Team Cherry’s long-awaited Hollow Knight follow-up Silksong has spawned lengthy discourse around difficulty in games, and now the developers have addressed the topic too.
The game is part of the Game Worlds exhibition at Australia’s national museum of screen culture (ACMI), which was attended by Dexerto. The exhibition’s co-curator Jini Maxwell spoke with Ari Gibson and William Pellen from Team Cherry at the event.
“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson explained. “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.”
Hollow Knight: Silksong Review – Beautiful, Thrilling And CruelWatch on YouTube
While Gibson admitted Silksong “has some moments of steep difficulty”, he added “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.”
So instead of players repeatedly attempting a particular boss fight, they “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”
Gibson further noted that as Hornet is “inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight” of the first game, even base level enemies had to be “more complicated, more intelligent”.
Added Pellen: “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss. 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.”
Team Cherry’s approach was therefore to “bring everyone else up to match [Hornet’s] level”.
One other area of contention are the boss runbacks, which often task players with repeating difficult platform sections before re-attempting a boss. But have boss runbacks had their day?
“Pretty and charmingly mean-spirited, this is a game filled with revelations and genuine personality,” reads our Silksong review.