I didn’t even know it was possible to get to bird hell before ant hell. I found bird hell easier but I also had the dash the whole time.
If you haven’t gotten dash it’s accessible in the marrow through the left part of Ant Hell so I’d maybe try that first if you don’t have it?
Silksong has challenging exploration but fairly reasonable bosses, so far. Which I like. The way things are going, it will take 30 hours to find something as difficult as the first Nine Sols boss
Hollow Knight is a game I enjoyed and didn’t think that much about afterward.
Likely to be the same here, but I’m perhaps enjoying it more? Hard to say. Getting the dash was a game-changer (and allowed me to take on a problematic boss much more easily).
So far I think this is a good game. I’m a little surprised at how it’s being treated like the second coming of Christ, but it’s a good game. Almost surprised my inner contrarian isn’t rejecting it, but maybe it’s because I spend more time reading y’all’s thoughts than gaming discourse at large and Hollow Knight is not exactly beloved here.
I lost 200+ beads because I fucked up a spiky passage in a sloppy way, and it both sucks and is good.
I happened to hear about a cheap way to beat Moorwing. Since I’m all about using any exploit I can in a Dark Souls game (or a game that wants to be like Dark Souls such as this one), I tried it.
And it didn’t work. It turns out I need a particular item to do it that’s in Reaper’s Chapel. I’d already opened the way there so I went to get it. And ran up against one of those little locked room fights that’s harder than any boss I’ve fought so far. I tried it many times and it made me want to quit the game. (On reflection I probably won’t quit the game just yet, though.)
Looks like they are about to make some bosses a little easier.
Finally found the map to Greymoor last night after exploring the area pretty extensively and repeatedly (but only in one direction, apparently).
I think I’ve pretty much lost my momentum in this game for now, though. It feels more like a chore than anything to pick it up again every few days at this point, with even basic enemies taking so many hits and having so many time-consuming dodges and attacks. (Some I can’t beat at all, such as those trident bugs.)
I went ahead and looked up how to get the normal pogo attack from the first game because I figured that would help make things smoother, and it turns out that’s the very item I was trying and failing to get the other day.
It makes sense that this started out as a DLC for people who have already beaten the base game and its DLC. They may have dialed it back some when it became standalone, but their testers probably still fell into that category.
25 hours in, this is getting a lot harder.
All the difficult parts seem skippable though (including the act 1 boss) but I would rather bash my head against a challenge rather than temporarily skip it. The power curve is very weak too so it doesn’t look like I could get much stronger anyway. In 25 hours, I got 2 max HP, about +30% more damage and a bigger purse? And a bunch of tools and accessories, which help but do not feel like they contribute that much to Hornet getting more powerful
I’m still having a fantastic time. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone articulate what makes HK and Silksong actually special. It’s not really clear for me either. Maybe the way each area feels slightly too long. The way Metroidvania best practices are sometimes ignored to enhance the feeling of surprise and exploration. There’s something about the misleading destructible background environments all over the place too
Also how bosses don’t have health bars. And how there are signs pointing in the direction of (some) benches but it is unclear how far they are, whether you need to take a detour to get there, and what might be required to unlock the bench when you reach it.
It seems to involve a paradoxical maximization of playfulness and discipline at the same time. It loves to playfully introduce new things and subvert expectations of patterns it previously established, even as it sticks carefully to a well-calibrated difficulty curve.
Like other striving-oriented games, it is highly concerned with questions of fairness and legibility, but it wants to keep these open as fruitful questions instead of settling on any given answer to them. Indeed, it earns the player’s trust on a large-scale partly by means of routine betrayals on the smaller aspects.
-_-
i don’t want to sound too curmudgeonly, but this stinginess was my least favorite aspect of the original hollow knight, and the fact that i’m hearing dozens of people say it’s repeated here is cratering my interest in buying it now.
i have multiple friends saying nonsense like “i just spent 2 hours on this boss and 4 hours on this other boss and didn’t beat either of them and every other path forward is absolute hell, but this game is soooooo good” and i’m just here wondering what planet they’re on
i’m finally playing the original hollow knight and it’s like…ok, I guess. it sure does not have a single idea of its own, and its chief achievement seems to be that it is bigger than the rest of these kinds of games.
I think the art really does it for some people but to me it’s just got kind of a Tim Burton / Jhonen Vasquez vibe that for me isn’t quite repellent but is just limp
Team Cherry poser vs Ska Studios real head mall goth .
Silksong is actually way more stingy than HK lol, since HP upgrades are more rare and the way accessories work is more limited and you can’t keep getting more powerful by getting more and more accessory slots
I relate to your friends since learning a boss can be very exhilarating here. I say this as someone who wished Souls games got rid of all bosses forever. This game rewards experiencing about positioning, it communicates well on how to improve, and the eventual success run can feel like a ballet dance. I just spent about 1 hour on this one million HP guy (hardest boss yet) and enjoyed it all the way. It’s not all Stockholm’s syndrome
strong agree with this take, though like most aspects of these games, my skepticism was closer to active criticism of the first one and it’s tempered quite a bit here as they’ve improved at what they’re doing in many ways
that combo sounds like it’d be a lot more angular and spiky; the knight in the first game kinda just looks to me like a funko pop
I picked this up, it seems neat so far. I seem to have been getting a decent amount of rosary beads so waiting for the patch feels like it was the right call.
i like these skull guys
they’re cohost colored
