The Elegance of Movement in Silksong

> Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.

But Silksong feels terrible. Its movement is awful and difficult to control. Hollow Knight felt smooth. Silksong is the opposite of that.

This very post is mixing its message:

>> The secret to why this game is like crack is the movement. The movement is so buttery smooth that simply getting back to the boss that just ripped you to shreds is a complex, skillful, and fundamentally enjoyable experience.

>> So am I having fun? I certainly don't feel joy in my heart when I fall into the lava for the seventeenth time because I missed a jump (if lava was a boss it would easily take the top spot for the number of times it killed me).

Falling into lava seventeen times because you keep missing the same jump is not an experience of smooth movement with player affordances.

Interestingly, there is coyote time in Silksong, but not enough that you can reliably do dash-jumps. It's just that occasionally you'll notice a jump starting from the wrong location, a little to the side of and below the edge you wanted to leap off of. Much more often, you'll notice that you hit the jump button but the jump never went off, which is the exact problem coyote time is supposed to solve.

> Silksong is presumably using all the same techniques.

They are similar, but different on annoying details.

yes, and I think one big reason enterprise might not buy your product even if it is guaranteed to make/save $X is $ is often NOT most important thing to the people make buying decision, specially when it is not your own money to save or gain

A big part of that is “I will save you X” is a non-starter. That is not making the business more money. If you have something that will actually make the business more money then they will go “Great if I pay you twice as much will it make me 2X?” and if the answer is yes, that will be a sale every time.

I might be overstating it, but here's what I see at my company. "Sell" is very different in all of these situations.

- Sell to the champion. - Sell to the rest of the org. - Sell to procurement. - Sell to the implementation project team. - Sell to the users and get adoption up.

Then constantly demonstrate that you're providing value in whatever terms that department / org thinks is valuable that year.

Easy!

I've been watching this process with a keen eye as a technical consultant, and one thing I've learnt is that naive models of large organisations as Profit=Revenue-Costs is totally inadequate for enterprise sales. Yes, it is true that saving money anywhere will improve profits, but you can only sell that to an individual who's personal KPI needles move because of this! If the cost is in dept X but the profit is recorded in dept Y, then don't bother. You won't get a sale, even if it's tens of millions of dollars of saved costs or increased revenue. At best, you can find their common manager and try to sell it to that person, but even that has pits of failure you can all too easily fall into.

> going from "Ugh, sales people are all snakeoil salesmen" to "I can't believe what they do is even possible, much less regularly done" over about 20 years.

I mean, it still sounds like snake oil salesmen. It's just that that's what it takes these days to even get noticed (let alone make a pitch). rubbing hands trumps a quality product 99% of the time.

Can confirm. At one point in my career (after reflection on the situation) I realized I had been made a champion by a subsidiary of IBM for one of their products. I found myself in some really bizarre meetings with our execs and their executive sales people that left me feeling like a puppet that was made to tell our CEO that we needed this. They really took us apart, It was all very slimy.

Different strokes for different folks. You don't need to please everyone, but it helps if you can move 15 million units with three developers. I don't play Candy Crush but yet somehow this little cash cow keeps getting updated and I'm not one of the 2.7 billion downloads!

In the same boat here - I played it for a while, but was (and am) sincerely super confused what people find so amazing in it. I mean, it's an ok game, and I get that some people may like it, why not; but the repeated claims of it being the best of all time, to me totally baffling. Already the respawning of the critters, and the grind to get some coins to get such a basic game feature as a map, two early aspects that I definitely don't like, and personally find somewhat disrespectful to my time.

> Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN?

To be fair, there's not much discussion to be had around expressing an opinion like that; people will either agree with you, or they won't. The only real thread of discourse to follow from there inevitably leads back to 'art is subjective' which isn't particularly helpful or interesting. Comments praising the game without any deeper thought are just as guilty of this, of course.

(for the record I don't think it's the end of the world for people to simply express opinions, but as far as intellectual stimulation goes it doesn't rank high)

Just to comment on the downvotes, I think this (a comment to the effect of "I don't like it" being downvoted) is an understandable if unfortunate consequence of modern internet culture not taking "it's just not for everyone" as a conclusion (especially if this is due to something being too hard).

To make something exclusionary, especially if this has a whiff of elitism, is taken by some to be a moral failing. Every complaint that could be read as saying that a work is like that, therefore, raises the spectre of activists or dedicated rabble-rousers using it as ammo to get the developers to ruin it for those who do enjoy it, be it by actually simplifying the game for everyone, devaluing the sense of achievement by introducing an "easy mode", or just changing direction with future expansions.

