We all waited a whopping seven years to get our hands on Hollow Knight: Silksong, and what has been the talking point in the weeks following its release? The difficulty.
With tricky bosses, perilous platforming and some meaty runbacks, many have found Silksong to be a touch too tricky at launch — even after a swift update sought to lessen the blow of select early encounters — and now, Team Cherry has addressed the hot topic in a recent discussion at an ACMI Game Worlds exhibition in Australia (thanks, Dexerto).
“Silksong has moments of steep difficulty,” Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson told the exhibition’s co-creator Jini Maxwell, “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”.
“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson continued. “One player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes”.
This approach makes a lot of sense. Much like Hollow Knight, there is help to be found with Silksong’s trickier moments, if you know where to look. If a boss battle or particular platforming challenge isn’t working out for you, then the best idea is probably to get back to exploring for a while.
The goal is to prevent players “getting stonewalled” by a particular challenge, Gibson stated, so the team ensured that “[players] have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely”.
This isn’t to say that all challenges can be overcome by mere exploration alone, mind you. “Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight,” Gibson said of the core changes in the sequel, “so even the base enemies had to be more complicated, more intelligent”.
Interestingly, some of these core enemies borrowed from the original Hollow Knight to really sell the step up in challenge. “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” revealed Team Cherry’s William Pellen, “in contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away”.
It’s brutal and punishing at times, but that didn’t stop us from having a wonderful time with Silksong. We called the long-awaited sequel “a mesmeric blend of balletic combat and movement with persistence, joy, and an incredibly invigorating map at the centre” in our 10/10 review, which you can read in full below.
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