The prodigal indie game has returned.

In 2016, Team Cherry announced that they’d started on a full DLC for their smash hit Hollow Knight starring the main character’s rival, Hornet, that very quickly over the course of a year became a full-blown sequel to the game (weirdly due to height differences between the Little Knight and Hornet). Nine years and constant memes later, Silksong has been released.

Its reception has been kind of…mixed.

While the game’s garnered universal acclaim and exceeded the fanbase’s expectations, the difficulty curve is less a curve and more a series of rapid, sharp spikes— bosses with weird attack patterns, precision platforming segments that rely on Hornet dive-kicking obstacles (rather than the Knight’s straightforward downward nail-bounce), two separate currencies to manage instead of just the single Geo, Hornet being vulnerable to attack at all points (with no frames of invincibility even after being hit, meaning if you position yourself in the wrong place, you’ll lose all your health to a grub you could kill in two hits), and of course, the endless once-per-level battle arenas where you’re forced to fend off wave after wave of enemies while getting penned in, failure forcing you to start the battle from the beginning.

This wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t feel artificial and followed up a game whose difficulty encouraged mastery of its systems— Hollow Knight was unforgiving, but in ways that made sense, getting you to learn more about your Knight and the rules of the setting. Throwing Hornet in a room full of shrieking crows who take twenty hits to down and whose only lesson is “get lucky” is just rude. Especially with the lack of runback and checkpoints meaning you have to traverse half a level to get to a particularly difficult point, sacrificing countless rosaries along the way. It’s padding.

Which leads to a more uncomfortable question: if this game was in development for nine years, why do all these difficult moments feel less like difficulty and more like neglect? I-frames and hitboxes are basic features. Arenas are padding. Long runback periods are a thing that FromSoft got roasted about for years.

Difficulty spikes are fine, but it’s interesting we forgive the obvious cracks when they make things harder for us. Maybe it’s time we start demanding more from our games, and expecting that when a game takes nine years or longer to finish, we get it in a state where it’s actually finished.

What do you think? Does Silksong need more love, or do we all just need to git gud? Share your reactions below or join the conversation on the Boss Rush Discord.

Boss Rush Podcast – A Podcast about Video Games

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