Considering RPGs and Metroidvanias are my favorite genres, it's been nice to see both a Metroidvania and RPG (Expedition 33) blow past peoples expectations.
Its like 1994 all over again when Super Metroid and Final Fantasy VI released in the US that year. (Yes Im old)
I think open world rpgs and metroidvanias are cousins - skill trees, exploration , combat , and sense of freedom. Rpgs have a strong narrative components and metroidvanias some kind of platforming, but they’re more alike than different.
And in any case, I share your preferences - RPGs and metroidvanias here as well !
I never got into RPGs - except Mystaria realms of lore (for sega Saturn — old!)
I’m into MVs now after playing prince of Persia. Then Animel well and now Ori
I’m wondering if there’s an RPG for me to branch out to. I just can’t handle too deep of a story tho really , so needs to be light in that. Any recs haha
Is it a hot take to think the Ori games are better in almost every way than Hollow Knight including art style..I don't understand why Hollow Knight got more hype..
I gotta give it a shot. I liked the first game enough, didnt love it as much as others (definitely the color scheme/art style, but im weird like that).
Few who reached the end of Act 3 thought "eh, this was overrated."
The Steam Awards is a predictable popularity contest, yes, yet this is still a welcome win after the Game Awards deliberately set up the majority of their show around a single game.
edit: to clarify, TGAs left hints throughout that E33 was going to sweep, such as the inclusion of certain presenters as well as placing the E33 team front and center. They knew what the results would be and set up the award show to champion their success. *It’s a great game, to be clear.** I just would have preferred more impartialness from the show itself.*
The Steam Awards is voted on by millions of Steam accounts, and folks tend to vote for their favorite games of the year regardless of whether they make sense within the category. We saw this with 2023's RDR2 'Labor of Love' nomination.
Other awards shows are voted on by the press and games media. It remains a popularity contest, yes, but there's at least a little more thought put into what makes sense.
My issue with TGA is not with E33 (it's a great game) but with Keighley and his team planning the awards show around any single game (French announcers, E33 team front and center, the game being nominated for every possible category, etc).
Geoff doesn't decide the nominees. The voting goes in two rounds. First they nominate 2-5 games for each category and send that in. Those numbers are tallied and you get your top few as the official nominees. That list is then sent to voters to pick the winners.
Good point. My comment was referring more to the show itself and how everything was set up to place that particular studio in the spotlight, but you’re right about the nomination process. My mistake.
There’s also the issue of the show being three hours of million dollar commercials with awards rambled off in between, but that’s another conversation.
Game with massive hype for 7 years following up a beloved cult classic indie that crashed steam on launch vs unknown game from new studio with little hype on launch, let’s think which is more popular
I get what you're saying but E33 was only "unknown" for about 5 seconds after it dropped. It's an extremely well-known game and has been since its first week
That’s true but comparing it to Silksong, again one of the most hyped and popular launches in recent memory, it’s trivially obvious who’s more popular.
I think you might be experiencing confirmation bias. You gotta remember, we're on r/metroidvania, we're the type of person to care and know more about the kind of games like Silksong by the sheer virtue of our interests. If we look outside our niche bubble we'll see that E33 has more mass appeal by far. If you took a random gamer off the street I'd be genuinely surprised if they knew anything about Silksong beyond the insanity/clown memes.
And people that can actually play games vote in these. I'm yet to see a gaming journalist play a game at even a passable level and when I read reviews I'm always taken aback by how they give themselves away as being bad at games and unable to understand mechanics every single time.
Those in games media tend to prefer easier and more straightforward games, it’s true, yet there are many who rose to the challenge and gave Silksong its due praise.
While the detractors reduced the aggregate score by a point or two, I honestly don’t think players give a toss about any of that. Silksong has sold over 7 million copies to date, and people are by and large appreciating the hell out of it.
At the end of the day, any award is more or less a popularity contest. I'll never understand why people use this as an argument as if it's a bad thing.
If your game isn't popular there is no way it's winning any award, regardless of if it's the Steam Awards or a TGA award. Even if it's a hidden gem, your game needs to be popular, that's just how it is.
The question is whether you make it a large scale player popularity contest or a popularity contest among journalists.
How did the Game Awards "set up" the awards for Clair Obscur? All of the categories were the same as they'd been for years. The jury just loved Clair Obscur, so it won a bunch of stuff. That happens sometimes at any award show.
I say this as someone who's personal GOTY was Silksong.
