Game Reviews

As Hollow Knight: Silksong once more raises the ugly discourse over gaming difficulty, there’s one aspect of the whole discussion that I think goes missed by people on every side: people play games for different reasons. It sounds stinkingly obvious, but there’s a nuance to this that I think is best summed up by believing or disbelieving the following statement: It’s fine if someone can’t complete a game.

Video games began being about insurmountable difficulty as players chased high scores, knowing all the while that the only ending in store for them was a GAME OVER screen. At the same time, video games began being about telling a story, guiding a player through a narrative or series of lands and levels to reach its conclusion. Whether in the arcades or via text adventures on the home computers, gaming was born with this dichotomy, and as things have become increasingly more complicated, it’s never gone away. In recent years, as genres increasingly twist and meld, the distinctions between “types” of games have become effectively meaningless, leaving no clear distinction between those two sides. Right now, in this era so dominated by soulslikes and roguelites, this schism has never been more pronounced.

My bias, to state it from the start, is that it feels not fine if someone cannot complete a game. I work with people whom I deeply respect who strongly believe and cogently argue the opposite.  And to be absolutely clear, I’m not here to say that one is right and one is wrong, simply because that isn’t true. It’s a matter of contention, with arguments for either side, and perhaps the only reason it feels like it needs to be resolved is because a person’s approach can feel incredibly important to them.

No one is right, everyone is right

Let’s repeat that once more: no side is right, and context is everything. But the point here is: that context is deeply ambiguous and confusing, and no one has a firm grip on it. Hence the issues.

At one point, in a very large part, video games were about high scores. You couldn’t beat the game, you weren’t intended to finish it, but rather the goal was to see if you could get further than last time, or beyond the point your friends can reach. That design model was in large part due to how those video games were monetized; you were paying by the dime, or by the quarter, and the more coins you put in the machine, the more money the game made. If it were easy, if it were designed such that you should be able to win, then it would be a disaster.

Meanwhile, on university machines and eventually home computers, other games were being built around text. While MUDs (multi-user dungeons) complicated the nuance far too early in the whole history, let’s instead focus on single-player games. These were, around the same era as the rise of the arcades, text adventures. Games about experiencing a story with a direct sense of involvement. You chose whether to go North or South, picked up the rope and then used it on the well, and hit the goblin with your sword. While you were working through a prescribed route, the experience was your own simply because you’d executed the actions. You may have died because you forgot to tie the rope to the well, or been hit harder by that goblin, and then had to try again, but the game’s ultimate purpose was for you to reach its ending.

So from the very beginning, there were these two diametrically opposed intentions. One half of games relied on your never being able to finish them, the other relied on your being able to do so.

Obviously things immediately became more complicated. Arcade games were released on home computers, games became far more complex, sandbox games soon sprang up which were neither about trying to kill you nor guiding you to a conclusion, and eventually multiplayer gaming turned everything into an infinite loop. Throughout all this, games were released with the specific intention of never letting you finish, or wanting you to finish, and people mostly understood which were which. And, for a while, the majority seemed to be the latter. Even a 100-hour role-playing game or a gore-laden first-person shooter were deliberately created with the intention that people who bought the games would be able to finish the games. For the most part, the tougher games of this nature came with difficulty settings so anyone for whom the challenge was too great could turn it down and still see that ending. (And indeed those finding it too easy could make it a more pleasingly tough challenge.) This all began right as the heyday of  what were always loosely called “arcade games” began to fade. Games that were still intended to be close to impossible for most people to finish, still all about that high score, or those supremely difficult 2D action games that were so hard that most people could only see the earliest levels. Your Ninja Gaiden and Contra games, utterly beloved by those who went into games wanting a brutal challenge, and bemusing to those who arrived without forewarning.

© Tecmo / Mobygames / Kotaku

A platform for complaints

This is the next stage of this schism. There are those who see games like an increasingly steep mountain to climb, with seemingly impossible vertical stretches down which they keep sliding, again and again, until after days of practice and failure they finally ascend. And there are those who cannot imagine anything worse than replaying the same bit of a game 20 times, failing each time, never sure if they’re going to be able to get past it. And neither seems to be able to comprehend the mentality of the other.

And that’s completely understandable! Because as we’ve established, people have been raised on games to believe each exact opposite position is the way in which games are intended to be played. And if there’s one genre of games where this is more confusing than any other, it’s platform games.