This has in fact happened with many games I play(ed), live-service games seeming particularly susceptible. The incentive to shout down any complaints about difficulty therefore exists.

I also didn't like hollow knight despite loving hades and dead cells (somewhat similar) although I only played it for ~ 2 hours

I am loving silksong so far however

You’re not the only one. Hollow Knight is a gorgeous game but it’s difficult to the point of becoming unenjoyable.

I persevered and beat it out of pride, not because I was having fun (some bosses took me more than 100 attempts to finally beat, that’s not fun, it’s a chore). About a year later I did it again just to prove to myself it hadn’t just been a fluke. But after that - no more. And I’m certainly not buying Silksong, I won’t give money to creators who hate their gamers so much.

Same.

So much praise but Hollow Knight mostly just felt like a dreary slog to me. So dark. So depressing. So gloomy. It just kept on going on and on and on and wore out its welcome for me long before I made it to the end. I have played a lot of great platformers and metroidvanias and I just did not really have a good time with Hollow Knight. I had also possibly played entirely too many games where your role is "wander around a pretty, decaying, dying world and turn out the lights" before this one and just did not need another one of those stories in the form of yet another a brutally difficult game that demands absolute obsessive precision. I have suffered enough soulslikes.

The idea of even more Hollow Knight is the exact opposite of appealing to me. Maybe after it's on sale for five bucks and has added an easy mode as well as a double-easy mode. I enjoy a good platform traversal but I want the game to work with me to make me look awesome, I am no longer "motivated by mastery" or interested in feeling like "Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view… only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again."

I hated Elden Ring because it felt way too hard and the movement & animations feel very slow. I died to bosses like 100s of times and just quit. HK didn't feel hard at all though, most bosses i beat within like 2-3 tries, maybe 10 tries at most for a few. But yeah I'm not a fan of frustratingly hard games either, it just feels like a tedious chore. It's funny how small tweaks can change what different people find hard I guess.

No I strongly dislike this game too. It’s too hard, I don’t like the movement which feels ‘rigid’ , and it’s super gloomy and depressing.

I enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.

Same! But it all boils down to what kind of player you are and what you seek in games.

Even though the context is/was online multiplayer games, I still think Bartle's player types are a great starting point to better understand why you play games. And people do not necessarily have one and that's it but you can figure out which one is the main one.

For instance, I've got friends who play to feel mastery over a game: they'll grind it, suffer, put the time, just to then be really good at it. For others that's an absolute waste of time.

Other friends just absolutely like to spend hours competing with others and being better than them, from playing CoD, WoW battlegrounds and such. They study the changelogs to know what changed to get the edge over an opponent who didn't. It's fun to win for them.

Others think that games are mainly to be shared, they do coop, spend more time chatting than actually playing but still love the time. They don't necessarily finish games as that's not the point.

Then you have people who love exploring, both the world and the game content, so these are the ones playing the story completely, going to do sidequests and such. The extreme of this is the completionist, who's mainly drawn to do everything and anything, regardless whether it actually unlocks anything interesting new.

And more but the point of my long comment is that it's ok if you don't enjoy HK, or Dark Souls, etc. While I appreciate the craft, I personally don't enjoy dying a million times just to beat a silly digital thing. I want the just right amount of difficulty so that I can escape death a few times, defeat it and move on with my exploration.

And games go at waves, you had tons of competitive games a few years ago, now it's a lot of skill-based souls-like bastard games who hate you for even picking them up.

So, don't feel bad and go play Clair Obscure with enemy mods on and enjoy the sublime storyline, world and soundtrack. It's your game, you bought it, so enjoy it as you please.

There are at least two of us :) I like exploration and I like bloodborne, elden ring, dark souls 3, demon’s souls, dark souls - in that order. Thus, I don’t mind difficult bosses and obscure storytelling.

I’ve clocked 10h in HK but I can’t get over these fuzzy hitboxes (I say it as souls veteran!), shallow fighting system and difficult platforming.

It is ok, just not a game for me.

Titanfall 2 had excellent movement! The only games I’ve played that surpass it are the tribes games, which just have a whole new level of fluid movement for 3d games.

As someone who completed most of the HK main story, I've decided to stop playing silksong during act 1 because I'm just not having fun

I had no trouble going through Silksong (and I'm having a blast!), but there were _a lot_ of times when I thought that this would be really hard for people who are new to the series.

