malvasia bianca

I quite enjoyed the original Hollow Knight: it wasn’t entirely the game for me, but enough of what it was doing aligned with what I like that I had something I could happily grab onto (the platforming, for example), and even the aspects that weren’t so much my alley were the sort of thing that it’s good to try out every once in a while. For example, while I don’t particularly enjoy not really knowing where to go (or even being flat-out lost) for significant stretches in a game, it’s a good experience to have occasionally; you just want that experience to be in a game that is giving you that feeling for a reason, which Hollow Knight certainly was.

So, while I wasn’t one of these people who had been actively waiting for Silksong for years, I was looking forward to that sequel, and I was assuming I’d play it decently soon after release. But of course the video game podcasts that I listened to were full of people immediately diving into and rushing through the game; enough so that I found it a little annoying, but this sort of thing happens with games.

The main tip that I got out of listening to those discussions was: if you run into something in Silksong that seems really difficult, don’t feel compelled to bang your head against it over and over again. Instead, go find something else to do for a while; the world is open-ended enough that you probably have choices. And then come back in a few hours; probably you’ll have gotten better, and maybe you’ll have unlocked a new ability that significantly changes that combat.

Which is the attitude that I approached Silksong with, and it’s a good attitude. In its own way, I think it’s an attitude the game tries to teach you: there’s one early boss encounter that seemed gratuitously difficult, and, sure enough, when I explored a bit along a different route, it didn’t take me too long to unlock a movement skill that made that particular fight much more tractable. And that pattern recurred as I progressed through the game: often my skill wasn’t quite up to a combat but, by wandering through a different area, I’d get used to fighting enemies that were tougher than the regular enemies that I’d been dealing with, and as a result bosses would be beatable. And sometimes I’d unlock a new capability that made a real difference in a boss fight, too.

I actually think Silksong does a little better job with its open-ended nature than Hollow Knight did. It’s been a while since I played Hollow Knight, but I remember running into one situation where I felt uncomfortably stuck for too long. There was an area that I was trying to go through but where I was having trouble building a map of that area in my head, I was having trouble finding something else to do instead, I was having trouble reaching a bench in that new area, and I was afraid that, if I found a bench in that new area, I’d feel even more stuck because I wouldn’t be able to get back to familiar ground after respawning at the bench.

Whereas, in Silksong, things didn’t get quite that bad: partly because I didn’t feel like I had to wander quite as far in new areas before being able to orient myself, and partly because Silksong did a better job of providing me with a menu of options. So, at any given time, I’d usually have one thing to do that felt like the next major step (a clearly main line boss to fight, or a next major area to explore), a couple of other areas to explore that felt like they were off the main path, a couple of other side bosses to try to fight, and a couple of platforming challenges or fetch quests or something. I really appreciated that approach towards providing options; and, when the game strayed from it (e.g. in a couple of situations where I got taken through a one-way door into a new area that I had to escape from), the game had built up enough credit with me that I trusted that I’d be able to deal with this new experience, and that I’d even enjoy making my way through it. Also, Silksong lowered the stakes of failed exploration by not making corpse runs as weighty, which I appreciated.

I mentioned above one early boss that I fought that was made much easier after acquiring a certain movement skill. I assume that this was Silksong trying to teach me the lesson that I shouldn’t bang my head against walls for too long; it’s nice to see a game that avoids overt tutorials while acknowledging in its design that players have to learn skills, including subtle ones. And doing that while being accessible to a range of players and allowing genuine freedom in exploration is hard!

I suspect, for example, that I mostly ignored the possibility and implications of stabbing down while jumping for longer than many players; and the result was that there were whole areas that I didn’t even know were accessible for me to explore. And then, after one boss fight, I was pretty annoyed that, instead of just opening up the route back to where I’d been, the game instead presented me with a bunch of balloons that I’d have to bounce along by stabbing down at them in sequence. I’d just overcome one challenge and was expecting to be happy with that for a while; a second challenge immediately after it was a bit much.

But that second challenge wasn’t all that bad. And, once I’d made it out of that area and slept on it, I decided that I liked what Silksong’s designers were doing there. The game had been slow-playing the introduction of those downward stabs for a while; and I’d been ignoring the hints that the game had been giving me. But it’s something that they wanted to have in their level design toolbox; so, before letting me go explore more of the game, the designers wanted a tutorial / skill check to make sure that I was up to the task going forward. That skill check felt a little abrupt in the moment, but it wasn’t really too far out of line; and it was done at the right time, and if they’d held my hand more, the game wouldn’t have felt quite right.

