Posted on: September 25, 2025
AGhostPepper
Possesseur vérifiéJeux: Avis: 1
Unique design but not enjoyable to play
I finished this game about a week ago, so I’ve had time to digest it. Hollow Knight is one of if not my favorite game of all time. This is the third time I've rewritten this review-- I am very passionate about this title lol. I finished Acts I and II vanilla, Act III with mods. I've gotten the "true" ending in Hollow Knight. As for Silksong, it’s just too hardcore and not so much challenging as it is tedious. First, more positively, I honestly appreciate the direction they went with this game. It’s not just more Hollow Knight, it takes on a life of its own by asserting itself as separate and distinct from its predecessor. What I love: -Hand drawn worlds and animations, of course -Harder difficulty (although it spikes too much as mentioned below) -Subtle and nuanced music -Unique crests add much variety to combat and traversal -Many enjoyable and uniquely designed boss fights -The central story/dialogue is intriguing and written well Dislikes (there's a lot): -Extremely unfun runbacks which degrade nearly every boss fight experience. Some of them can be shortened with a super secret bench hidden behind wall #47 in room #352, but aintnobodygottimeforthat. -Debuffs galore. Debuffs that prevent you from healing, specifically, because the lore apparently dictates which areas are an unfun slog to actually play. Side note: I’m waiting on an update that adds a 20% rosary tax on every transaction, ya know, to add to the “lore” /s. In fairness, you can get a crest to balance this debuff, but it’s literally the furthest point away from the starting area. -Dozens of “gotcha” and “troll” hazards. God-forsaken fake benches which can only be found through sheer trial and error and rote memorization. No environmental cues, just cheap gimmicks which only exist, imo, to create viral clips on twitch or other social media. -Many, many, many gauntlets, the longest of which is 24. waves. long. Several mandatory gauntlets precede boss fights. Many boss fights spawn extra enemies, because apparently difficulty in 2025 means fighting 7 enemies at once. Now, ironically, I actually love the coliseum of fools in the first game, but I did not enjoy most of the gauntlets in Silksong. Maybe because the coliseum is completely optional and rewards you generously. It’s also about 10x more varied than any of the gauntlets in Silksong. -They added an entire bone currency just to, imo, balance one crest (architect). Consequently, earlier before you get this crest, this bone money only serves to frustrate lower skill players (read: not part of the top 0.01%) who need extra attempts on boss fights. This bone money is a total gimmick which throws the entire early-to-mid game off because of a single crest that lets you replenish tools using silk. -A major gripe: The Reaper crest’s needle is a bit RNG. There’s a 50/50 chance of you swinging the needle above or below you. So you end up missing (mostly flying) enemies a lot because you think you’re swinging up and forward, but instead the needle decides to swing underneath and forward, evading the enemy. How fun! -Very poorly designed fetch quests/town center job boards. For example, one of the side quests has you go collect 15 or so “bells.” These bells are random drops which only appear in 2 rooms in a specific zone. And they only respawn once you’ve sat on a bench. So, you’re just going through these same 2 rooms 10 or more times, hoping you get a random drop so you can beat one of the dozens of side quests required for Act III (yup, these are required). Plus, you only get these quests after you’ve already ran through a zone. So you’re going *back* to old zones to grind items. -Many tools feel cheesy and gimmicky to me. It feels like Home Alone simulator, where I’m raining down pins & needles on enemies, then hiding in a corner hoping I don’t have to actually fight anyone. -Enemies read your inputs before attacking. They select an attack, read where you are (or where you’re going), move to that location, and then attack. This is especially jarring with flying enemies (which make up like half of the total enemies), who can read your attack, dash out of the way and *off-screen*, then throw a projectile at you from out of sight (and many bosses = 2x damage). The clawline *helps* here, but it doesn’t reward as much *silk* as a regular attack, which is very much needed to heal during the marathon gauntlets. Later on, my awkward solution was to clawline > double jump > pogo, but that can be very risky depending on the enemy (collision damage on super fast and large flying enemies just-- is not fun to handle for most of the game). Overall, it’s like they took my least favorite parts of the first game (runbacks, flying pests which throw projectiles, deep nest) and made those parts central to this game. It’s very claustrophobic, dimly lit, and just kinda feels like you’re stumbling through it all. In addition, fundamentally, the skill floor is just too high. “Oh well, why don’t you just go explore and come back to this hard boss later?” Because so much extra content is hidden behind endless waves of sidequests/gank/gauntlets/etc. that you can’t help but feel like you’re always underleveled no matter what. Even health masks feel useless to a degree, because merely colliding with a static enemy = 2x damage. All that said, don’t get me wrong, there's incredible content in this game. I'd recommend trying it out, especially at 20 dollars. But I can't help but think that they took a large DLC for Hollow Knight and then padded it with uninspired, well, junk and gimmicks. Sure, some hardcore Fans might eat this stuff up, but for me-- it feels like a waste of time. Tantalizingly, I think it could be a 10/10 game with a couple of changes to make the story/ambiance/etc. more central and the difficulty more justified and enjoyable. Finally, I wanted to add a few solutions to these problems in the form of mods I used in Act III. 1. Warding Bell Plus - Makes you temporarily invulnerable while healing, preventing the mechanic which drops your entire silk bar *and* damages you if you get hit by an enemy (because of i.e. contact damage by flying/teleporting enemies). 2. Custom Hit I-Frames (No Multi-Hit Anymore) - Increases invulnerability after taking damage by a few milliseconds, preventing instances where you get spam-hit by multiple enemies. 3. All Enemies Drop Rosary Beads (and Shards) - Makes the game feel more rewarding and less like a grind, especially early on. 4. Stakes of Marika - Rebirth. I wouldn't recommend this for the original game, but for this one the runbacks are so egregious that I strongly recommend it. I wish this mod only removed the most tedious runbacks, but it is what it is. Bonus 1 [tools]: Get Multibinder (heals for 4 hearts), Longclaw (extends your needle), and Wreath of Purity (protects against maggot water) as early as you can. Bonus 2 [mods]: Always Have Compass Effect + Always Have Magnet Effect. Reduces a lot of the early tedious grind. Look, I’m all for a medium-to-high difficulty game that both challenges and rewards your skill as a player. That’s why I beat Absolute Radiance in the first game. Silksong, however, adds too much difficulty with too little reward. The skill floor is too high, the difficulty is inconsistent, and there's too much poorly designed padding in the form of i.e. uninspired gauntlets and cheap gotchas. With mods, the difficulty spikes become more well-rounded and reasonable. Lastly, I wish more reviewers could look at this game for what it is-- and not through the lens of 7 years of built-up hype and expectations. It's not a bad game, by any means. Silksong just lacks a reasonable level of difficulty and reward to make it enjoyable to play.
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