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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2235 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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After seven long years, Hollow Knight: Silksong released and people could finally play it crashed Steam for several hours after which people could finally play it.

You'll remember that Dark Souls (2011) started a storm of Dark Souls buts -- Dark Souls but Scifi, Dark Souls but Roguelike, Dark Souls but Cooking Mama, etc. Of these, to my knowledge, the only pure success was Hollow Knight. (But Metroidvania.) It captured Dark Souls 1's best feature, which was a feeling of going on an expedition into the deep unknown, with no idea how to get back home. Likewise in Hollow Knight, very commonly players clear the game's tutorial zone and end up falling into a late game spiders' nest a hundred miles underground. Or swim through a hole in wall, but get lost in a complex sewer system with an abandoned city underneath. Or mess around platforming and find a secret level hidden above the cliffs of the starter village. The story, vibe, and lore were also very Dark Souls, although this is mostly because Hollow Knight just plain ripped it off.

Five hours in, I'm enjoying myself but I'm disappointed. It's ironically the exact same disappointment of Dark Souls 2. Silksong is much more linear and railroaded; the difficulty, even in these early areas, is a step up from the original, and this is mainly accomplished but lower player health, higher enemy health, and the liberal use of gank squads. And I suspect Silksong won't pull off a nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.

We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade. Anyone else playing this? (Or any other Soulslike or Metroidvania, I guess)

Update on Silksong.

The conversation around this game is getting on my nerves. Camps have divided over whether Silksong is too hard (double damage, runbacks) or just right (get good). Ultimately difficulty is up to preference. No one is going to convince anyone here, although people denying Silksong is harder are pretty annoying. But no one is talking about Silksong being a different genre than Hollow Knight. That seems important. Am I taking crazy pills?

The core conceit of Metroidvanias is exploration yields power. You have a freeform world and can explore many different areas. As you find collectibles and beat bosses, your avatar strength increases. You unlock new areas, which open up new bosses and powerups, which in turn open up new areas, etc. Not so in Silksong.

First off, the area progression is almost entirely linear. You have one or two optional areas like Hunter's March. But really, you're advancing down the critical path like a regular action platformer.

Second, your avatar strength is barely increasing, and not at all due to exploration or boss-beating. If you comb every area for hidden walls, you can maybe find enough masks to increase your health from 5 pips to 6 pips by Act Two. But since most enemies and environmental hazards do two damage, that isn't an upgrade. As for your damage output, you are gifted a small sword upgrade at a set point in the story about 10 hours in. But since all the enemies from that linear point on get twice as tanky, that's not an upgrade. And there's no incentive to backtrack, so...?

All crests or tools you get are sidegrades. They unlock other gameplay styles according to your preference. I've mostly ignored them.

Weirdly you do get a few things that feel like Metroidvania "door-opening" moves (See: the Drifter's Cloak or Silk Spear). But they end up only being used to advance from the area you find them in. Want to backtrack? The door-opening moves don't open anything in old zones. And later levels forget about them. (Why didn't Team Cherry put steam updrafts in later levels at least? That was fun!)

At hour thirteen, I don't feel my hornet is meaningfully stronger or more capable than at hour two. Instead, the last eleven hours have been a sequence of challenge levels.

Conclusion: Silksong is in practice closer in genre to something like Super Meat Boy or I Wanna Be the Guy than Hollow Knight. The trappings of a Metroidvania are here, but the substance isn't. I feel like this change is more important that just 'second game harder', no?

This development does not surprise me in the least, given how the tail end of my playtime in Hollow Knight was mostly just a continuous escalation of challenge for the sake of challenge. I liked the game for what it was up to a point, especially for the exploration, but the exclusive focus on high-end skill checks in the boss rush or extreme platforming sequences at the end had me check out. That Silksong looks more like that and less like the open-world exploration game that the earlier parts of HK were like seems consistent with what the devs of HK already liked to turn their game into.