> Everything so far has felt achievable and reasonable to me, having played HK, Dark Souls, Elden Ring and other similar games I don't think Silksong is significantly more difficult than any of those

If you are a type of player that plays HK, Dark Souls and Elden Ring, then yes Silksong isn't brutally hard.

But I think the game is brutally hard for majority of people who hasn't played any of those. I think HK had a better difficulty ramp for beginners.

It is most definitely not an overstatement. I have over 425 hours in Hollow Knight. I stopped playing Silksong in 8 because it felt like unfun masochism.

Wait, I didn't have to go to Hunter's March? I thought there was nowhere else to go, however the sudden change in difficulty made me feel I must have missed an area.

> If you went to Hunter's March as soon as you found it you probably had a bad time but going in there later on was honestly pretty easy.

That's probably a significant part, too. Silksong is more open than HK, where the lack of abilities put a natural wall around the areas which are too hard at that point of time. But in SK you can easily stumble into areas where you are not supposed to be, which can be frustrating.

Ok, this is as close as I'm ever gonna get to having a real reason to post this on HN, so here goes:

"Git Gud" by Viva La Dirt League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs

Silksong is objectively hard, and if you're trying to argue otherwise you're either the mythical "god gamer" or just trolling. The game is unapologetically hard and punishing right from the beginning. The very second boss you encounter already hits you for 2 masks (which effectively means 3 hits and you're dead), and each time you try to fight him you first have to run back for a minute before you reach him. He even does 2 masks of contact damage. Heck, even some normal enemies you encounter in the first two hours deal 2 damage. The original Hollow Knight bosses didn't do 2 masks damage until half way through the game.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the game and consider it pretty much a masterpiece, but many people believe (myself included) the game could have a better difficulty curve from the beginning and be less punishing (just give me a freaking bench before each boss so I don't have to run through 10 screens to have another try at it) while still maintaining the overall difficulty and challenge.

Elden Ring is easier than Silksong. Summons are easy mode.

Played all the soulsborne and 100%-ed HK. Except the last pantheon, I couldn't ever beat ascended moth

Don't so easily dismiss the opinions of others. For certain individuals it is indeed the hardest game they've ever played. I've cleared Steelsoul 100% in the OG Hollow Knight and would argue that Silksong is definitely the more difficult of the two.

Just tried both the ones you mentioned and I have to say I absolutely hate the movement. It is extremely floaty, meaning there is a ton of acceleration and deceleration. Maybe that's the point, but it's not what I enjoy at all. Same reason I didn't enjoy the Ori games.

Oh man I forgot about N+, that game was incredible. Super cool to see there's a new N++.

The thing that makes HK and Silksong stand out to me is the full picture. Everything is well done. The movement feels great, the combat feels great, the exploration feels great, the progression feels great, the boss fights are awesome, the art and music are amazing, the characters are fun and the story is engaging, it just has everything.

These people are extremely talented and put years of effort into this game to make it perfect, impatient fans be damned and it shows.

I'd also put Super Meat Boy up there for good platforming feel. But yeah, Fancy Pants is fantastic, it's what I always wanted Sonic games to feel like.

If you haven't triend Sundered yet I recommend it. If you go with the unlock path that specializes in movement abilities then the game gets really wild by the end.

Link to the original N if you haven't played it: https://www.kongregate.com/games/MetanetSoftware/n

(Mandatory addiction hazard notice)

After 10+ deaths just go somewhere else. It's optional boss.

Most people struggle with this boss, I stopped counting how many times it killed me but I spent probably close to 2 hours fighting it. The fight is just unfair. And when I finally beat it I didn't even feel satisfied, just glad it's finally over and I can move on.

Heck, there's even a dedicated subreddit for hating on this boss: https://www.reddit.com/r/fucksavagebeastfly/

I too had trouble with this boss but eventually made it. The fact it summons little friends is the problem, so hard to dodge 2+ the boss!

Surprisingly overlapping set with games I’ve played and enjoyed a lot! Dead Cells was another that has a lot in common.

I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.

FPS characters have invisible crab legs.

Titanfall was one of my favorite games ever, largely because of the movement. (I even hated using the eponymous Titans, because they take away your ability to run on walls!)

That's why I struggled with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. They subtly broke the movement and some hitboxes, and I could never get the proper hang of it.

Blind Forest though? Chef's kiss

I'm a huge fan of pixel perfect platformers. Chalk Cuphead and Super Meat Boy up on the list of games with a very natural connection between player coordination and game mechanics.

I see a mention of Celeste, I give an upvote. What a great game, and a perfect showcase of what the OP writes about too. The movement is Celeste is so fluid and expressive, which is super important because the game is crazy hard so the movement has to feel great, otherwise the game would be annoying to play.

