Apparently this game made me miss the Saturday slot last week. When the weird bug lady kicks your ass and delays your review by a week. Accurate for this game though tbh.
I’ve not beaten it yet, still throwing my face at the wall, beacuse this game does kick your ass, a whole lot. Certainly more so than Hollow Knight does, but in a way that’s probably a good thing? Not every game has to be easy, and while a lot of the game’s bosses and trials have caused me strife, it’s nothing that putting the game down for a night can’t fix.
I’m talking about Silksong as if everyone knows what Hollow Knight is, so uh, let me take it from the top.
Silksong is a metroidvania in the world of Pharloom, where you play as Hornet, one of the main cast from Hollow Knight, and as you explore the land, you grow your power and stumble into areas that are way out of your depth and enemies who will destroy you in a femtosecond. You are a bug in a hostile land after all, makes sense you’re so fragile, and that everything wants to kill you.
For as much bluster as I’m putting about this game’s difficulty, I do enjoy playing it. Pharloom is a fun place to explore, with a much more varied set of locales and biomes than Hallownest ever had, and while I am grumbly about the fact that a lot of rooms have severely reduced visibility, as well as hidden traps to catch you off guard, it also helps add to the world and the anxiety of exploring it.
But naturally as games such as Ori And The Blind Forest, Nine Sols, and Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus, have released in the 7 years between Hornet’s time in Hallownest and now, developers have pushed what players and experts of the genre are capable of in both combat and platforming, which has encouraged the folks down at Team Cherry to amp up not just the combat difficulty (something something double damage), but also the platforming difficulty. With sections that on your first pass require difficult pogo strings with a pogo move that launches you diagonally instead of straight down. (Tip: If you’re barely above the red pogofruit when you down attack, you should automatically pogo off it instantly.)
I’m curious to see how the Runner vs Hunter community adapts to this game, considering how tretchorous basic traversal is now.
If you feel like this review is all over the place, you are correct, because this is also how I found myself playing the game. Constantly doubling back and exploring new paths to try and find power before tackling a tricky section that kicked my ass over and over and over. And you will need to do this. All the upgrades are incredibly well hidden, and you’re going to need to explore every nook and cranny to find something that gives you the edge.
And then you realise that all that time spent wandering and ambling and retreading areas just serves to help you master the movement controls more, and you stumble into minibosses, find an upgrade that changes everything and reframes the whole game and makes it significantly easier for you specifically to play. But even though the miniboss killed you 3 times, and the runback is 10 rooms long, you beat the miniboss, and it helps you master the combat and things get easier. So you go back to the big boss that was walling you for hours the night before, and go in with a calm mind, and better mechanical skill, and you’re muttering under your voice what attacks are being telegraphed so that you can react to them (because at least you managed to learn what those were before tilting prior), and after 15 minutes of carefully dancing around an eratic boss, it falls to your needle, and the bass response in your headphones gets hit with that loud long falling note that indicates time slowing down and the final hit and a boss finally dead.
And you breath a sigh of relief, and let your heart rate return, and then you cheer and you celebrate and you fucking did it. And that, that is the moment that this game lives for!
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1030300 £16.75
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/hollow-knight-silksong £16.75
Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Hollow-Knight-Silksong-1575920.html £16.75
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