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The elegance of movement in Silksong

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Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#261
post #250
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Su…

> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World. You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "Li…

I mean, fair enough I guess, but there's a lot of games on that list. I don't think you would go around saying "LittleBigPlanet is widely regarded as one of the best of all time" just because it appears in that article. A lot of publications has done click-baity "top 100 games of all time".

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#262
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Su…

“metroidvania”, not “metro”

Corrected, thanks.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#263

Here's some of Celeste's movement design: https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_forgiveness...

It was strange not reading the name of Celeste when the article wrote about “the only other videogames that have this much focus on movement alone”.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#264
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World. You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "Li…

Hollow Knight was released when a greater portion of the mainstream was going into gaming so that was one of their first encounters of a "great game" hence the rave reviews. It's recency bias clouded by initial unfamiliarity of a genre's appeal that is misconstrued as a sole game's features. If you ask people who more acquainted with metroidvanias it's not going to be topping their lists.

What Metroidvanias do you think are better? I've played a ton of Metroidvanias and I completely disagree. Hollow Knight has excellent combat and arguably the best map layout in any Metroidvania. The only Metroidvanias I consider its peers are Super Metroid and Rabi-Ribi.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#265

Every time I see gameplay for this game, I just think it is a temu version of Ori and the Blind Forest. Is it distinct enough from that?

AFAICT the main difference is that Hollow Knight focuses on (and gets most of its challenge from) combat, whereas Ori focuses on platforming.

Hollow Knight has 47 boss encounters - OatBF doesn't have any (but I think the sequel does).

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#266
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what this game is, and I'm pretty insulated from gaming news, culture, etc. The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere. What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises. How did…

It started as a meme by a small but loyal Hollow Knight fan base on reddit. They had this ongoing joke about waiting for Silksong to release. As subreddits do, they were repeating the same joke for years. For some reason, this admittedly pretty lame joke escaped into mainstream. That is basically all there is to it.

Well that, and someone made a long-running “daily news” on YouTube:

https://youtube.com/@dailysilksongnews

I enjoyed Hollow Knight an awful lot, and checked-watched DSN nearly every day since it started. But I never visited the subreddit.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#267
post #250
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Su…

> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World. You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "Li…

> You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.

To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive proof that something is widely considered to be among the best games of all time. My guess is that most people think of categories of "best" media in much much smaller terms, and the only people allowing so many things in their categories are people like the American Film Institute and other people who like making lists.

It's hard to judge games which came out relatively recently against all the games which came before. I also think there's an abnormal level of hype around Hollow Knight. It's an excellent game which was received well, but I think on the grand scale of games I would be quite surprised if it cracked the top fifteen of most critics' choices of best games of the past decade. Within the Metroidvania genre I'd expect it to be a very different story.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#268
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World. You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "Li…

> You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time. To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive pr…

You are welcome to your opinion. If you don't like Hollow Knight, that's fine. I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#269
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollow Knight was released when a greater portion of the mainstream was going into gaming so that was one of their first encounters of a "great game" hence the rave reviews. It's recency bias clouded by initial unfamiliarity of a genre's appeal that is misconstrued as a sole game's features. If you ask people who more acquainted with metroidvanias it's not going to be topping their lists.

What Metroidvanias do you think are better? I've played a ton of Metroidvanias and I completely disagree. Hollow Knight has excellent combat and arguably the best map layout in any Metroidvania. The only Metroidvanias I consider its peers are Super Metroid and Rabi-Ribi.

Not the person you're replying to, but I personally preferred Ori and the Blind Forest a lot, both in terms of movement and story, but also in terms of the satisfaction of the backtracking and world as a whole. I felt like Hollow Knight did a poor job of nudging players in the right direction, and found the combat to be a bit more finicky than I care for from the genre. I'm not a huge fan of the art style either, at least as far as the environments are concerned.

The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#270
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time. To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive pr…

You are welcome to your opinion. If you don't like Hollow Knight, that's fine. I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all ) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.

> I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype.

My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living.

I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though.

> You are welcome to your opinion.

For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there.

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