Hollow Knight: Silksong ratchets up everything from its predecessor. The world is bigger, more detailed, and more dangerous. Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen recently spoke about some of their thinking behind making the Metroidvania Soulslike sequel harder, and what players can do to navigate the higher difficulty.
“Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight–so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said during an interview at the ACMI Game Worlds exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, according to reporting by Dexerto. Even basic enemies in Silksong hit harder and can be much more aggressive. That’s because the hero Hornet is much more agile, and Team Cherry wanted to balance that out with more effective adversaries.
“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen added. “The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”
If you keep dying, go somewhere else
That was essentially what Gibson’s advice seemed to be from the interview. He argued that Silksong is much less controlling than its predecessor when it comes to where the player can go and explore at various points in the game. “The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” he said. “So 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.”
The logic is reminiscent of Elden Ring which, despite its punishing enemies and brutal boss fights, was arguably more inviting than previous FromSoftware Soulslikes because the open world allowed players to approach each challenge in unique ways. In addition to being able to grind additional levels, they could also explore off the beaten path until they found a weapon or spell that would tip the balance of power in their favor.
“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty–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,” Gibson said, adding that players “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”
A clash of design philosophies
There was recently a mini-debate about whether Silksong is actually harder than Elden Ring. The Washington Post‘s Gene Park came down on the side that it is. I would agree, though I think that’s in part because Elden Ring isn’t necessarily one of the harder games out there. Elden Ring is just a hard game that happened to sell over 30 million copies, meaning that its reputation is partly derived from tons of people who wouldn’t normally play a Soulslike actually giving it a try.
Ryan Thompson, an assistant media studies professor at Michigan State, teased out what I thought was an interesting observation about one of the core differences between Silksong and Elden Ring. It’s not just that one is a 2D side-scroller and the other is a 3D open-world RPG; it’s also the way the roots of those genres diverge. “3D games are designed for you to win eventually,” he argues. “2D platformers are originally designed to take your quarter and tell you to piss off.”
That’s an oversimplification, but a helpful one when it comes to a Metroidvania Soulslike like Silksong. As the genre name denotes, it has its feet in two related but distinct traditions. One is 8-bit action platformers of the NES era that seemed to be perfectly content if the kid they were sold to was never able to beat them. The other is a baroque RPG adventure in which the expectation is you’ll be able to level up or learn your way out of any challenge.
Silksong is as much a 2D bullet hell game as a Metroidvania, maybe even more so. The margin for error on screen is more circumscribed than in its 3D counterparts, and its arsenal is more streamlined. It’s borrowing from Castlevania III: Dracula‘s Curse more than Dark Souls, and the result can be more uncompromising. That might be easier to accept if Silksong didn’t also tell an evocative and whimsical story that’s constantly dropping devilish obstacles in your path. But I’ll take that challenge over the original Mega Man any day.
