The Elegance of Movement in Silksong
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The article discusses the elegant movement mechanics in Silksong, a game that has received significant hype, but comments reveal diverse opinions on the game's difficulty and enjoyment.
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[0]: https://youtu.be/Vxt8uud5o_4
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.
That is the same conclusion that I and my brother both came to. The game is bizarrely punitive, from the very beginning, for no reason. It's as if they thought of it as being the next Hollow Knight expansion after Godhome, providing an additional challenge for the people who have beaten every pantheon with all bindings. ("The new challenge is: all of your controls now do something different!")
But it's a sequel. Supposedly. Most sequels are aiming to appeal at least as much to players who enjoyed the first game as they do to a hypothetical new audience.
Some discourse makes it sound like we're thrown 20 hours into HK at the beginning of Silksong. I know I'm biased as someone who beat 100% of Hollow Knight (granted, there's 112% of completion, so I did not in fact beat ALL the content), since I've played more HK than average.
Like those birds that will always mirror your movement to stay just out of reach, move erratically otherwise so you're guaranteed not to get a hit in (forget about hitting them with your spear when they're in the air), and just when you managed to get under them where you might be able to land a hit they'll drop down on you to deal contact damage and flutter away again.
10 hours in, and I've not even started the game since Saturday afternoon, when I was expecting not to be able to drag myself away from it (being a huge fan of the first Hollow Knight).
I would describe that as a skill issue. And I think Silksong feels great. I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Regarding coyote time I haven't noticed it myself but what you describe just seems like the margins are thin. You wish they were wider ie you wish the game was easier but there's lots of people who enjoy it for what it is.
To me it's an amazing game, absolutely incredible.
I mean, the ones for Hollow knight felt wider. I think the main issue is that The Knight moved much slower and you had to time dashes anyway. Hornet's sprint has much fewer coyote frames compared to her and the Knight's dash.
They are similar, but different on annoying details.
This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies.
I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect for enterprise sales people - 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.
Selling software to large organizations involves finding a champion within the org, then figuring out the power structure within the org via an impressive sort of kremlinology. You have to figure out who loves your product in the org, who hates it, who can make the buying decision, whose approval is needed, who's handling the details of the contract, and so on. You need to understand the constellation of people across engineering, procurement, legal, leadership, and finance – and then understand the incentive structures for each.
Then you have to actually operate this whole complex political machine to get them to buy something. Even if it's self-evidently in the interest of the whole organization to do so, it's not an easy thing to do.
Anyway, all that to say: "b2b sales are easy" is... naive... to say the least.
- 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!
Getting your internal structures right and aligning your incentives is one of the main challenges of building and running a large company! If it were easy, you wouldn't see nearly so many massively-inefficient corporate giants. :)
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.
In theory, it's just the game for me: indie, charming graphics, technically well done. What's not to like?
In practice, it felt too difficult, too much work, too repetitive, and simply unfun to me.
edit: interesting, downvotes for expressing an opinion directly related to sentences in the article (how difficult games are enjoyable somehow to some people; the article is all about difficulty and enjoyment regardless!). Is this the famed respectful and intellectually stimulating discourse of HN? Guys (and gals) please realize I'm not saying you are wrong to like Hollow Knight or Silksong, just adding a data point to the fact some of us don't like punishingly difficult games.
Agreed!
I hope you're not saying the only possible alternatives are the opposite extremes of Candy Crush or Hollow Knight, though :) I'd feel vaguely insulted.
I did finish Cave Story after all (but maybe today I wouldn't, I no longer have the time or patience).
That's very easy to explain. It's a Kickstarter effect.
Boardgamegeek is a website that, among other things, aggregates ratings of board games into a big master list of which games are the best, kind of like imdb.
The list has been corrupted by Kickstarter - it turns out that, when a game with a Kickstarter campaign comes out, everyone who reviews it is someone who backed the Kickstarter, and those people are personally invested in the idea that their game is good. You have to wait for quite a while before a Kickstarter game's rating can be usefully compared with a normal game's.
The waiting period for Silksong seems to have had a similar effect on the people who bought it right away.
Considering it released a couple of days ago, I don't see how this can be true.
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)
I think my opinion was fair and interesting, and also on-topic, since TFA goes into a discussion about how a repetitive, punishingly difficult game such as Silksong shouldn't be engaging but it is (for the author), to which I replied: games as hard and "feels like work" like Hollow Knight turn me off. Difficulty is definitely the problem.
My wording, "am I the only one [...]" invited discussion of the kind we are supposed to welcome here, is it not? And we welcome discussions of art which are inherently subjective.
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 am loving silksong so far however
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.
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 enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.
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.
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.
I think this is an overstatement. I've put about 16 hours into Silksong so far, I've pretty much completed around 8-10 zones or so, unlocked most of the abilities and stuff.
I don't think Silksong is that much more difficult than HK. Honestly it's been so long since I played HK that I'm not even sure it's more difficult at all but it probably is. 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. And aside from that and maybe a couple other spots it's been fairly alright in terms of difficulty IMO.
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 - yet.