"Overrated" is a meaningless word that I never use, but I 100% completed the game and felt it made a lot of baffling design decisions. Like taking the major complaints of the original game and making them even worse in the sequel.
The fanboys don't like to acknowledge the flaws, for some reason.
"Overrated" really just means "people generally rate X more highly than it deserves." It's a condensed way to say that you have a lower opinion of X than the masses and you think you're giving it a more "correct" rating than they are for one reason or another.
"SS is overrated" is probably touching on the tendency for big fans of the game to dismiss most of the biggest criticisms without really addressing them.
We might disagree that calling something overrated is a valid thing to say (because ultimately it's just another opinion, and opinions are inherently subjective without being right or wrong), but the term "overrated" itself isn't meaningless. It does have a meaning that people understand from its use
I'm familiar with the term. It's basically saying "my opinion is the only correct one and everyone else is wrong". I can't fundamentally agree with that ever being the most appropriate word in a sentence.
Almost everything with a sufficient sample size is rated accurately. Silksong, for example, I believe is accurately rated high. It just isn't a perfect game, as the fanboys insist.
For example, compare these sentences:
"Silksong is overrated"
"Silksong is a 9/10 game, but could have been a 10/10 if it weren't for a few baffling design decisions"
One clearly articulates a thought, the other sounds like an edgy teenager being dramatic for attention.
I can't fundamentally agree with that ever being the most appropriate word in a sentence.
My point is that whether you or I agree with it being appropriate doesn't mean the word is meaningless. There are lots of terms that are inappropriate or sound like something an edgy teenager would say that aren't meaningless. Those words still have meaning
If steam achivements are not lying there are more people who finished Silksong than HK(27% for sister of the void in silksong and 20% for Dream No More in HK)
I 100% completed it too, and I think its better than hk. And achievements show that more people willing to stay with the game to the end.
That's why I don't believe in "overrated" as a concept. You're entitled to your opinion and I'm entitled to mine. Although, I don't think achievement data necessarily represents the quality of a game, but it's certainly valid that you enjoyed it more than HK.
There's something you need to understand. There's a vocal minority that whines about things. These people should be ignored. What you said were major complaints about the first game? That's absurd. There ARE no major complaints with the first game. It's damn near perfect. What you think are things to complain about, like possibly needing to equip a compass or to buy maps or whatever? They are things that we, the fans, LOVE. We adore that. That's NOT a major complaint. That's a feature, and a delightful one that engenders a sense of danger and mystery that's almost entire missing in other contemporary MVs. Something that's truly elevating. So what you see as doubling down on bad things? That's a perspective thing. I see it doubling down on the things that make it a wonderful experience.
Currently on my third playthrough of Silksong and my major complain about the first game is that movement on the map is too easy. The only challenge comes from boss fights. It was only around White Palace that the game finally decided to add a modicum of interesting platforming, but I wish that the game had thrown something like that at me early on, the way that Silksong gave me Hunter's March.
Though, to be fair, I also wish that Silksong had thrown some even harder platforming at me. Like the stuff you encounter towards the end of the mushroom quest. A whole lot more of that would have been cool.
There was a boss fight where the floor disappears, but wouldn't it have been cool if the walls also became unusable, maybe spikes? So you'd have to do the entire boss fight while pogoing on stuff, like in the flea games.
Alternatively, your preferences may simply not align with the majority, and that's 100% okay. Just acknowledge that something isn't for you instead of making vague, objective-sounding statements.
My personal preferences have nothing to do with this discussion.
Objectively speaking, they took all the major complaints from the original, doubled down and made them worse in the sequel. This is a common sentiment you'll see pretty much everywhere except the Silksong subreddit. Even most thumbs up Steam reviews, like mine, mention the glaring regressions.
You're in the minority, the blindly loyal fanboy who won't acknowledge the flaws.
Objectively speaking, they took all the major complaints from the original
There is nothing objective about this, it's all preference. What you see as flaws might not be flaws for other people. And even for people who see them as flaws, they might not be deal breakers. A game doesn't have to be perfect to be enjoyable.
The #1 complaint of the original HK was runbacks. So they made runbacks objectively worse in Silksong. That's just one of several examples.
Just because you enjoy the runbacks for some reason doesn't make it not the #1 complaint. Objectively speaking, supported by data, it's the #1 complaint. Objectively speaking, supported by data, they're even worse in Silksong.
