There's Nothing Hollow about Silksong.
I simply do not have the time or bandwidth in my life right now to no-life a game that I know is going to be as manicured as it’s proving to be. From both a narrative standpoint and mechanically, a true metroidvania is a canvas of a game, Hollowknight was a game that was only as good as the player was willing to engage its full design. I imagine Silksong, naturally, is doubly so. That might sound like a pompous crock of shit, but it’s true; a platformer in 2025 must set itself apart from the zeitgeist of AAA industry bombs by optimizing the “good things come in small packages” ethos.
This isn’t a “get through the game in 20 hours and put it away” experience, it’s a game that I know will take multiple, slow and methodical playthroughs. A good expression of this contrast is positioning Hollowknight against Astrobot. The latter is truly a fantastic production, from its high end graphics that rival the very shiniest of Unreal Engine 5, AAA stockholder darlings, to its tight and manicured, genre redefining controls. But, to me, AstroBot is a game that can really only truly be experienced one time, there’s not much more to the base game than a surface level collectathon of IPs that Sony would rather employ as nostalgia bait than fully nurture. The time trials are a different story; a true test of optimizing the game’s mechanics in a way that does not once become necessary during the game’s main runtime. There’s replayability, and a respect demanded by Team Asobi for their efforts in establishing a wholly new titan amongst Playstation’s pantheon of well established console experiences.
Hollowknight, however, is a full game of those time trials, that relies on its players optimizing the game's base mechanics; a simple jump, attack, or dodge can fundamentally change the way one interacts with the map in which the game is set. There might be a shortcut or hidden area hidden just out of sight that’s only accessible by bouncing off an enemy that would otherwise be completely missed without hyper-specific and intentional employment of the game’s movement system. I can only imagine that Team Cherry doubled down on this for the sophomore entry in this franchise. In short, I imagine there’s a good reason this game was in development for 7 years.
That said, I’m already seeing the bullshit. It’s Monday, September 8th and I’ve already scrolled past a seemingly curated selection of tweets about how the game is “artificially difficult”, too much so for its own good, allegedly. In other words, people are frustrated with the fact they couldn’t hammer through a game that took 7 years to make in one weekend. I can find no better words to express how I feel about this: Go Fuck Yourself™. It reminds me, incredibly, of Elden Ring, or, more aptly, its expansion Shadow of The Erdtree. “The game’s too hard”, “FromSoftware is taking the piss”, “I wish they wouldn’t conflate complexity with artificial difficulty”. You weren’t meant to 100% this game in a weekend. If you did; good for you, I’m glad you waited 7 years to slug through a game in as little time as possible.
This is not a dig at people who’ve finished the game, this is a dig at people who found a reason to bitch after they ran through a purposefully difficult game that was designed to stand the test of time, be replayable for years, and have its layers peeled back over the better half of a decade; characters you didn’t meet, upgrades you didn’t get, mechanics you never mastered that would’ve made your experience smoother. I can understand being so starved that you blindly inhale the meal in front of you instead of slowly savoring each nuance of a chef’s meal, but you do not get to criticize the chef for making an overly complex dish that you spent little to no time appreciating because you wolfed it down unceremoniously.
I can’t stress this enough; this game took 7 years to make, it’s wholly your fault for thinking certain enemies were too difficult by deciding to rush through a game that’s undoubtedly much easier if you’re willing to spend the time getting better at inputs, or fundamentally understanding damage output and intake. Any great platformer is a game to master, not experience one time.
Again, to talk about Shadow of The Erdtree, the expansion’s final Boss (although swiftly nerfed post launch) was and still is properly difficult, having many moves players might still make a case about being cheap. However, at this point I’ve seen people cheese that boss and/or annihilate it within seconds simply by optimizing the tools at their disposal, mechanically or with better loadouts.
Is the game artificially difficult or are you just frustrated that you couldn’t breeze through it and actually had to spend a considerable amount of time figuring out how to dodge? Be honest with yourself and stop being entitled. Team Cherry won’t have another game out in the 2020s, appreciate this title, go back and replay it; stop. complaining. More importantly, just because you've mastered Hollowknight, it does not mean you should breeze through Silksong, if that were the case, Team Cherry shouldn't have wasted their time and resources making a sequel, and instead should've taken a page out of Sony's book and published a premature remaster.
I'm going to get to Silksong soon, I loved and still love Hollowknight and I'm sure I will love Silksong just as much if not more, but a good metroidvania and/or platformer isn't about how good it is to play it on release, it's how good it still is to play a decade or two from release, when all of its cards are on the table and there's simply nothing new to learn or discover.
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