This development does not surprise me in the least, given how the tail end of my playtime in Hollow Knight was mostly just a continuous escalation of challenge for the sake of challenge. I liked the game for what it was up to a point, especially for the exploration, but the exclusive focus on high-end skill checks in the boss rush or extreme platforming sequences at the end had me check out.

I had the same experience of HK. The game was all roses until I maxed out my knight. Then, suddenly, to reach the ending I apparently had play a masocore platformer and a bullet hell game? Why? I checked out and watched the ending cutscene online.

Honestly, I didn't hold this against Hollow Knight. But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.

I only just stumbled across this post, but I feel like this deserves correction. The Path of Pain and Absolute Radiance are both very optional, intentionally brutal content. The canonical good ending only requires you to defeat normal Radiance (after fighting the Hollow Knight), which is a bit tricky but nothing compared to what you linked. It sounds like you checked some guides, misinterpreted them, then gave up prematurely?

No, I agree with @popocatepetl. AFAIK getting the good ending requires doing a bunch of ‘optional’ bosses to power up the dream nail, then going through super-meat-boy style platforming in the White Palace to get the Void Heart, then fighting two difficult bosses in a row.

I beat the ‘final’ boss, felt kind of good about it, looked the game up online and got told about all the other bullshit I was meant to do and gave up.

I liked HW for the metroidvania exploration, but Team Cherry seems far more invested in super-hard bosses and platforming.

But it seems Team Cherry wanted to make a sequel to the part of their game I actually didn't like. Shame.

Agree completely. I don’t think they realised that this wasn’t what appealed to many players.

From the wiki: "Behind a breakable wall on your left is the entrance to the Path of Pain - an optional and particularly hard area. Note that beating this area isn't required for the true ending."

Yes, you do have to do some platforming in the White Palace. But you do not even have to find, let alone complete, the insane secret section that's showcased in the linked video.

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. You are factually correct that the Path of Pain and Absolute Radiance are optional.

I agree with the previous poster in the sense that you have to fight some pretty bullet-hellish bosses and do some pretty gnarly platforming to get the chance to fight ordinary Radiance, and that I noped out on hearing this.

Fair enough! It's definitely a hard game.

There are three major endings in the game, ranked from earliest/easiest to hardest. I'll spoil them just in case.

  1. You kill the three dreamers and then the Hollow Knight. Doable with mid-level upgrades, but might feel hard at that point. You probably won't have discovered the entire map.
  2. You awaken the Dream Nail, requiring defeating some combination of easy-ish Warrior Dreams and harder versions of existing bosses, then collect the Void Heart (the only obstacle of note is the aforementioned platforming section), then kill Hollow Knight followed by Radiance. At that point, if you've been exploring you should have enough upgrades that Hollow Knight is barely a challenge, especially since you're fully healed on entering the Radiance fight anyway. This is the "canon" ending that Silksong takes over from.
  3. You find and kill every boss in the game, then complete a boss rush where you fight all of them in a row, with a few opportunities to get a full heal, capstoned by a stronger Radiance. This is pretty much the 100% completionist ending and is not for regular players. Solksong does not have this kind of challenge implemented as of now.

I find it strange to complain about platforming in favor of metroidvania exploration, because as far as I remember there are more than a few exploration rewards in HK that are locked behind platforming.

In my experience Silksong is quite heavy not on hard bosses but hard "gauntlets", i.e. the multiple waves of enemies arenas. But those can be trivialized by tool spam if you haven't been zeroing out your shard stash all the time.

Silksong does not have this kind of challenge implemented as of now.

Yeah, Hollow Knight also didn't have the Pantheons (boss rush) until the DLC came out. And while the first four (much much much easier) Pantheons contribute to the final 112% completion percentage, the fifth one with that ending does not. It really is intended to be optional content. (There IS an achievement for it, though.)