Maybe it gets crazy later on, but that wasn't the claim in the article. The article claims you can hardly access anything without extreme effort and I don't think that's true at all.
> 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.
I'm not particularly good at this, by the way. Before Silksong I haven't picked up my playstation controller since Elden Ring came out. I've been pressing the wrong buttons and running/jumping/dashing into enemies over and over. I've been struggling. That's what I signed up for when I bought the game.
What I would have liked in Silksong is for the devs to remove some of the "frustrating" part just at the start: more free benches, less hp for some enemies, less flying enemies in platforming parts etc. Once the users have unlocked abilities and are used to the movement (and hooked in!), crank up the difficulty to what it is now.
I think I went through the narrow to the balloon place, then maybe back through the marrow or something up to Bellheart, deep docks etc.
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.
You can go there before you even get the hover ability, and I totally see how that would be demoralizing.
"Git Gud" by Viva La Dirt League: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blSXTZ3Nihs
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.
If I absolutely do not want to play a boss; for whatever reason, I should be allowed to find an alternative way to get through that area. If grinding endlessly for damage is the alternative, fine. But at least there is one.
I guess more than anything it's just been cool to see the community come together on silksong.
But this: "Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game"" is an immense exaggeration, I could understand this for, maybe, IWBTG.
Among 2D platformers in general, I think the medal for best movement feel goes to the Fancy Pants Adventure series. (You can still play it online on sites that have Flash replacements, start with the 4th game because it has everything.) But that's a deliberately easy game, you just run through the levels and have fun.
Among difficult precision platformers, I'd say the N/N+/N++ series has the best movement. (The first game is also still playable online.) Be careful, this one is like a drug, it has a huge number of levels and it's really hard to stop playing.
These people are extremely talented and put years of effort into this game to make it perfect, impatient fans be damned and it shows.
(Mandatory addiction hazard notice)
Heck, there's even a dedicated subreddit for hating on this boss: https://www.reddit.com/r/fucksavagebeastfly/
FPS characters have invisible crab legs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvAbbye-oCY
Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.
When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.
That seems like a strange comment in a thread about a 2d platformer. Nothing moves like a 2d platformer character either. So both don't move "naturally" and both feel good to many people?
Bah. Doom2016 has some of the absolute best (meaning fun) movement in the business and it is the absolute definition of fluid.
Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.
Blind Forest though? Chef's kiss
Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/how-to-prototyp...
I'm sure many others have separately come up with this idea, too.
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.
Which is exactly how I felt about HK - I never thought I’d see Super Metroid and Castlevania Symphony of the Night shuffle aside to make room at the top, but the genre definition is now a triumvirate, and the newcomer is hybridized with soulslike elements. It’s been a fantastic renaissance for the genre imo.
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.
I haven't actually played HK yet, and I don't normally play Souls-likes, but I did finally start playing Elden Ring about two months ago.
Yes, I've had times where I'm cursing out loud because I've been trying to beat a boss for three hours without success, sometimes dying with the boss only needing one more hit to die, and I'm frustrated with myself because knowing he only needed to get hit one more time started making me greedy with my attacks, and so I take big hits to the face and don't back off to heal.
But what makes them fun is the dopamine rush when I finally succeed. A couple times, it felt damn near orgasmic. I've been playing video games for probably around 35 years and nothing felt as good as when I finally downed Morgott.
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)
I avoided reading the Elden Ring wiki as much as possible. I decided to open it up and found how to get to Malenia, so I'll be fighting my way over there and gaining a few more levels before trying Radagon and Elden Beast again.
> The music and feints are absolutely diabolical for playing with your emotions and heightening your stress.
The feints are what really get me. Some of the wind-ups for attacks feel like an eternity, or at the very least, extremely unnatural, making it very hard to time a dodge.
I was interested to find out that Margit is one of the most technically fun and difficult fights to nohit run because his flow chart is actually the most complex of all the bosses. But most players can brute force their way through him.
Malenia was a lot of fun, especially without summons
They used to give you unlimited time to deal with difficulty and always gave the alternative of rolling back and getting more levels. That's until Nightreign -- you are almost always under time pressure.
Forget Malenia -- everdark Libra is the current standard of the most diabolical Souls experience. The time is against you, the music is maddening. You either clear the summons in under 20 seconds or you get another stacked debuff and the goat is casting.
Can't wait for the Depth version to be released this Thursday.
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).
As usual, you're gaining all sorts of tools and abilities along the way, and a few areas you can technically access early are best saved for later, when you have better gear. Some players aren't super thrilled with arena challenges, which this game has more of: suddenly 3-4 enemies in a small room all at once. I enjoy the meta challenge though: which tools can thin the crowd? Which minions should I focus to make the rest of the group manageable? If I can avoid taking damage, I can cast spells to thin the crowd much more effectively, etc etc.
Hornet's 45º downwards attacks are significantly harder to aim/time, and pogo chains (where they are even possible) take a lot of practice
Above all, all three games demand and reward precision and timing, and to some extent figuring out enemy movement and attack patterns. None of the games demand much in terms of speed or reaction time.
In many ways it's much more forgiving than your traditional "hard" platformers.