This article from 2005 has the toy idea. It has stuck with me.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/how-to-prototyp...

Sounds like Tynan Sylvester’s game design book (Tynan Sylvester created Rimworld)

It's promotional material, but I enjoyed what the Get To Work devs put together to show how they built the game up from kind of the same approach (all on youtube)

Yes, movement in SSBM is so satisfying. Nothing else comes close for me. All other games just feel boring in comparison. A classic example for those who haven't seen it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpOaQxrsaqI

This is interesting to me because I separately came up with the "toy" idea in trying to figure out for myself exactly what a "game" is, anyway. Many popular things marketed as "games" really are toys by this standard, in the sense that you have to build your own win conditions around them. I'm thinking here of pretty much the entire simulation genre, as well as even very niche and complex things like Dwarf Fortress.

I'm sure many others have separately come up with this idea, too.

I’ve had multiple friends insist that I absolutely have to play this game. But I just know I won’t like it because I don’t like any of the other games that are like it. This game seems to be the labubu of gamers in terms of social media hysterics.

I used to think the same when I was around 15-18 hours in.

Now I'm finally reaching 100% completion and frankly, it's just very hard for me to argue this is not the best metroidvania ever released. It has a lot of hype, but I think it somehow lived up to it.

For reference I do think the original Hollow Knight is a bit overrated, right now I reckon Nine Sols has it beat, but this? The game has SO MUCH to offer, SO SO much, with so much care for detail that I just can't think of any other game in the genre that is better.

It is extremely over hyped. The first game was already regularly over hyped. The community is famous for treating as some sort of masterpiece and reacting very strongly to any form of criticism.

Then you have a lot of opinion in the mix. I strongly disagree with the article for exemple on both the extreme difficulty, the game is difficult but manageable, the enjoyment, plenty of questionable design decisions are there purely to spite the player and it’s a game which often confuses wasting your time and being frustrating with being difficult, and the supposed elegance of the movement.

Silksong is really weirdly tuned in that it has mechanics which will actually only bother you and make your experience more painful if you are already struggling while being completely invisible if you are flying through. And the punishment will be grinding, so wasting your time, not actually forcing players to encounter things which would make them better. Amusingly for a game so long in the making, I think it suffers from a significant lack of play testing.

My first play through of Elden Ring was a pseudo challenge run - capped at 125RL (pvp meta) and dual UGS style. No ash of war usage. No guides for bosses.

Malenia took me over a month, and probably over 500 deaths and I had to relax the ash of war usage (still limited by my very low FP)

The entire end game was brutal as this was before the buff for UGS animation speeds and most boss openings were shorter than anything than a crouch poke but I loved every minute of it. Just like learning to play something new on an instrument just cos you can't nail it in one try, one week or even one month doesn't mean you won't eventually get it.

One meta lesson I like about Souls is it provides a safe environment to learn what performing under pressure is like. The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress. I always play better on mute (but that's no fun)

> Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun [...]

I haven't played Silksong yet and I know difficulty is rather subjective, but is it really that difficult compared to the realm of punishing platformers like NES Ninja Gaiden, Cuphead, Spelunky 2, the dark world portions of Super Meat Boy, etc?

I played the first Hollow Knight and didn't find it particularly hard. (not easy, but definitely not Dark Souls level punishing).

I played Hollow Knight. I don’t recall if I defeated a single boss. I must have done a couple but several of the first you were meant to defeat remained unchallenged.

There are non boss fights that get more elaborate as you go, and let you pick up some new skills and abilities.

Another one like this that shouldn’t have been was Orie and the blind forest. If you play it on story mode, which I did because it was great eye candy and I just wanted to see it all, there a spot in the middle of act 2 where you have to land several double wall jumps in rapid succession with nearby spikes. Someone at that studio needs to be beaten about the shoulder with a clue bat about wtf “story mode” means. I never got to see the story and was too mad to watch someone else play it on youtube.

I’m fairly sure that my problem with both was the same. Only partly fat fingers and part was that certain movements don’t work identically on all controllers. Some things are counterintuitively easier on a D pad than a thumb joystick. It’s just not as crisp to go from one input to another 90 or 180° opposite. If your game mechanics are built on that, then some ports will be much harder to play.

You should either not port them, or adjust the timing grace period up on that hardware.

