting us rebuild a town to its glory, only to completely destroy it again later?
Act III was virtually non-existent for me. I just hate it. Back up your save file before advancing into Act III.
But the most annoying aspect of the game lies in its community: chanting “Git Gud” like brainless worshipers who’ve lost their ability to reason, developing only reflex muscles. They look down on people who pick up the game later, bragging about beating it before the nerf… You see, not everyone gonna have F1-level reflex time. And this game is not an elite F1 racing track that only a few people on Earth are qualify for. Games (not just this one) should be an enjoyable recreation for everyone (or at least for those who’ve spend their money supporting the game), not only for those gatekeepers who only think their game must be difficult for the sake of difficulty — see comments on my prior review on the original title.
Honesty, if this trend continues, there won’t be the 3rd installment of the series (or Team Cherry) on my account. Heck yeah, I’ll enjoy watching streamers screaming in pain playing these badly designed kindof games, never spending another single penny on it, just as those gatekeepers suggest.
After seven years, I can now confidently say I don’t love the game no more.
P.S. You saw my 100+ hrs and thought “this is an addicted game”? Well, one third of them are spending on boring runback. And then another third of them are spending on dying on unfair bosses.
P.S.2 I didn’t received the game for free. I pay the full price for it. But since Steam is down on day one of the game’s released, I can’t make a purchase directly with my account, so my friend buy it as “a gift” for me using my credit card… Speaking of which, it’s so stupid to praise that the game “broke” Stream, especially in the era where pre-purchase exists.
Originally published on: Steam
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