Have yet to run into a truly brutal boss like the last few Pantheon participants in HK.
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.
It would take many hours to get used to dpad so I'm sticking to what I know, but it's definitely not ideal.
Shameless plug and possibly spoilers: I wrote about this in my blog https://asukawang.com/blog/bitter-masterpiece.
Those bosses felt way too frustrating to me because they force you to unlearn the entire deflect gameplay, turning it into an annoying, slow-paced & somewhat janky fight.
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.
Actually, there is:
Knowing the difference between a game being difficult versus punishing. Here's a 12 year old, 7-minute video that talks about it: https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs
(EDIT: If it helps, consider changing "punishing" to "unfair")
The TL;DW is that punishing games are not fun because they often rely on cheap things like unavoidable damage, actions not being telegraphed, inconsistency of rules, long iteration times (ie, unskippable cutscenes, excessively long boss fights where you're redoing the same first 10 minutes over again). Punishing games are poorly designed by people that want to defeat the player, rather than allowing the player to overcome the challenge.
In Elden Ring, all damage is avoidable. Every attack is telegraphed. Boss fights aren't really that long, and if you die, the walk back to try again is always short and doesn't rely on fighting through waves of enemies. Some fights have cutscenes either at the start of the fight or during a transition to a second phase, but they're skippable.
It's still a challenging game. Some boss hits will eliminate over 60% of your HP in a single hit, but those attacks are telegraphed and you're supposed to dodge them.
But to a certain extent, ER is a "choose-your-own-difficulty" game. You can grind out higher levels to get your stats up if you want to give yourself more of an edge. The people complaining about Margit (A very early boss) being super hard were probably under-leveled. I got him to 1% HP on my second try (Seriously, his health bar was a single pixel wide), and got him down on my 5th.
Each boss has a moveset puzzle, where you have to figure out how to beat it, and to win it's not just enough to find the solution; the execution matters as well.
Other games usually just add boss HP or damage, instead of interesting movesets.
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.
At the surface I had a similar experience to what the author describes. The movement feels good to me (until it doesn't), the game is appealing in style and gameplay concept, and I die frequently.
But unlike them I dropped it after throwing myself at the exact boss they mention.
Not because I think the game is actually hard at this point (it seems quite early in the game), but because I don't think the game actually respects my time. Something they don't seem to have an issue with.
They mention that they died over 30 times to the boss, and how it never felt unfair to them. And while I do not fully share this sentiment, I do not actually mind that part either. The difficulty of learning a boss is part of the game.
What surprises me is the not really mentioned part, that these 30 deaths (if I were to take them) take up 1-2 hours of my time.
And you might be thinking, 2-4 minute boss fight? Seems reasonable? To which I say, this person focuses so much on movement and dying to random stage hazards because at least 70% of that total time is spent getting back to the boss to begin with, a 1-2 minute run of the same segment of game, each attempt!
That's right, I spend more time running to the boss, than actually fighting it, because it turns out that you make mistakes when you do something repeatedly, even if it is just getting to the boss. I wish I could learn the boss and "get gud", but the game just won't let me without wasting my time.
Part of that is a skill issue on my part of course, but for this very segment at least, you just start to see all the little hazards the devs have placed on the optimal path, to trip you up if you ever lose focus for a second. For a part of the game you have already done, and are not actually concerned with at that very moment.
At least for me this got tedious very quickly. And supposedly this actually gets worse in later parts of the game.
At some point you start to wonder, "is the game punishing me by making me traverse the game world before fighting the boss again?" And this thought starts to infect the regular gameplay, were you are supposed to willingly explore the game world, you know, the core of a Metroidvania.
At the end I just asked myself "why am I willingly playing a punishment?"
The author even seems to have vaguely similar thoughts here, they say themselves that they are sometimes not having fun with this core part of the game. Isn't that worrying from a game design perspective?
Anyway, I think that's enough ranting, sorry for not concluding this thought.
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.
UFO50 is voluntarily retro and purposefully use poor design as a kind of homage to video game progress and as a way to foster nostalgia. Part of the pleasure is seeing the changes between the games pretending to be older and the newer ones. Plus, it’s pretty clear it wasn’t made with the idea that most players would finish all the games. Part of the pleasure is sampling the large collection, closing games you don’t like until you find one that sticks. UFO50 objectively contains games which are not that good next to real gems but it is particularly brillant as a collection. Plus independently of how it plays, it’s interesting in itself as a kind of experience. That’s indie at its best.
Silksong is supposed to be a modern game and excels at some parts but the issue is that some design decisions are just, well, bad. I agree with the person you are replying to that it’s not particularly respectful of its player’s time for exemple forcing you to grind and slog repeatedly through uninteresting parts to actually play the fun parts. This is notably something FromSoft entirely solved a long time ago. To me that’s entirely orthogonal to being difficult. It’s an enjoyable game but a flawed one which makes for a tarnished experience.
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.
> movement is so finely tuned and so precise that I know deep in my bones that any hit or death is entirely on me. Of course, that in turn makes tangible improvement extremely visible. 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
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?
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