I haven't finished all Silksong's extra content yet, but I found the bosses to be tough but fair - especially if you count this as a soulslike, which IMHO is a genre rife with badly-designed overtuned bosses. I would cite Nine Sols, another recent metroidvania, as an example of how NOT to do it.

I'm playing (have just defeated the Fourth Chorus and made my way up, where I am now up against the owlmoth thing), and finding it pretty enjoyable so far. The differences in locomotion from HK don't particularly bother me (the diagonal plunge is easy to get used to), and I don't actually see the game feeling too linear (I felt a fair bit of freedom regarding the order that I could do the early bosses in, to the point that I actively backed off of one in the hope that I could find some movement upgrade first). Some complaints I have would be that

  • the early areas somewhat lack distinctive personality

  • the whole trap/consumable mechanic, so far, feels insufficiently impactful to waste precious middle-aged neurons on developing muscle memory for

  • BGMs feel more ambient, while HK had some songs that stuck in my mind

  • I agree with the sentiment below that many enemies are pointlessly damage-spongey (looking at you, red ant tribe).

  • So far the driving plot feels too similar to HK, what with the collapsing bug kingdom suffering from a mind control zombie plague that the protagonist has some mysterious existential connection to.

On the other hand, things that I feel are an improvement over the predecessor:

  • The graphics and level design feel more polished. HK had some areas that looked pretty monotonous.

  • Every boss fight so far has been great: they are unique, inventive, and the difficulty feels fair. HK suffered from the problem that a lot of the bosses were just finicky - you needed to learn the exact timing and hitboxes for their attacks so that you could get out of the way and strike back, but the mechanic would often just be "dodge this massive club swing by between 1 and 4 pixels and then run towards the enemy to get in a hit".

  • It has doubled down on HK's strength of having an endearingly quirky NPC cast with funny fantasy-language exclamations and songs announcing their presence.

  • I found the FOMO (what if some other set of powerups would have trivialised this boss?) of HK's knapsack-based badge/upgrade system to be more annoying than anything. The new one has less of that (though that might just be because so far I have found hardly any optional powerups that feel meaningful).

  • I'm obviously not far enough in yet, but the narration of the main story feels more tight.

One thing worth noting is that I tried to play the game with my recently-acquired Switch controller (having been a keyboard gamer all my life, but finally folding because of some games requiring omnidirectional movement/aiming), but went back to keyboard after the first few bosses which immediately gave me a massive power spike. I am not sure the controls were optimised for gamepads.

the diagonal plunge is easy to get used to

I envy your neuroplasticity.

You eventually get crests or something that alter your attack moveset (but require you to unlock equipable slots all over again) and the first one i got changed the downward plunge to much more forgiving hitbox that's slightly slower but you get it after you've probably gotten used to the fast diagonal or at least had to use it for four to five hours.

You move in the direction of the needle, which helps.

nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.

Please elaborate.

nifty meta-narrative like DS2 did, or at least not with such gravitas or panache.

Please elaborate.

Oh boy. The following are all spoilers. Although the Dark Souls series never makes these things explicit, discovering them is the marrow of DS1 and DS2. I recommend these games in part for their story, but I'm not going to turn a Motte comment into a CIA document. Read at your own risk.

Dark Souls is set in a kingdom named Lordran, and Dark Souls II in one named Drangleic. They're far away: "if the first game was set in the North Pole, the second would be in the South Pole". Both kingdoms are in a Cormac McCarthy The Road state of social collapse and imminent human extinction. All characters are slowly going mad as they lose hope. The vast majority are already mad ('hollow') and form the bulk of enemies you fight. The games hint, if you pay attention to their death sounds and what makes them respawn, that hollows are 'player characters', so to speak, who unplugged the controller, abandoned the game, and turned into mobs. And ALL player characters of Dark Souls do eventually turn into mobs. The games diegetically loop back to New Game+, so no one ever "beats" Dark Souls, strictly speaking. Whenever you stop, you stop. The "Age of Fire" ends, and the "Age of Dark" begins, though the in-game lore never explains what these terms mean.