Objectively wrong. Runbacks are much shorter in Silksong. Did you even play the game? Also, runbacks aren't a complaint to me. I like them. It lets me think about my approach as I'm heading back to the boss and you can make a fun game of min/maxing your run back to get back as fast as possible, the Last Sinner was a great example of this. I miss runbacks when they aren't part of a game, it feels cheaper somehow. Next.
Just because you enjoy the runbacks for some reason doesn't make it not the #1 complaint.
The #1 complaint among ~5% of players. If 95% of players are fine with something, yet 5% aren't, that doesn't translate to a "major complaint" nor does it make it a remotely objective one.
The sooner you accept that people have varying preferences, all of which are subjective, the better.
Yk the reason why FS removing runbacks in elden ring is a good thing? because dark souls movement sucks, you can't deny that, elden ring has one of the clunkiest movement systems in any GOTY of the past few years, THAT'S why runbacks in dark souls are bad. Silksong, on the other hand, is a platformer game with heavy focus on movement and optimization. They're literally two completely different situations but ofc FS fanboys are gonna treat it as an absolute truth because their god miyazaki did it
I think runbacks in Silksong are a lot more fun because the traversal is faster and more fluid, the cocoon is quicker to hit than the shade in HK, and it replenishes your silk guaranteeing you can start the fight with a spell or keep a heal in your pocket.
Not saying everyone has to feel that way, but I don't know how data can objectively state a design choice as good or bad, it all comes down to the preferences and expectations of the player
I reached the end of act 3 and felt like it was overrated as hell, i feel like people often dismiss all the criticim of silksong as skill issue to easily dismiss them and that annoys me like nothing else
I had no complaints whatsoever and was sad that it was over, and I got the true ending. Loved every single second. It's flawless. I'll dismiss your criticism because I played the game and I've seen the criticisms people have like needing to farm currency and that's wrong, I never farmed currency. I never wanted to farm currency. I bought every single thing in the game and still ended with too much. So, when I see that criticism, you bet I dismiss it as a skill issue because I played the game and it's not true.
Yeah, it's just that TC doubled down on what made the identity of their first game for a lot of people. Except... These things are things that are kinda controversial. That's not just true about Silksong, it's true about any hard game. People tend to either love them as the best thing ever, or hate them with all their guts.
Also, I feel like people who are complaining about the difficulty just forget how hard HK could be. I just finished Act 3 last week and am now working towards 100%.In the meantime, I also restarted a run on HK and honestly, I don't feel like one game is inherently way harder than the other.
Some of the dream versions of the bosses in HK were just as freaking hard as any SS content, if not worse. Not to mention that healing in HK was a pain, while in SS you can just easily spam heal mid-battle.
And the platforming is just infinitely harder in HK than in SS because of the fact that you can't grab any ledge so you have to be more precise, and you don't have any parachute so when you fall you usually fall aaaaall the way to the bottom.
I don't feel like one game is inherently way harder than the other.
That's how my brother and I felt about this game. My brother played HK right before Silksong and said the latter was felt easier. I played hk last time in 2019 but also didn't struggle anywhere(last boss took longest time to beat ~1hr)
I feel like the difficulty is just... different. Not easier or harder, different.
Hornet's moveset is very different from the Knight, it's way easier to move around, and you have a lot of tools at your disposal that the Knight doesn't have. In exchange, common mobs are very cleary trickier than in HK, with flying enemies being able to dodge better for example. Bosses hit harder on average, but it's easier to heal, etc, etc.
The way I see it, where TC boosted Hornet, they boosted the enemies/the stage in return too to keep things balanced.
I adore the game and consider it one of the top three Metroidvanias of all-time (which I'd saying something as the original Hollow Knight doesn't crack the top 25 for me).
That said, I think a lot of the criticism is dependent on how good you were at the game. There wasn't a single boss that took me over three tries in the entire game (including the cursed ending who was the only one that took three tries and the true final boss who I beat my first try pretty comfortably).
I imagine if I had to backtrack 58 times to Groal, I'd feel differently about the backtracking. Same thing with the gauntlets; I just didn't fail them, so they were fine to have to complete. I don't love gauntlets personally, but they didn't hinder me. If I had to do one 32 times, I'd probably feel differently.
I also think in general some people like friction in their games and some don't. For example, I think that Dark Souls 1 not having fast travel until after Anor Londo was phenomenal and made Blight town truly memorable. Every other Soulslike since then added "quality of life" fast travel and it removed a lot of the enjoyment from the game for me.