Again, twas always thus. I remember these games I’d play as a kid that seemed deliberately ludicrous, games in which I’d play the first three levels over and over and over, never even knowing if anything even came after them, so frequently would I die. Jet Set Willy and Chuckie Egg 2 stand out as examples of platform games that seemed to be designed to be close to impossible from their opening moments (though I was also like eight years old). Even the original Super Mario Bros. and Sonic games weren’t designed to be won in a sitting, with limited lives and the lack of a means to save meaning you would endlessly start again from scratch, trying to reach further than the last time. Most often, this difficulty was a result of technological limitations. It simply wasn’t possible to save your game, so a game that’s really only a handful of hours long could last you forever if it were hard enough. But the moment saving became a thing, tellingly a huge number of games started to be designed with progress as a core element.

Nearly every Mario game in the last three decades has been created with the player being able to finish as part of its design. Metroidvanias like Ori and the Blind Forest have been created so that almost every player can see them through, with difficulty settings that allow players to shape the experience for themselves. Others, like more recent Metroid games, remain incredibly difficult in their later stages, especially with boss fight spikes, but they’re still not intended to prevent most people who buy them from being able to roll the credits. It became increasingly normal for platform games to be designed this way.

A large number of likes

Meanwhile, two other significant genres arose. There was the “roguelite” (“roguelike” is used too, but it conflates things with, well, games like Rogue which are something else entirely), where the idea of the game was to see how far you could get with a specific build (be it character, deck of cards, or choice of tools), then losing everything (or almost everything) when you made a mistake. It became normal again for games to be designed to be unbeatable at first, requiring repeated play to improve. However, the crucial difference was that each attempt would play out differently, with procedurally generated levels, or randomized scenarios, and different equipment allowing different approaches. And also, Dark Souls happened, and it changed everything. For those who played games for the challenge, who wanted to be beaten up over and over, suddenly the dial started swinging in their direction again. Huge numbers of similar games appeared, and as the “soulslike” became an established term, it started to diffuse into other genres.

In 2016, Salt & Sanctuary opened the door, through which 2017’s Hollow Knight and 2019’s Blasphemous followed at which point everything became so god damned confusing. Because now we had these pixel platformers, or even super-cute cartoon games, that were nightmarishly difficult to play, doubling down with a lack of difficulty options. And audiences were understandably not able to know which way a particular game was heading.

In the midst of these developments in the 2010s rose the monstrosity of the “git gud” culture. But, and I’m typing through gritted teeth, there was a valid argument beneath the grim unpleasantness. Because, to return us to the thesis of this meandering piece, there is a vast audience of people who play games because they want to struggle, to fight against the wall, and to gradually get better until they can conquer the challenge. So, when someone else comes along and says the incredibly reasonable statement, “I’ve been loving this game for the last five hours, but now I can’t play any more because it’s become impossibly difficult,” it makes sense to one entire contingent of players to say, “You need to get better.” Because they’re right. You do need to get better if you want to get past that point.

However, and I feel like a marriage counselor trying to explain how one partner’s comments are heard entirely differently by the other, it’s the most abysmally unhelpful and unsatisfying answer to the contingent of players who weren’t ever playing the game for a grueling challenge, but for an entirely different reason. They were playing for the continual satisfaction of progress, to keep experiencing the thing they are enjoying in new and refreshing ways. They don’t want to personally improve their dexterity levels to be able to perform lightning reflexes across seventeen buttons to get past this one enemy, but just get past this one enemy. Their goals, their intentions, their very reason for playing the game in the first place was utterly different, and until that point it was being met. So being told, “Be better at the game then,” is not only unhelpful, but wholly irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the player who just wants to sit back and calmly play is equally incomprehensible to the challenge-seeker. Why on Earth do you want to play this game if you’re not even interested in improving? This game was designed so you would learn through trial, where hitting the wall is about learning to punch it harder until you break through. It’s the whole point of the game, and declaring that there should be a way to make it easier is entirely missing the point. Being told, “But I just want to carry on playing,” is not only unhelpful, but wholly irrelevant.

It’s quite the impasse.