All this is an analogy for nihilism in our garden-variety IRL life. Dark Souls games pose the question: Is fighting entropy worth it?

Do you remember when I said DS1 and DS2 are set in different places? I lied. Or Director Tomohiro Shibuya lied in that interview anyway. Once you actually play Dark Souls II, you'll find heaps of evidence that Drangleic is actually Lordran, except tens of thousands or even millions of years later. Most locations of the first game are all accessible, but buried underground, and so worn with age it's hard to tell what you're looking at. First game items can be found as artifacts: the Holy Grail equivalent of DS1, the Lordvessel, is in a trash heap in the basement of the starter village. Characters frequently remark on "countless kingdoms rising and falling on this very spot".

(Side tangent: 2014 was the first time I encountered NPCs in the real world, though I didn't have the vocabulary for them at the time. Debates raged online for the first year after DS2 on Drangleic vs Lordran. One side said "Here is a mountain of evidence Lordran is Drangleic", the other side said "An authority figure said Drangleic is not Lordran, and Trust The Experts, case closed". Fun times.)

Everything in DS2, even the story, is a cheap knockoff of DS1, being repeated over and over and over again. There is an Age of Fire running out, yielding to an Age of Dark. In one sense, DS2 is making another analogy about nihilism and entropy. In another sense, DS2 is talking about video game sequels.

Dark Souls 1 was a smash hit. What's more, beyond commercial success, it became perhaps the Most Admired Game Of All Time. What Ocarina of Time was in 2010, Dark Souls became in 2011. What's more, the premise and ending of DS1 made even the idea of a sequel artistic sacrilege. That hopeless, but nevertheless beautiful descent in the Heat Death of the Universe — and I won't even spoil the way DS1 punctuates that at the ending — did not brook a direct sequel. But because video game franchises, FromSoft did indeed have to make a sequel to a game about the End of the Universe.

This crass act is a bit like taking mom out of her coffin, mummifying her, and using her body as a carnival prop.

Bearer of the curse.
Long have I awaited one such as you, one who might shatter the shackles of fate.
One who can set me free. Bearer of the curse, it was my own manifestation that led you here.

Dark Souls II a game about being forced to go through the motions of something degrading that you hate. Like making a cynical sequel to a story that conclusively finished. Over the course of the game, you forget why you're even doing what you're doing, just like the ugly crone in the opening cinematic promised. Of course, it's not "just" about video game sequels, but that's part of it.

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

Now please explain how DS3 fits into that narrative framework.

It doesn't. Dark Souls meant and intended one thing at release. Then they had to make another game, so they brainstormed a sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the original. And then they made another sequel, which retroactively changed the meaning of the last two games, again. And so on and so on.

This is why "canon" arguments when it comes to stories that were not planned in advance are stupid. Obviously, in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook and the republic collapsed in distant history. Now, when I watch it again in 2025, should I view it through the hermeneutic that Darth Vader is actually Vice-President of the Empire and the Republic fell 19 years ago? Of course not. Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.

It's generally valuable to analyze movies or games on their own, in light of what preceded them at the time of release.

in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook

He's referred to as "Lord Vader", and recognized immediately by an imperial senator.

Later, he's on board the singular imperial superweapon in a top-level strategy meeting with less than a dozen participants. He does obey a command from one of the other participants, but the command is "stop choking that high-level general", everybody watches for a while first before anyone dares give the command, and Vader still faces no consequences for the incident; Tarkin even goes back to addressing him as "Lord Vader" immediately afterward. Out of context, the impression the movie gives is that Vader is basically the third in command of the Empire after Tarkin. With "it was only 30 years after WWII" context, Vader seems to be the head of the sort of personally-loyal private forces that fascist dictators develop alongside existing traditional armies, with perhaps less nominal power but with more real power.

and the republic collapsed in distant history

This was probably technically a retcon - there's some bit of dialogue in the novelization about multiple Emperors and their increasing corruption over time - but the bits needing to be retconned never made it into the movie.