I also played Elden Ring recently. I wish I could share your dopamine rush because I never had one during the playthrough. Certain bosses caused so much frustration that the net sense of achievement for the game was negative for a decent margin. I've also played Dark Souls and Sekiro and I found them better on this aspect. After beating them after an extended period of struggling, my thought was not "I finally got it" but rather "I hope there aren't more bs like this".

Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.

When I was in college, I bought Demon's Souls and also started the most difficult semester I'd had yet with 3 classes deeply into my CS major. I was terrified of what lay ahead of academically, so I procrastinated by playing Demon's Souls.

Yes, Demon's Souls was hard, but eventually I somehow I started passing dungeons and beating bosses. The rush that I got from that gave me what I needed mentally to persevere through my classes: by the end of the semester I had A+s in 2 and an A in the other. I don't think I've had a better semester since. Beating big demons in video games made me feel like I could beat my own big demons in real life.

Lots of others feel the same way about Souls-like games; there are many video essays on Youtube that cover how Souls-likes got them through depression and other things.

Lots of people say this but they can unfortunately never articulate why that works in Elden Ring. Making a game that is insanely difficult will not be enough to give you that feeling of accomplishment. If that's all it took there's be thousands of games that gave you that feeling. And yet there aren't. So whatever makes Edlin Ring so special, it's appearently really hard to describe in a way that separates it from lesser games.

I wish I could go back and experience soulslikes for the first time! They really are a treat if you experience them as you describe (not everyone feels that way, but I certainly do).

You're in luck because that subgenre has exploded in popularity and there are a lot of good ones out there if you want to keep playing them these days. Elden Ring is one of the best though for sure.

Challenging fun is the kind that defers satisfaction to near the end of the process - so the more challenge there is, the more uneven the satisfaction is likely to be. It's the same satisfaction one experiences with language fluidity, and being able to "converse" with the mechanics. That is the cause of an essential problem in the design of such games: enjoying the game means becoming literate in what the game is doing. Some people are hooked on the pattern recognition particular to that form of challenge and find it easy to progress and satisfying to win. Others have difficulty maintaining attention, get frustrated quickly and quit. This is evident in reviews of UFO50, the anthology of "authentically fake retro games" from the makers of Spelunky. Most of the games in UFO50 are difficult in more-or-less the same ways that games of the NES era were, with some intentional anachronisms. People find games they love and games they hate in the collection, but their opinions on which ones, and how hard they are, are all over the map and in vigorous disagreement. It is an excellent litmus test for what kind of gamer you are.

The most notorious game in the collection by most estimates, Star Waspir, is a vertical scrolling shooter. For most people, it's the hardest thing they've ever played, but they also like it if they persist, and the overarching goal of completing all 50 games propels them into developing appreciation. The enthusiasts in vertical shmups, on the other hand, find it a bit out of touch with where the genre is and not all that hard relative to other games: the mindset of shmup players is one of playing the same 15 minute experience repeatedly with incremental improvements in progress or score over weeks and months, and intentionally choosing between easier and harder routing according to their current skill - as opposed to the mainstream of continual progression through content with a binary conclusion of "beat the game/did not beat the game". Star Waspir has elements of the modern genre but it's also stripped down to be more within the 80's vintage, retaining certain rough edges.

A large part of what hooked people with HK was that everything was "paced for mortals" and stayed in an accessible Goldilocks zone with a lot of room to grow into doing harder stuff. This also made it incredibly boring to Metroidvania enthusiasts who knew all the tropes: it's the plain vanilla version of this gameplay, given a lot of attention to detail, but it takes a while to get going and doesn't have many things for enthusiasts. Silksong has pushed a little more into the enthusiast territory, which is always going to be to popular detriment.

> you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania

This is why I bounced off Hollow Knight despite enjoying similar games like Metroid, Ori etc. The “shade” system actively discourages exploration: when you die, the game wants you to go back to the same place over and over, instead of going a different way or trying something new.

It's not an easy decision, putting down a book, a movie or a game halfway through, but my lifetime on this planet is very limited.

How is this different than a game like Sega Genesis Contra Hard Corps? (Asking with genine curiousity).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzJyBQKDaeQ

In that game, it's basically ~30 boss fights in a row (don't know the exact number). There are 4 paths through the game A->(B or C)->D->(E or F). So if you take path B you fight different bosses than path C. Same for E and F. One of those last paths has 2 endings with one more boss fight on one path.

You have limited lives so making it to the end of the game requires effectively memorizing the boss patterns. So, your description fits.

> You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious

But I'm guessing Contra Hard Corps does not stick up to Eldin Ring. So what's Edlin Ring's special sauce?