I have been pleading with my husband to do exactly this. But no, he will continue to bash his face off enemies until they die by some kind of miracle. He has 5 masks, does not use red tools (but uses the poison polyp in his one blue slot), does not pogo or hit enemies above him, not use running attacks, or heal in the air. Just straight on hit with nail while face tanking and ground heal. I am DREADING him somehow reaching Bilewater.

I absolutely KNOW he is not the only person playing like this, and suspish this is the main source of the difficulty discourse...

Some things in the game definitely piss me off. But I avoid ranting about it because then the game would only be about the bad parts. It can still be a lot of fun if you take it slowly.

Big tip for boss fights: turn off the music and it becomes 10x easier. For me the music is way too overdramatic and distracting during a boss fight.

Also it does really get easier when you have more movement abilities.

Silksong makes me want to cry sad tears of defeat.

It's so melancholy and difficult sometimes. Yeah, there's the whole 'get good' argument, but there's a lot of arguably unnecessary tedium involved that starts to feel like difficulty just for the sake of being difficult and nothing else. That's definitely been a bit of a detractor for me, as well as a lot of others it seems.

I avoided all Silksong articles and posts until I finished Act 1 and probably shouldn't have been surprised by the response, but I was. To me, this threads the needle of that difficulty curve I'm looking for. It's hard but none of my deaths have felt cheap - I made a mistake in my read or hit the wrong button or I'm old and my reflexes are slowing down.

The high you get when finally learning the boss patterns and beating them is fantastic although...

Difficulty and fun are orthogonal, one doesn't exclude the other. Look at something like Celeste, it gets brutally difficult in farewell but never feels unfair.

A difficult game should motivate the player to get better, and that can happen while still remaining a fun experience. Nine Sols has a difficult combat system, but the combat feels fluid and fast-paced. Learning how to parry an enemy's attacks and get in counter hits feels amazing, also you get lots of meaningful upgrades and rewards from everywhere.

Meanwhile in silksong you have a character with insane horizontal movement, then you repeatedly get pushed through narrow vertical platforming sections with flying enemies above, spikes on the sides. Killing a bell guy by agonizingly hitting them 1 hit at a time before they dash away out of reach again is not a fun combat paradigm and doesn't create the power fantasy Hollow Knight excelled at.

The boss fights and >!Mt.Fay!< are fantastic but exploring the map just feels frustrating, especially when 90% of zones don't drop any rosaries.

I think it'll only be "too hard" the first play through. I got every achievement in HK, I'll probably do the same with Silksong, which means eventually I'll be able to beat every boss in order without dying in less than 10 hours. It'll get easier to the point where I'm adding challenges to my game just to stay entertained.

Most of the complaints are limited to the early game. After act 1, I didn't really struggle to the same level anymore. I had the masks and abilities I needed to navigate hard fights.

I feel like they should stick to their guns and just make the game they want to make.

Is it going to be for everyone? No, but no game is.

It's right in the difficulty sweet spot for me despite not being as into games (at the age of 40) as I used to be generally. It's like it was made for me!!

It’s got the bloodborne blood vial issue with having to grind for crafting materials if you get stuck and use them all.

Definitely could use a cost nerf for the tools and not every attack from a boss should do two or three damage.

These people have obviously never played cuphead either then.