Silksong Struggles: Why Make Hard Games? (Weekend Watch)

Everyone is talking about Hollow Knight: Silksong this week, specifically its difficulty, so our Weekend Watch is a video about difficulty in games and how it can be a tool game developers use to teach or reward players.

Our video this weekend comes from Mark Brown, the creator of the excellent game development videos at Game Maker's Toolkit. His video asks the question "What's The Point of Hard Games, Anyway?" and it is an interesting look at how and why developers might choose to ramp up the difficulty of an area or encounter in a game to get a specific feeling out of the player. You can check out his take in the video below.

As always Mark makes some great points in the video, but I'm not sure I agree with him. I am firmly in the camp that games are first and foremost an expression of their creators. In effect, while games are purchased and played by the gaming public, they are actually made for the developer. Game development is very difficult, there are so many things to stress over, and you have to pour so much of yourself into the game to complete it that it becomes a reflection of who you are as a person. Now, in large development teams this personal imprint is muted by the number of people working on the project, as well as management and marketing concerns from people who aren't directly involved in development. But in a small team, and Team Cherry is a very small team, the personal imprint of the designer is very evident, in basically every aspect of the game.

What that means, in my opinion, is that Silksong is difficult because Team Cherry wanted it to be difficult. They didn't include difficulty sliders or an easy mode because that would have detracted from the experience they wanted players to have as they played, and hopefully, conquered the game. By not including 'artificial' ways to adjust the difficulty they can ensure that every player who completes the game will have overcome the same obstacles. It builds a community of players who are all 'in it together' and I think the game and community are better for it.

Team Cherry Weighs In

And this isn't just guessing on my part, thanks to comments made by members of Team Cherry at a recent gaming exhibition in Australia, we have some evidence that they knew Silksong would be hard, and created ways to circumvent that difficulty. Just maybe not in the way players expected. Here is Silksong co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen talking about why the base enemies are more difficult than the enemies in Hollow Knight:

"Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight — so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent," ... "In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away,"

And that makes sense to me. Hornet is so acrobatic and builds such a varied moveset through the game that standard enemies marching back and forth across a ledge would never pose a threat to her. To keep each new environment challenging they had to expand on the behaviors of the enemies so the player was always on their toes.

In regards to the game's bosses, the members of Team Cherry knew that they were introducing steep difficulty spikes, but instead of thinking about how to level out the spikes, they designed the rest of the game in such a way that most of them could be avoided until later, when the player would be more capable. Here are their comments about the boss fights:

"Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty — but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing," ... "they (players) have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled."

So, like Mark mentioned in his video, the point of the difficult bosses isn't to introduce a hard stop to player progress. They are there to constantly provide the next ledge that the players will need to climb on their quest. Just like the areas of the map you find that are out of reach for your current skillset, but you know you will be able to overcome once you gain the necessary skills.

While I love the game so far, I have also hit some challenging sections that have frustrated me as I continue to run back for 'one more try'. But, maybe it's not the game that needs to change, it's how I approach it.

What do you think? Is Silksong too hard? Would it be better with difficulty options, or is it better that everyone who plays will have to face the same challenge? Let us know over on GameMinr's X and Facebook accounts.