In the movie, the Emperor dissolves the senate in the middle of the plot. Not long prior, Leia is invoking the Senate as a moral authority and the villains are taking it seriously enough as a practical authority that Vader decides it'll be easier to pretend Leia died than to admit she's imprisoned. This is perhaps compatible with the Senate being just an old Imperial-Rome-style facade that hasn't had real power in centuries, but from the film alone the retcon is the most parsimonious interpretation - they spell out right in dialogue that everyone still takes the senate seriously, and that the imperials get rid of it as soon as they think they've got the centralized military power to ignore any backlash.

Vice-President of the Empire

The phrase in the final draft of the script was "right hand of the Emperor". To be fair, this never made it into the movie, and could have ended up in the same wastebin as "Journal of the Whills" without too much hassle.

Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.

Star Wars, even if you only consider the first movie vs later films (and not the others or the shows or the entirely waste-binned Expanded Universe), has some seriously retconned ideas! These just aren't the best examples.

DS3 is when you say ‘fuck it, this is definitely the last one but we can at least do it well’, and you get back the reluctant Lords of Cinder (Miyazaki-san and the team who worked on Bloodborne) and squeeze out whatever is left for one last hurrah.

It’s the end of Dark Souls but you feel that something new will come along one day and that’s enough to lift your spirits a bit…

The First Flame quickly fades. Darkness will shortly settle. But one day, tiny flames will dance across the darkness. Like embers, linked by lords past. Ashen one, hearest thou my voice, still?

Here’s my take from a few bosses and couple upgrades in.

Overall, the game’s pretty fun and meaningfully more difficult than the first. I feel pretty confident saying this. I 100%ed (112%) the first game deathless, and it wasn’t that hard. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times and it’s been very easy to pick back up. On my first play through I even got several bosses on my first try. Silksong is not giving me trouble on the level of, say, Sekiro, but it’s not nearly so easy.

I think there are two elements driving this. First, the enemies all have truly obnoxious amounts of health. It feels like every fight takes about 1.5 to 2x what it would in the original. IMO this is a hard miss. The original had a challenge mode for forcing boss completion with perfect or near-perfect mechanics. Extending the time to complete a boss will force perfect mechanics but honestly gets quite boring. I’ve so far found it pretty straightforward to learn mechanics and perform for a few minutes, but it’s not the best experience.

The second part is that the movement in the game is way messier than the first. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The first game had exceptionally clean movement, which made it a tactile delight to play. Silksong’s movement is comparatively weird. My hands are well practiced in Hollow Knight movement, and I have a hard time adjusting to the different down attack movement. This is one change of many. So some of this challenge is just a learning curve. Back to Sekiro, I had to eat dirt at the first actual boss for something like an hour to get the main mechanics under control. That’s table stakes. I also suspect that using the non-basic attack options (“tools”) is much more important than in most games in the genre, but a serious miss here is that the degree of their importance is not obvious from menus… This means that the player is not quite encouraged to experiment. For all of these I expect that the game will shake out over time, and I do like the systems even if they do not come naturally.

Last thought. The areas of the game so far have been lackluster. Hollow Knight made it very clear how the pieces tied together into a unified whole. The starting area is literally a crossroads suggesting what was once present in that land. In Silksong you start in an iron foundry that is apparently still active. I don’t know what to make of that except that the devs wanted both a lava level and red ants, which I believe got cut from Hollow Knight. If this game is eight years in the making for cutting-room floor scraps from the original it leaves much to be desired. But I’ll wait on that judgment.

Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.

Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.

It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.

I’m playing and enjoying. My experience so far is that the game is hard, but not much harder than I remember HK being at first. I’m taking things slow, not letting myself get too worked up about setbacks (like repeatedly dying because of combat or platforming mistakes), and having a great time.

