Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
Fragility is a tricky thing in video games. It’s an unforgiving concept, for one thing, and good game design usually incorporates some element of shriving—a way to claw your way back from the edge and make up for past mistakes. Hollow Knight: Silksong, which came out last week after years of anticipation, and which has been consuming my hours mercilessly ever since, understands this concept. Some of its most thrilling moments come from the hard-fought scrabble, as I find the one safe inch of space on its gorgeously realized screens in which to slowly, so terribly slowly, bind my wounds before a boss can launch its next attack. But oh, my little friend Hornet is a fragile lil’ thing.
Silksong—the expansion-turned-straight-up sequel to Team Cherry’s 2017 indie hit Hollow Knight—has been subsumed almost instantly into The Great Internet Video Game Difficulty Discourse, because of course it has. Partly that’s because of the hype machine, and partly it’s because the game looks like it could be for everybody, with its ugly-cute bug designs. (Capable of appealing to a far wider swath of players than its inherent disinterest in mercy could seamlessly support.) It is also, from the jump, quite a bit nastier than the original Hollow Knight, which is one of those game design foibles that sequels fall into sometimes. You assume (not without evidence) that your audience for a second game will be made up in large part of players who mastered the first one, and so you tend to feel a little more comfortable throwing some serious roadblocks at them as early as the first or second boss.
(In this case, Team Cherry may have allowed time to trick them a bit; yes, we all devoured Hollow Knight… eight years ago. The spirit may be strong, but the muscle memory, not so much.)
Difficulty in Silksong arrives from two angles, neither of which has been mitigated by anything in the way of chooseable difficulty options. The first is straight-up numerical: Many enemies in the new game hit for two pips of Hornet’s extremely limited health, while taking a heavy number of expertly-aimed needle slashes to take down. Since you start with just five points of life (fragile lil’ thing!), that renders many of the game’s more frenetic battles a “three strikes and you’re out” ordeal. You can heal, spending the Silk resource that builds up when you attack, but in-battle healing is a fraught affair. Screw up the timing, and you don’t just get knocked out of the animation—you lose the Silk, too. Combined with attack patterns that put a lot of sturm und drang on the screen (even if, on second or third blush, they tend to be easier to find the loopholes in than you might expect) and you have a recipe for a lot of very quick trips back to your nearest life-restoring bench.
The other difficulty angle, and the one more fundamentally rooted in Silksong’s narrative goals, is the basic hostility of its world. This expresses most cleanly (in another element lifted wholesale from the original game) in how its mapping works: Every time Hornet pushes forward into a new area, she does so without a map at all—scrap paper apparently being in short supply in the land of Pharloom. Those initial pushes are harrowing every single time the happen, as the player blindly chooses paths, trying not to get themselves hopelessly lost. (Do I go for the upper path, which is clearly harder, or down, where I might get trapped in a path I have no good way to get back out of?) The relief of finally stumbling into the NPC who sells the maps—of hearing her happy little hums, or seeing evidence of the Xena chakrams she’s buried in enemies’ cute little skulls—is profound. You can’t have a safe haven, after all, without making most of the world feel profoundly unsafe.
Even beyond that one element, though—or the fact that such luxuries as tracking Hornet’s position on the map requires giving up a precious crest slot that could be spent on survivability—Silksong is even more interested in creating the sensation of pushing into hostile territory than Hollow Knight was. The Knight, after all, was essentially a blank-slate meanderer, wandering into fights almost at random as he slowly explored the king of Hallownest. Hornet, by contrast, is a crusading killer, hunting down Pharloom’s highest figures, and Silksong isn’t shy about making you feel how daunting her trip into enemy territory can be. The game emphasizes this insecurity with a few stand-out moments, sequences that blow apart and surprise expectations and feelings of safety, and some of the only parts of the game that don’t just feel like Hollow Knight, But More So. But it also captures the exhausting feeling every time it asks Hornet and her player to dive into yet another impenetrable, foggy labyrinth of secrets. I have stopped the game more than once simply on account of sheer existential exhaustion.
The Big Question of The Great Video Game Difficulty Discourse always boils down, in the long run, to this: “Who should decide how hard the video game should be: The developer, or the player?” Part of the reason Hollow Knight and Silksong‘s lack of difficulty options rankles some people, I think, is because it’d be so easy to implement—at least, for the more frankly numerical kind of hardness. (Change the numbers so that enemies hit half as hard against twice as much health, and you can basically call it a day.) As I noted back when Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree‘s final boss repeatedly kicked me in the teeth, difficulty in video games is an act of authorship, and, like any act of authorship, it carries an inherent “you can take it or leave it” philosophy. There are people, and not a small amount of people, who will never see the good (the map, the world design, the surprisingly heartfelt writing) or the bad (fuuuuuuuuuck those semi-random sidequests) of Silksong, because it is very determinedly hard. By refusing to cede control of the game’s difficulty to players—potentially allowing them to remove frustration, struggle, and misery from its emotional palette—Team Cherry has essentially written these players off. That’s harsh, hostile, alienating, and even potentially ableist, even while conveying a certain flavor of artistic confidence that’s hard for me to outright condemn.
For me, personally, I mostly love Silksong—even when I don’t always necessarily like the experience of playing it. The numerical difficulty I could give or take, even as I tend to get more thrills than screams out of the many attempts it takes me to master each of its highly mobile bosses. But the dark, cruel hostility of its world is the stuff that keeps me addicted. Fragility is a tricky thing, in video games, and rare. Few games have ever made me feel more like a little bug in a big, horrible world.
