Agreed.

Yes, except so far Silksong is even worse than HK was for "not enough well-placed benches". You're regularly backtracking huge distances to get to where you died. That's my main complaint so far.

Disagree - It is very much not at all intuitive and doesn't feel good. Hunter's zone was a nightmare getting through, hours and hours later. It (the angled dash instead of the down swing) works for combat, but not for traversal.

It's overall a good game, but they tuned the difficulty too high and without a curve. It expects anyone playing to have 100%ed HK (something I never actually did because screw all those late game side bosses that aren't fun at all), and have done so recently. A sequel needn't (and shouldn't) be more challenging than its origin.

Ladies and gentelemen we have the first academical critical opinion about the design and difficulty of this game.
The game is polished and perfect. A piece of art like the prequel. Take it as a legit opinion in the same way we have to accept the classic and expectable critizism about the game and the difficulty, specially if it is a hit. It needs to be relativized in the bad way, always, expectable.

The game is indeed super well polished and really good. I can't say yet if it's as good as its predecessor or not yet (not until it and I are done), but it's mostly certainly living up to the expectations set by the exemplary first game.

NOTHING is perfect. And there are many easy steps this game could take to make it *better* (compared to its already really high position). I am baffled why they didn't address the widely known top issue with the first game: bench (save/respawn) locations being too far from places players are likely to die (bosses/challenge rooms).

Every piece of media absolutely must be critiqued. It's how things get better. (And one CANNOT "love" something if they can't critique it. Fanboys who refuse to allow criticism are worthless and make things worse.)

Husband and I (each, separately) were playing it late into the night last night and are dragging asses at work today. And can't wait to play more tonight.

It still had an initial hiccup the moment the countdown reached 0 but not enough to crash the site, obviously we have less traffic than the biggest PC storefront and game pass, duh

Well - for me it took several hours to manage it. After the first minutes I was even close to refund it because I was completely unable to progress.

Over half a million concurrent player peak, less than 24h after its release, on the biggest platform is pretty impressive, especially for a "indie game". No clue about GOG, it would be hard to track gamers down because of offline-installers, but i suspect it is about 10% of this number, up to 15% if it goes well.

Xbox gamepass (along with a comparable PSN-subscription) seems still popular yes, but the "Netflix-generation" is slowly starting to burn out. I assume the "streaming-peak" is over now, as the people slowly realize it is lacking and "not owning it at all" not the most wise thing. Piracy was raising world wide for that reason... yet those who can afford it and who are ethical may support GOG and comparable offers.

Glad you got over the hump! I'm succeeding more than not by now, but I'm hitting the spikes still plenty. I'm sure if this game has or gets an equivalent of Path of Pain, I'm certain I won't be attempting it. (I never completed it in the original, but I could consistently get much of the way through.) It's just far less natural.

Once again, if you (collective you, not you specifically) missed my post above: THE GAME IS GOOD, just caveats.

Quite the discussion over the last two and a half weeks leading up to the release as well - apparently a lot of other indie developers were and still are very mad about Team Cherry's decision:

- to having priced Silksong at only 20 Nuyen
- for the advance release notice of only 2 weeks

They would have been mad no matter what.

When OST included 26 USD without local taxes added, so up to 30 is possible and of course for me even more. So it is not cheap but still reasonable priced.

I just can't say I understand the hype for this game.

Doesn't look impressive in the least. It's just a platformer with that soulless "clean" indie art style.

Have you played it or Hollow Knight (which is the reason for this hype) or are you judging based on looks only?

Looks alone. What attracts me to say Shovel Knight is it's unique look, this game has that clean flash game look I do not like.

If the look is not to your liking the game probably won't be either - but if you only judge by the look you won't be able to understand the hype around HK and Silksong. It is much more than looks even though those in HK and Silksong are extremely detailed. It is the gameplay, the controls, the way bosses work, the charms, the level design, the way how it seem to be extremely hard and still gives you that feeling of being able to do it if you only try hard enough ... and last but not least: the story in HK wasn't shallow either.

HK launched to ~2k concurrent players peak on steam in 2017... and only these days it's experiencing a sort of a rebirth with 88k+ all time high peak, thanks to the Silksong... which is a huge success for an indie.

Oddly enough I never got all the trophies/cheevos in HK and I haven't touched it since 2018 but seeing all those bugs makes me want to revisit that moody place!

P.S. I wasn't a fan of the look of HK back then either until I've played it myself... However in motion it all comes together and fits with with the backgrounds, music and overall ambience rather well. I'm more into Blasphemous etc, but dang... HK is just that good of a game, despite featuring a tad too large game world to explore (after all those expansions ofc, at launch it felt just right size-wise). I'm sure that Silksong won't disappoint either.