Noita is a fun roguelike with a ton of deep exploration component, and regularly invites you to jump in well over your head. Very much a game for masochists, though, even compared to Dark Souls: I think I was in the low hundreds of deaths before I 'finished' the game, every death puts you back at the start, and killing Kolmi is just the beginning. Downside's that it tends to be very frantic, compared to the slower-paced Souls combat that I like a lot more.

Noita was a frustrating bullet hell game to me.

I've put dozens of hours into Noita, but I still don't know how to resolve the tension in its game design: It both requires and punishes experimentation. If you find a mystery late in a run (whatever "late" happens to be for you, personally), then you're faced with a choice: Test it, and have a 50/50 chance of dying or learning something, or leave it alone forever. I ended up installing a resurrection mod to deal with it.

We'll see if the game opens up once I reach the citadel, or once I finally get a freaking health or damage upgrade.

HK was also annoying to play until you got the cloak and the claws.

UPD: okay, I got to the second boss (right past the cartographer) and I need a break. I'm not good at bosses, especially early game ones when you can't tailor your build to them. Being able to heal only if your spool is full is punishing.

HK was also annoying to play until you got the cloak and the claws.

I think you know what I mean now based on your update, but early Hollow Knight was annoying-ish in the sense of "You don't get a dash or double jump for several hours." Silksong is annoying-ish in the sense of "I've died five times in a row to this gauntlet of ant mobs that take eight hits to kill each"

I do enjoy how mobile even early game Hornet is though. (Tip: Keep holding C after dashing to sprint)

I haven't gotten to the ants yet, I am currently trying to beat the big club miniboss, but so far I haven't really been punished by the regular mobs. The firebombing fliers are annoying, but not enough to kill me. Bosses and minibosses dealing two masks per hit are the biggest hurdle, as you die in three hits and recover three masks per spool, so even if you time your heal well, you will die in two hits the next time.

I've never been good at dodging in platformer games and my favorite builds in games that let you tailor your build have always been facetanks, so you can see my frustration. At least in HK I could combine Stalwart Shell, Soul Eater, Quick Focus and not worry too much about missing a hit.

Regarding the big club miniboss: When I realized he can't jump if I lure him into the tunnel, the fight went by really fast. If this was intentionally set up by the devs, kudos.

Yeah, now I'm past him and fuck platforming. I have explored the available map and it looks like I have two options: to beat the white fencer lady (and hopefully get some powerup that will let me find another path forward) or to learn to airjump on the red pods. The only game I liked airjumping in was the second Ori, and only because it had bullet time.

UPD: okay, the fencer lady is down, time for the big lava fight, reminds me of the Giant in Dead Cells. At least DC gave you lots of invisibility frames when dodging.

That's too bad. I keep seeing these memes going around that all the remaining mainstream review sites that nobody has any respect for (IGN, PCGamer, etc) hated it. But I can't see that they've reviewed it at all, because there are no review copies. I'll probably grab it on Switch 2 at some point, unless community consensus decides that it's a completely bomb.

It's super cheap, so there's no reason not to buy a copy today. I'll be starting it in ten minutes.

I'm trying not to buy games anymore unless I'm going to play them right fucking now. The shelf of shame is just too weighty.

Currently my spare time is heavily invested in Mechwarrior 5 and it's new DLC.

I'm completely shameless in regard to unplayed games.

I have literally hundreds.

Question on my mind a lot is whether my children can, and will care to, inherit.

As I recall Steam officially does not let anyone inherit your account. But if you actually own your games because you bought them on GOG, that's what offline drm free installers are for.

Seems like a question of enforcement. How would they know I died?

Now I'm imagining my kids having to deal with this when my putative lifespan is getting so high, including future medical advancement, that it's no longer plausible. And I think, if I could take that deal I would, because it implies an acceptable future. Wonder how the monkey's paw would take effect though.

Also presumably at that point no one would care if they're pirating a 70 year old game anyway.

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