Hollow Knight: Silksong’s storefront-crashing launch may be behind us, but the debate about its difficulty rages on.
Silksong is one of the biggest games of the year, hitting huge player concurrent numbers on Steam alongside a positive reception from critics. But amid the excitement over Team Cherry’s long awaited sequel is a debate within the community about whether the game is too hard — perhaps even unfairly so. It comes as no surprise to see Silksong’s early days mods dominated by those which make the game easier.
IGN has already reported on how some Silksong players had expressed criticism across social media, subreddits, Discords, and Steam reviews about the game’s difficulty scaling and brutal runbacks. There’s one very early miniboss causing a lot of players a whole heap of trouble, too.
“Is it just me, or are some of the things that make Silksong ‘difficult’ just cruel?” wondered redditor Machi-Ato. “The game has artificially inflated difficulty and playtime due to overtuned numbers and menial tasks/runback,” reads a post on Steam.
Now, speaking at the launch of a new gaming-focused exhibition at Australia’s national museum of screen culture, ACMI, attended and reported on by Dexerto, Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen addressed Silksong’ difficulty for the first time since the game came out.
Gibson said that because new playable character Hornet is “inherently faster and more skillful” than the Knight from the first game, Team Cherry had to make enemies tougher.
“Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight, so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said.
Pellen revealed: “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss.
“[There’s] the same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”
Team Cherry thus made enemies more powerful to present Hornet with a challenge, or as they put it, they had to “bring everyone else up to match [her] level.”
Team Cherry also talked generally about its design philosophy for Silksong, insisting that by presenting the player with the choice to constantly divert from the main path, they are able to dance around Silksong’s now infamous steep difficulty curve.
“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty,” Gibson admitted, “but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”
Gibson also reminded players who are struggling against a particular boss for hours on end that “they have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”
Still, Silksong’s first post-launch patch made the early game easier, so clearly Team Cherry has acknowledged the game was at least in partly tuned a little too hard at release. A second patch is out soon.
Playing Silksong? Here are some essential guides for your journey upwards: the Silksong Interactive Map, how to grind for Rosary Beads, our ever-expanding Walkthrough with boss videos and guides, how to get your first life bar upgrade (first four mask shards), and a great guide to the Simple Keys and the doors they open.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