The result was a game whose rhythms worked very well for me. More periods of tension than I’m used to, than I normally seek out; but it’s good to have that sort of experience every once in a while, and it always stopped before it got overwhelming. I happily made it through the first act; I happily made it decently far through the second act.

And then, unfortunately, Silksong stopped working for me. The first warning sign was that the number of side bosses / combat challenge rooms that I hadn’t yet beaten was increasing; and also I realized that there was a whole mechanic around customizing details of your attacks that I wasn’t seriously engaging with. And, while I sometimes used the consumable combat items, I was mostly hoarding them and saving them as a last push to get me over the hump of a boss, even though the game had mechanics nudging me towards using them more widely. All of this meant that I’d stopped appropriately scaling with the combat, which is a problem for a game with so much combat.

You spend most of Act 2 exploring a big city, with a major goal being to defeat three specific challenges to unlock the “threefold melody”. The exploration was fun (though I was a little disturbed, as I mentioned above, that there were more side bosses that I was having trouble with than I’d like, and that I wasn’t even sure if all of those side bosses were actually off the critical path); the first of those three challenges that I happened to try was the one in the upper left. It was a combat challenge room, where you had to fight a series of enemies; quite tough the first time I banged my head against it it, but, as I mentioned at the start of this post, that’s fine, I should just go explore some more. So I explored some more, went back to it, and I beat the specific enemy in that series that I’d been having trouble with. Which I was fully expecting to be the last enemy in the series, but it wasn’t; that was frustrating enough that I didn’t keep on trying, and this time I wasn’t sure that I’d come back.

I’m glad I wandered around for a few more hours after that disappointment, because I enjoyed the further exploration I did. I tried a second one of the three melody challenges, the one in the top center; that was a platforming challenge that was a pleasant level of difficulty. (I actually never found the challenge for the third melody; maybe I missed something, but I suspect one of those other bosses I’d bounced off of was a gate for progressing to it.) And I explored more of the map outside of the city; more pleasant enough platforming challenges, but also I picked up some random item which caused the game to cry or shriek or something at me every single time I opened the pause screen to look at my map or inventory. (A fairly quiet shriek, but still!) And that just wasn’t pleasant.

I tried to figure out what to do with that shrieking item, but nothing in the first few places that I looked was relevant. So then I looked it up in the wiki; I had to go some place that I never would have tried without returning to every place I’d been to through the entire map. And, if I’d done the obvious thing there, I would have gotten a negative status effect that didn’t sound pleasant and that I would have had to do another not-very-enjoyable-sounding challenge to get rid of. I also mentioned in an online forum that I was stuck on the combat challenge room for the upper-left melody, and the answer I got was “if you do this random sequence of things then you’ll unlock some character who will beat challenges like that for you”; I didn’t expect to get anything useful out of mentioning it, I was mostly just venting, but that wasn’t an answer that pointed towards a way for me to enjoy the game.

At this point, I was getting pretty clear signals that Silksong was no longer a game for me. My platforming skill level was fine for the game (I was actually expecting that second melody to be a harder platforming challenge, so maybe I’m even slightly better at platforming than the game was requiring), but my combat skill level wasn’t. And the mysteries in the game were switching from pleasant bits of uncertainty that I was happy to temporarily live with to annoying bits of uncertainty that I wouldn’t enjoy resolving.

So I put down the game; I never finished Act 2. (And, even if I’d decided to struggle through to the end of Act 2, from everything I’ve read Act 3 would have been way too much for me.) Which is fine? I really do appreciate the mystery of the world, but I’m also not one of these people who really wants to put together clues to uncover the back story, so I don’t feel like I missed out on something important to me by not finishing the act or the game. And I just don’t have so much time to play video games; even without finishing it, Silksong ate up about three and a half months of my main video game playing time, I can’t play very many games like that over the course of a given year!

But I really am happy to have played Silksong. I think it’s a very good game, I think it’s making interesting design choices, I enjoy the fact that it made me live with uncertainty more than I normally do in my game playing. It likes combat more than I do, but it also likes platforming; I haven’t talked about that so much, but I appreciate how, every time I got a new movement skill, the character you were playing felt more and more right, more and more like the way they should be. And I’ve never played a game whose game world unfolds quite like Silksong’s; that’s a real accomplishment.