Designing for theme, to a fault
Here we are seven years on, and I can fully believe that that entire time was spent immaculately crafting this game to Team Cherry's dream specification. The music, presentation, atmosphere, art, my GOD the art. It's Hollow Knight again and polished to even more of a mirror sheen this time. I love all the environments and silly little bugs milling around, there's so much I love about its presentation.
Regrettably it's also quite easy to believe that this is a game that three people spent seven years practicing and tuning in private. You'll be able to get into the game, sure, but did you beat all the superbosses and finish all the pantheons back in Godhome? Because that seems to be the difficulty FLOOR for Silksong. Everything starts doing 2 damage so the 1 health upgrade you can get before the second act is useless, most of the bosses just plain take too long even on a successful run with massive health pools and occupy half the screen while dealing 2 damage even on contact. The REALLY bad ones also summon trash mobs endlessly... and most often it'll take at least twice as long to run back from the nearest bench as it will to die again to the boss that facestomped you the last 30 times.
The farther you get into the game the more frustrating it gets. The never-ending biomes with the worst omnipresent poison mechanic ever devised that play more like something a trashpost game parodying Dark Souls would make as a joke. The tools that are limited per-use between save points, but also consume a secondary currency which exists purely as a solution in search of a problem. Every bench, every fast travel, every THING costs massive chunks of a currency that only some enemies drop and you'll always be skint on until quite a bit later into the game. Half the arenas are just endurance runs against 5 waves of the also-overtuned standard mobs including plenty of evasive, back-dashing, projectile-spamming flyers that don't even drop currency now just to ensure the encounter is a COMPLETE waste of your time.
I *almost* managed to finish Godhome back in the day, I just ended up losing my patience with the worst boss (Uumuu). I finally hit my stopping point in Silksong around 30 hours in when an endurance room lasted for about 12 consecutive rounds including throwing three bosses into the mix. There's a constant stream of "gotchas" here that exist purely to spite the player, seemingly because it's thematically suitable that you're exploring a living world that actively wants you dead as opposed to a dead world that just lashes out in passive reflex to any living presence. I could keep putting myself through this but I haven't been having fun since the 8 hour mark and it's only getting worse.
Silksong has been overtuned to hell and back and it's the kind of punishing that even fans of the original might not be able to stomach. It's the kind of punishing that even some Souls players, and half the people who manage to enjoy and finish this game, will still openly admit is "excessive". The only possible circumstance in which it is "a good jumping-on point for new players", as it was allegedly intended, is maybe specifically if you're a Bloodborne fan or you dropped Hollow Knight because you were bored with your exploration NOT being broken up by two-thirds of all trash mobs having the balancing of a miniboss encounter.
I can barely call this a metroidvania anymore with how you have to buy your way forward at every step of the way, and every single enemy demands absolute locked-in focus just to survive basic traversal. I'd call it a soulslike but even most of the Souls audience seems to disavow the comparison. I'm not sure what to call it other than a very pretty, very deliberately crafted test of one's patience.
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