joy cometh with the morning

Silksong

Photo of some leaves on a tree in front of the Phoenix Centre

Don't worry, this one is actually just about the thing I'm talking about, specifically Silksong (The Sequel To Hollow Knight). I like the running, the weird dive kick down attack is interesting and it still looks beautiful. It has a lot of the positives of the original, but I'm not very far in and already I feel like there is a fair helping of what I would term 'bullshit'.

'Bullshit' is the problem that I feel Fromsoft games have. Dark Souls is great and most of the time is tough but fair: if you keep your wits about you and are patient and careful then you will succeed! But then sometimes there would be bosses like Bed Of Chaos who have an attack that will, if you're in the wrong place, sweep you into a pit and kill you instantly and you can't do anything about it. Silksong feels a bit more like that. This is caused by a few different factors:

If you get damaged while you're healing, you don't heal anything

It was very annoying in Hollow Knight when you'd start healing and get hit, but you could usually get off one mask's worth of healing at least, so even if you did get hit you'd just have lost a bit of soul. In Silksong, you heal three at a time but not only do you lose all your silk the moment you start healing, you won't heal anything if you get hit while you're healing, which might mean you just die the second you get hit, because:

There are way, way more enemies with attacks that do 2 masks' worth of damage, from early on.

I can count on one hand the enemies that did 2 masks of damage in Hollow Knight, and they were all either later-game 'bigger normal' enemies or very weird and specific (like the heatseeking-bomb-plant thingies). I appreciate that we start with 5 masks rather than 3, but a lot of the time it doesn't feel like it makes a lot of difference, because:

They've messed around with the i-frames.

It seems very much like there are fewer i-frames after damage—or possibly just that the i-frames apply only to the enemy that damaged you and not to e.g. the environment. This, coupled with the previous point, leads to boss fights where (for instance) you can get whacked by the boss with an attack that damages you and also knocks you into lava, further damaging you and causing you to die in a manner that feels pretty unfair. This is doubly annoying in Silksong, because:

You can be blocked from returning to the rest of the world until you'd killed a boss.

Sometimes I will die a bunch to a boss and just want to go and do something else for a bit. Not necessarily to go and farm a bunch of currency and buy more items to help or whatever (though maybe that), but mostly just that I want a bit of variety. In Silksong you can be prevented from getting back to other areas of the map until you've killed a certain boss, which I definitely don't remember happening in Hollow Knight. Even for the bosses that don't block you in this way, you might find yourself going back and fighting them again more than you were hoping to, because:

Silk/currency retrieval is from the boss room itself.

In Hollow Knight this was usually from an antechamber prior to the boss, rather than the boss room itself. Sometimes in Silksong it's still possible to retrieve with a ranged attack without triggering the boss, but not all. This contributes to the stuck-feeling that the last point causes. Even if you are able to get it back, you might end up losing it elsewhere, because:

There are loads of enemy rush areas.

Do you remember how tedious and annoying the arena section of Hollow Knight was? What if they had those liberally scattered through the levels? It just sucks!

Josef told me something to the effect of "the playtesters for Silksong were folk who were really, really good at Hollow Knight" and it does feel like One For The Heads. I think the problem for me is that the difficulty balance of Hollow Knight itself felt pretty much perfect, and I while understand the need to change and evolve, I think the changes made mostly serve to increase difficulty at the cost of frustration, which to me feels a poor tradeoff.