Something Hollow Knight: Silksong-related has happened at an Australian museum again. This time, rather than the game being confirmed for an appearance back when it was still infinitely mysterious and sans release date, it’s Team Cherry devs addressing just how difficult their creation is, following plenty of post-release discourse on the subject.
This follows the metroidvania’s first patch making a couple of its early bosses a bit easier to tackle, amid debate as to whether it’s just good and hard, or pushes into unnecessarily annoying slog territory via the likes of bench placement and hazards being able to deal out two masks of damage. As with every FromSoft game since time itself began with the release of Demon’s Souls, where you stand on that bickering will likely depend on how prepared you are to spend hours battling one foe over and over again.
Naturally, the appropriate venue for Team Cherry co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen to weigh in on this conundrum of our time is Australia’s national museum of screen culture, ACMI, where the launch of a new exhibition was attended and reported on by Dexerto.
“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson said when asked about the difficulty by exhibition co-curator Jini Maxwell. “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.”
While acknowledging that Skong packs “some moments of steep difficulty”, Gibson stuck to emphasising that going for a wander is the best medicine if you get stuck banging your head against a bug-shaped wall, as there are “ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely”. Learning? In a video game? Come on lads, I can’t be doing that. I use my brain for marginally more important things during the average day, but by the time I get to playing games for non-work purposes, it’s all just mush up there.
Anyway, I digress. Gibson and Pellen also explained the differences between developing Silksong and the original Hollow Knight from a hardness perspective. Hornet, with her superior zippiness and superior skills to the knight, demanded more complicated base enemies to make sure she still faced a good challenge.
“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen said. “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.”
I imagine this was followed up with a gesture to some screens of culture as the devs indicated that the time had come to check out the Aussie exhibitions. If you’re still struggling with Silksong, definitely check out our great Silksong walkthrough Ollie’s worked very hard on. There are also mods.