Hollow Knight: Silk Song
by Team Cherry
Finished: ✓Yeah it's pretty good.
See, I wasn't even planning to play this game. I tried playing the original game repeatedly, but I bounced off of it. I don't even really know why I didn't like it and I never even got that far (The farthest I got was getting the wall jump). I was never one of the people that have been waiting for it for years, so I never had an attachment to it when it came out. Though, the internet video game discourse once again turned its sights on difficulty, but now in the context of Silksong. I was thinking that the higher difficulty of Silksong might make me more interested in it. I got access to the game through my steam family, so things kind of just lined up for me playing it!
I like the world and I like running around and exploring it. Silksong does a very good job at making the world feel dynamic and genuinely alive. If you revisit past areas, you will often see that something has changed or developed since you were last there. Lots of the side quests are about helping these small villages and it's fun to help people. I loved seeing recurring characters join me on this adventure.
There is an incredible amount of attention to detail and intricacy in the game. For example, when you get the needolin, a mandolin-type instrument, you may discover that playing it in front of people makes them sing about things they are thinking about. I think that every NPC in the game has some unique dialogue. I don't know for sure, but many of the enemy types also have seemingly unique dialogue when you play in front of them. That is wild! I really like how there are multiple ways to get into Act 2. It's thematically appropriate and gives you an alternate route for a second playthrough.
You can tell that it is just fundamentally a well put together game. I do have some really weird mixed feeling about it though.
Like, the movement is so smooth and seamless. It does feel good to move around and navigate the world. At the end of the game, the movement is forgiving enough (because you have so many options) that you can just go and improvise as you move, which is very satisfying. But, in other ways, it kind of renders the movement transparent and invisible? You have very fast acceleration so you get up to top speed immediately, so there’s no feeling of inertia or momentum. You have perfect air control, so you lack that feeling of “weightiness”. It never really felt like I was engaging with it, I was just doing it, which felt good, but wasn't very interesting to me.
To me, the combat is the same way. Your standard attack has no ending lag and it doesn’t impact your movement. The exceptions to this are your down aerial, dash and dash attacks. The down aerial is maybe the most interesting move in your kit. By default, it’s a downwards diagonal attack and, in Hollow Knight fashion, it bounces you upwards if you land a hit. You have to have a bit of planning when using the move because spacing matters and being directly above an enemy doesn’t necessarily mean being able to attack it. It’s just short of the size of your full hop, so you can’t do a full hop and expect to hit a shorter enemy that was on the ground. You have to short hop and put yourself in a bit more danger in order to use it. Dash attack is also fairly interesting because it puts you in the air, which may be useful for dodging moves or positioning better.
For me, the game was basically an exercise in not being greedy when moving or attacking. I have the instincts to just hold forward and attack, but most enemies and bosses punish that. You have to be patient and strike when it’s safe, which I do think is fun, but only when the enemies and bosses make it interesting (because the movement on its own isn’t gonna do that for me). My experience with the bosses was trying to be incredibly greedy, realizing that I should calm it down a bit, and then things were pretty ok. To me, I see it as the early pitfalls of playing fighting games; You do not have to hold forward all of the time and you have quite a bit of room to be cautious in your movement. Also, because of how effective your movement is in the game, you can just kinda just run away a lot of the time if you are unsure of how to handle something in a more advantageous (but also more dangerous) position. Choosing to be greedy and get an extra hit in is almost never really worth it compared to living longer. It’s simpler to manage the overwhelming feeling of everything attacking you all at once if you remember to stay calm and Just Leave.
It is kind of interesting how puzzle-like the boss fights can be, and I really liked that. In a boss fight, you have to have some sort of “answer” or “response” to every move that the boss has. The bosses often don’t have that many moves, but you really need to get a feel for each one and how to avoid it. In the end, you get in the state where you forget that the boss has health and are just content in doing this dance indefinitely until oops the boss died. I think that the most fun boss fights in the game were the Lace fights (not the first one I guess because I beat it first try and I don't remember anything about it). The margins of when it's safe to attack (after Lace attacks) are quite slim, so you really need to get a sense for the spacing and timing of Lace's attacks so that you can confidently position yourself in a place to dodge attacks while being close enough that you can get in a hit. Lace also counters during vulnerable moments, so you can either bait the move out, or react to the counterattack to get in more hits. Neat stuff, reminds me of what I like about platform fighting games.
Overall, I think that the game is more punishing than it is demanding of the player. Obviously, these aspects both contribute to the difficulty of the game, but it feels different when playing it. In Silksong, if you make a mistake, then you will suffer for it. For example, tons of the attacks in this game do 2 damage. So, If I have 8 points of heath, I really only consider that to be 4 points of health in the worst (but likely) case. Also, you need to hit the enemy quite a lot to build up silk so that you can heal yourself (and if you get hit during it, then all of your silk is gone). At the beginning, the punishing nature is very apparent because you don't start with that much health and mistakes compound on themselves. After a certain point of finding health and abilities, the game eases back a bit on how punishing it is.
I saw a fair amount of people talking about the brutal "runbacks" in the game (dying to a boss and having to go through part of a level again to challenge the boss again). I’d say that there’s really only one runback that I thought was particularly challenging and it was the one where you basically had to navigate through the entire area again if you died to the boss (if you know you know). This was the most difficult and frustrating, but also most interesting runback. You need to reconcile what equipment you bring because what you want for navigation isn’t necessarily what you want for a boss fight, but you can’t have both. The average case in the game is respawning at the halfway point in an area and running back and it’s not too bad. I do think that it is funny, because I survived playing Rain World: the game where you will frequently spend like 25 minutes trying to make it even just halfway to the next checkpoint because sometimes you're just really unlucky.
Maybe there is a general trend to how I feel about the game: a lot of the game was exactly how I expected it to be, and it was an incredibly well-tuned and fun experience. However, that left little room for me to be genuinely surprised by it.