© Capcom / Mobygames / Kotaku

It’s fair that people are confused

This, in a very gap-riddled, convoluted way, brings us to today, and 2025’s breakout hit, Hollow Knight: Silksong. Because when a game gets this big, sells this well, and is receiving this kind of word-of-mouth, it is of course going to attract audiences from every approach. Not only is Silksong a colossal success on Steam (it’s been regularly seeing half a million concurrent players every day since launch, which is almost unheard of for a single-player game), but it’s also arrived day-one on Game Pass, meaning millions of Xbox owners will have been able to install it for no extra cost. And when a game looks as gorgeous as Silksong in its screenshots and videos, why wouldn’t you?

I say all this to address the rather silly claim that “everyone should know how hard it is” because of 2017’s Hollow Knight. Bit of perspective on that: 2017 was eight years ago. So yeah, there are adults today who were in elementary school when that game came out, and it’s wild to believe everyone encountering the buzz for the game should have filled in the history. Secondly, Silksong absolutely doesn’t present itself as a crazy-hard game. Firstly, its characters are lovely-looking insects with stunning animation, which immediately implies something gentle. Then, the game’s store description isn’t explicit about the challenge.

“As the lethal hunter Hornet, adventure through a kingdom ruled by silk and song! Captured and taken to this unfamiliar world, prepare to battle mighty foes and solve ancient mysteries as you ascend on a deadly pilgrimage to the kingdom’s peak.

“Hollow Knight: Silksong is the epic sequel to Hollow Knight, the award winning action-adventure. Journey to all-new lands, discover new powers, battle vast hordes of bugs and beasts and uncover secrets tied to your nature and your past.”

“a deadly pilgrimage” is doing a lot of work in that sentence once you know, but doesn’t exactly give the game away.

So of course people not expecting to meet with astonishingly difficult boss fights are arriving on the game’s doorstep. People who are just flabbergasted that, say, a metroidvania would so facetiously make a core feature—the map—be locked behind multiple purchases and even then be hugely obfuscated. Who does that?! What is going on?! When will this game be fixed so it works sensibly?!

Life of the Author

What none of this addresses is the most divisive aspect of all this topic: developer intent. Hollow Knight: Silksong has been developed this way by Team Cherry on purpose. It is meant to be incredibly difficult, forcing players to try again and again and again to traverse its trickiest sections, and to take dozens of attempts to defeat its toughest bosses. Of course it is! You wouldn’t play Elden Ring and demand the boss fights be easier, right? Only a depraved pervert would think such a thing. The developer’s intention demands that this game not have difficulty options, and it would defeat the point of how and why it was made for that to change. Surely it’s ridiculous to even want to play a game in a way it wasn’t created to be played?

Here I have to get personal. As an avowed Barthesian, I think this is gibberish, and I absolutely, fundamentally am not interested in “developer intent” once the semiotics are in my own hands. (To be very, very clear, I am absolutely fascinated by developer intent, and love to hear about it, speak to developers about it, and think the topic is wonderful. I just don’t see why it should also control my personal life.) I double down on this when I’ve paid money to get access to the game. It seems wild to me that after I’ve bought and installed it’s anyone else’s business how I go about playing this offline single-player game. I absolutely get that if I were able to lower the difficulty (and vast numbers of people already are) that I wouldn’t be experiencing the game as the developers intended. I also don’t mind about that one bit if it means I can experience the game at all.

I think it’s this distinction that causes the most consternation. “Hollow Knight: Silksong is meant to be played this way” versus “Hollow Knight: Silksong is meant to be played at all.”

Is there a middle ground? Of course, vast expanses of it. It’s just that most of us don’t want to agree to sit in it, myself included. But how about this?

1. Team Cherry has built Silksong to be played in one particular way, and worked phenomenally hard to craft that experience exactly as intended. Untold skill has gone into creating it, and creating it in this specific form. And that’s worthy of enormous respect. The creators are under no obligations whatsoever to change the game, and should not have to respond to public demand whether it’s to add difficulty options or make it even harder. It’s how Team Cherry wants it to be.
2. This game is of such enormous popularity that it very understandably has picked up a very large audience of people who are not skillful enough, or don’t desire to become skillful enough, to be able to play the game as is designed, and feel frustrated that they’ve spent money on game they’re unable to play.
3. Those people have every right to adjust the game’s difficulty by mods or any other method such that they can enjoy it in the way they want to.
4. Other people are allowed to believe those people have ruined the game for themselves, and if they would only have persisted with the challenge they would have grown to understand why it was made the way it was.
5. These two groups of people aren’t going to understand the other, and that’s fine. There are bigger things to worry about.

Conclusion

There are bigger things to worry about.

Source link