Topic: Hollow Knight: Silksong

I was about 12 hours in and starting to feel a bit 'Hmm' with the game, like I hadn't had a decent power-up in a while and things were starting to feel a bit samey. So I decided to grind to get my rosaries up and do a bit of shopping. I got myself to about 350 rosaries and then stumbled upon the Chapel of the Reaper.. I hadn't found a bench in a while, so figured the name was a deliberate bluff and a bench would be right inside. Whoops. Once inside I couldn't get out, died, and of course the game decided to put my cocoon inside the death trap. So then I was stuck having to keep trying to clear the Chapel to get all my grinded rosaries back.

I did manage it, and it didn't take me that many tries, as it turned out, but it was one of those stressful occasions that the Hollow Knight devs love to put us through.

I then went and spent my rosaries and found the upgrades to be pretty much worthless and totally not worth the effort of grinding and recovering the rosaries. That's my biggest issue with the game at this stage - aside from the compass, the dash and the gliding cape, I barely get any benefit from the other trinkets.

Disillusioned, I decided to have a crack at the platforming that requires the diagonal dive attack, which I was yet to attempt. Got a decent way into that, then got totally ****ed by a trap that swung down from the ceiling and smashed me. That felt really unfair, because nowhere else in the now 13 hours of the game had I encountered that kind of threat.

I'd rebuilt my rosary stash to about 350 again by then, so was compelled to redo all that tricky platforming to recover my cocoon. And believe me, as a rookie diagonal diver, redoing that with 350 rosaries on the line is stressful as **** and that was sweaty joycon time.

I think I recovered it once, immediately died, and then remembered the trick about quitting to the main menu when in a sticky situation, so the second time I just got to the cocoon and then immediately quit to menu to recompose myself.

This game can really stress me out.

So how come they only made the game for people who liked the challenging DLC for the original?

THIS GAME IS PEAK!!!! I absolutely love Hornet's movement, and it hasn't been too hard!(yet. idk why) Platoforming? PEAK. Movement? PEAK. Music? PEAK. Combat? PEAK!

@gcunit I'm 18 hours in and I've died multiple times before recovering my cocoon and rosaries. At this point I just don't stress about it. Whenever I get above 80 I just buy a rosary string, and I pretty much always have enough for the basics - benches and maps and so on.

@chardir Thanks. So how do the rosary strings work? I've not bought one yet. I just figured I'd be paying 80 to put however many over 80 I had at the time on a string. E.g., If I had 250 rosaries, I'd pay 80 for a string with 170 on it, which didn't seem like a good deal to me. But happy to be corrected if I've guessed wrong.

@gcunit you pay 80 and receive a rosary string worth 60. So it's a fee of 20 to protect 60 beads. At first I thought it was a bad deal, but now I'm just happy paying my insurance 😄

@chardir I agree that at first I thought that trade-off sucked... then I lost ~400 beads and the cost of 80 (to protect 60) is a bargain

I've been quite outspoken about not enjoying it across the site for a week but I finally sat down to play some more last night and can confirm grinding for tools makes the game less rage-inducing.

That bird room went from GOOD SWEET MERCY to Okay That's Fine.

@ROMhaiku Any tools you recommend? So far most things I've bought have been disappointing in terms of how useful I find them. And yes, it was the bird room that sent me off grinding for upgrades in the first place.

@chardir Thank you. Kinda strange that it doesn't make that clear on the shop listing.

@gcunit I'm still early game but Sting Shard was the game changer for me in the bird room. It allowed me to throw it and get hits in on the chicken/fencer dude without jumping in and getting my arse kicked.

Flew brea (reward for collecting all the fleas) has been useful in other areas.

From what I've peeped, tacks are apparently busted (in a good way). I'll be finding them asap.

I think I might bounce off Silksong. I’m in Act 2, and I was loving every minute of it. It wasn’t until yesterday and even this morning where I started to really be annoyed with the game design. Up until this point, I found the difficulty fair, but challenging. I never had any real issues hindering me from progression other than a boss battle taking me up to an hour. Other than that, smooth sailing.

Now, however, there are gauntlet challenges, some of which are mandatory to progress the story, that are downright not fun to play. And perhaps you’re expecting a typical gauntlet - 4 or 5 waves of enemies. You’d be wrong. How about 10-12 phases instead? Let’s top it off by adding a mini boss fight in the middle of the phases, and then if you are lucky enough to survive, fight three more waves and then fight two of those mini bosses at once, of which their attacks do AOE damage and their bodies take up the entire screen so you can’t move that well. And if you die? Sorry, you have to start all the way over, and do a run back.

These kind of roadblocks are happening way more frequently and it is not fun. I don’t want to say that the game is difficult - I don’t think it is in terms of mono vs mono, or even a duo boss fight. Again, that has been fine up until this point. The game is, however, incredibly unbalanced and punishing for the sake of ramping up the learning curve.

I don’t know; I’ll keep playing and see how my progression goes. I’ve unlocked the double jump and grappling hook. I’ve made really good progress. It’s just not fun anymore and that is really a shame. Maybe I am giving up, and maybe I need to “git gud”, but I believe there is a fine difference between punishing but fair, and outright cruel punishment where it’s not just about the act of dying, it’s the act of losing currency when you die and hope that you can make it to the same area without dying beforehand. There needs to be a balance instead of an unjust expectation of accepting bad game design.