Hollow Knight: Silksong devs address difficulty concerns: “You have choices”

Hollow Knight: Silksong developers at Team Cherry have addressed difficulty concerns, assuring players they always have multiple paths to take.

After an excruciating eight-year wait, Hollow Knight fans are finally battling through one excruciating boss after another in the follow-up, Silksong. It’s another jam-packed Metroidvania with dozens of hours of optional content to find and conquer, but there’s no denying it’s certainly punishing at times.

Lengthy runbacks to boss fights, chaotic attack patterns, and tricky platforming all make for a tougher outing than the first game. It’s been so brutal for some, in fact, they’ve turned to mods in the early outings, reducing even basic enemy damage,

While Team Cherry hasn’t spoken out a great deal since the game’s launch, new comments stemming from the ACMI Game Worlds exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, have shed light on their intentions behind upping the ante.

Silksong devs address game’s difficulty

Silksong featured as a prominent part of ACMI’s new gaming-focused exhibition, which Dexerto attended ahead of its public opening. Beyond the hand-drawn art and demo stations, however, an accompanying book available for purchase revealed brand-new information on the game’s obscure development process.

Game Worlds co-curator Jini Maxwell spoke with Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen, with difficulty being a major focus of the conversation.

Admitting Silksong is indeed far more complicated than the original title, Gibson explained how it’s all designed to give players choices.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path. 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.

“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.”

Say, for instance, you keep banging your head against the wall with one particular boss fight, devs aren’t exactly concerned if you’re struggling for hours on end. “That’s fine,” Gibson said, reminding players “they have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

Silksong devs explain why game is harder than original Hollow Knight

If you’ve played both games, you’ll understand how drastically different they are. From Hornet’s unique movement mechanics to upgradeable tools and weapons, not to mention a proper quest system, there’s a great deal in Silksong not present in Hollow Knight.

As such, enemies had to change in order to properly mesh with the other adjustments, the devs explained.

“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.

“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.”

Rather than scaling back Hornet’s powers, Team Cherry’s approach was to instead “bring everyone else up to match [her] level.”