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The elegance of movement in Silksong

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Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#111

Post by WithinReason »

sfn42 wrote: post #11

> You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As…

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.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#112

Post by viraptor »

SyrupThinker wrote: post #106
qwertytyyuu wrote: post #98

Dying 30 times to a boss isn;t that bad…

Is it if this constitutes an hour of two of your time, most of which is not actually fighting the boss, but walking back to it?

Are there actually long runbacks in Silksong? I'm not that far in, but so far they've all been maybe 2 screens long at most which you can cross really quickly.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#113

Post by marginalia_nu »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #83
furyofantares wrote: post #81

> 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. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun. Games, more than any other form of entertainment, offer skill challenges. As they've become more popular they've gotten better ab…

Spoilers: Silksong has arenas with 3 mobs that throw discs plus you. Idk about you, but I can't track 7 things moving at once. This isn't fun. Nor is it challenging, you just have to get lucky. I like Silksong, but the only way some the bosses were made challenging was because of constant adds. Hollow Knight rarely had this.

You can just attack the projectiles though. You don't have to dodge them.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#114

Post by marsten »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #71
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #25

Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.

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…

Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high.

Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#115

Post by foresterre »

yladiz wrote: post #102
crooked-v wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silksong has the basic issue that it was effectively designed as extended content for people who had already beaten the secret harder stuff in Hollow Knight, rather than as its own game or even as a sequel for people who had "just" beaten the basic game in HK.

I think that’s a slightly uncharitable take. Yes, it was originally DLC, and yes it is unforgiving, but it’s nowhere near as hard as the White Palace from the first game, and it’s not brutally punishing (you are quite agile and get good upgrades pretty early on).

I felt that the beginning of the game is pretty punishing, exactly because you don't have these movement abilities yet.

After getting Swift Step (dash), the game became quite doable. Luckily you get dash a lot faster than in the original game, although I would say, in Silksong it's more a necessity.

I went through Hunter's March without abilities and initially I hated the diagonal pogo jumps. It took a night's sleep to reset my mind, and learn pogo-ing for real.

That also was the lesson I needed to go forward: take your time, consciously clear the environment, and learn the movesets. I have a lot of hours in the original game, and was way too used to sprinting through the environment.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#116

Post by ianbutler »

viraptor wrote: post #112
SyrupThinker wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it if this constitutes an hour of two of your time, most of which is not actually fighting the boss, but walking back to it?

Are there actually long runbacks in Silksong? I'm not that far in, but so far they've all been maybe 2 screens long at most which you can cross really quickly.

There are several runbacks that are quite painful. I'm on the last bit of the game now and while I've overall very much enjoyed it there's more than a few spots where I thought "this is just tedious".

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#117

Post by pharrington »

akavel wrote: post #48
the_af wrote: post #7

Am I the only one who didn't like Hollow Knight? 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…

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…

You absolutely don't have to grind geo to buy maps, or really anything (except three very specific charms) in Hollow Knight. Just kill stuff as you go exploring. However, if you don't like the game's combat, then the game is definitely not for you.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#119

Post by sfn42 »

WithinReason wrote: post #111
sfn42 wrote: post #11

> You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As…

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.

Yup! I saw the big guy guarding the entrance and noped out of there, only recently went back - with hover, dash, wall climb etc, different moveset (no directional downslash).

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.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#120

Post by marginalia_nu »

vunderba wrote: post #68
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

> 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 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, so…

> 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 fi…

I found both HK and Silksong roughly similar to Dark Souls in much the same way.

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.

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