Yes it is, except for the boss fights being too hard.
I think I havenāt fully internalized how big the audience for soulslikes is these days tbh
every time I wind up on like the elden ring reddit for something Iām usually surprised at how a) huge and b) smart that community is. it really has grown exponentially and defined tastes
soulslikes seem fully like a normie videogame player thing to like now. they might as well be star wars or harry potter fans at this point.
I know, it just makes me happy every time when I realize that something so funny and demanding and oblique has such a massive audience, like I refuse to internalize it so itās always a nice surprise
i canāt get over how the most memorable bit of music in the Hollow Knight is a naked cover of part of gwynās theme that plays in the hub town
hey, the actual entries in the souls franchise arenāt awful like those yet. itās inevitable though! elden ring is already showing some worrying tendencies
the imperial march contains probably the greatest key change in western music though
one bungie firing thatās good
Itās very smartly made in most respects. Itās just far too thin for itās frame and held together by a bit too much gristle.
Part of me thinks that Silksong is a victim of HKās success. HK created some unreasonably bloated expectations of scope and difficulty for all the metrovania fans it created, so now theyāre faced with the impossible task of topping that while also somehow making a good game too. A more reasonably scoped Silksong would have been out years ago by this point, but thatās not what their fanbase thinks they want.
I never played Hollow Knight but I hope Silksong has scope creeped into something weird like a 3D action game or something else that will make people confused.
Elden Ring sold 20 million copies in a year. I donāt know if itās a normie game in the same way that Madden or GTA or COD are, but itās a normie enough game at this point.
thereās a difference between a normie game and a game normies like
I played a good bit of hollow knight on my switch and got conceivably halfway through (I at least had crystal dash and double jump iirc) but put it down for a week or so. I return and canāt remember where I last saw a lock for a key/ability I had and didnāt get a map for the areas I was going in circles in and couldnāt find the map guy and his wife wasnāt offering any maps and I didnāt want to look up a guide so this kept repeating once a month or so until I told myself Iāll just start clean on PC whenever I feel like I can plow through it in a few sittings.
One good thing about Hollow Knight is its soundtrack.
all my zoomer coworkers are all about bloodborne and elden ring im like haha hey 20 somethings have you heard of āmaiden in blackās bare feetā, have you heard of ādemonās soulsā?
never played Hollow Knight but Chris was kind enough to gave me a lift home from a new years party once, well out of his way and we were only acquaintances, so Iām always pleased to see people praise his music
iāve said it before but Hollow Knight, Celeste, and Undertale are all things that i think are Fine and maybe even Good from what iāve experienced of them (well i donāt love Celeste) but the way theyāve basically completely crowded out any other indie games in the consciousness of people of a certain age and define their whole universe will never not baffle me. i would be a ājust let the kids like what theyāre going to likeā but i think a lot of those opinions are heavily shaped by youtube video essayists and like, exponentially growing and self-reinforcing fandoms that become more and more annoying over time. but i think the whole poptimism era around certain kinds of stuff probably has a sell-by date anyway. i just felt a little better about it when āindie gamesā werenāt so dominated by like, a handful of different fandoms.
ādemonās solesā
sorry
All these people going feral waiting for Silksong should just chill out and play Nine Sols, which is five times as good a soulslike 2D search action game as Hollow Knight was. And I liked Hollow Knight a lot!
Somehow I feel like pining for Nine Sols on switch is about the same for me as pining for Silksong