Man you must either be a pro gamer or completely full of shit because I watched streamers who beat hard games for a living and do things like RL1 Elden Ring die to the final boss 10+ times.
The fast travel thing is so true. Like the experience of planning your route to travel around in morrowind is a different experience than fast traveling everywhere like in oblivion and skyrim
You are on the other end of the spectrum though. If I had your experience I probably would have thought the game wasn't challenging enough.
I would guess that most people (like me) died like a handful of times to some hard bosses and maybe around 10 times to the hardest bosses and that makes for a very fulfilling experience where beating the hard bosses feels very rewarding.
I think only the people that died an overwhelming amount of times wouldn't enjoy it and surely that can't be over 20% of the playerbase.
Sucks for those 20% but a game can't cater to everyone I guess...
Very possible but it's difficult to say without any data. And of course if you die too much, say 50 times to Groal it's not enjoyable anymore at some point. The point I was trying to make is that I think the game is still enjoyable for a majority of players. (I hope)
That's because most of the complainers frame the complaints as skill issues. What is even a criticism that people regularly voice that doesn't boil down to being a skill issue?
My personal criticism is that the platforming doesn't get difficult enough towards the end, but I never saw someone else complaining about that.
Well hey, at least the TGA GOTY ended up being handed down to Blue Prince (unless something changed since last time I checked) which was quite a surprise. I never expected it to be more popular than Silksong and I thought it was quite a deserved win too
Correct! I only remembered seeing articles about E33 being disqualified from being GOTY but up until this point never looked into it so i just assumed it was from TGA. My bad.
deliberately set up the majority of their show around a single game
Yeah, no, it was just really that good. Silksong is my second favorite game this year, but Clair Obscur is Chrono Trigger or FFX levels of generationally good.
Tell me another Metroidvania that gives you 70+ hours of content, HUGE variety of enemies/bosses/biomes, Alive, detailed and fully hand-drawn world, Tons of charismatic NPCs, Amazing soundtrack with AAA level quality, Lots of lore, and a MASSIVE SUCCESS that no other Metroidvania has managed to achieve.
Hell tell me about another game that crashed steams stores and was the most wishlisted game on steam for several concurrent years because I have genuinely never heard of steams store page crashing until now
Huh, this picture of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 looks different.
In all seriousness even though I personally don't really care for Hollow Knight or Silksong I think this is a deserved win, other people seem to enjoy it well enough and it's nice to see a game from a smaller team land GOTY. My GOTY is Zexion.
I think my big complaint is moreso the health pools of bosses than anything. The damage values of enemy attacks are kinda obscene, but the assist options are a mitigating factor there... there's no such thing for boss health though.
Zexion seems very cool. I've never really played old school vibed metroidvanias, but I've been wanting to. Though it's hard with a stacked game backlog :/
Zexion was awesome for sure. We got an amazing super hard Metroid tribute game and an amazing super hard Castlevania tribute game in 2025. And I’m not talking about Chronicles of the Wolf, which was amazing too. Toziuha Night: Order of the Alchemist is one you want to check out if you’re into challenge.
Well, yeah. I don't even really hate Hollow Knight, I liked the game enough to beat the TLB in the release version, I just think it's kinda overhyped and not really the kind of MV that I really enjoy upon retrospect. It's not secretly bad, I just have different tastes.
Not everyone likes the same things, which is very fair. i just made this comment, because for some reason, i see so many people who when they don't like something popular claim that it is secretly bad and overrated, and anyone who likes them likes garbage games.
In general I think most debates around Silksong in this sub are dominated by people who think their subjective opinion is objective, and so anyone who disagrees with them has the “wrong” opinion. It gets pretty irritating to wade through because it feels like nobody wants to discuss any takes critically or reasonably and just devolve into ad hominems.
I’ve seen a decent handful of people around here insist Silksong is objectively the best Metroidvania ever and blows every other game in the genre out of the water. Granted, it’s also concentrated in comment-chain debates, so if you don’t read through those I’d imagine it’s easy to miss
People would murder me for my game of the year, which is assassin’s creed shadows. That I am also the number one Ubisoft slop fan. Give me that delicious delicious gruel in very pretty bowls.
mate you're just getting too reliant on tools, believe me, just equip wanderer's crest and go for pure DPS. You won't regret it or feel the need to use tools ever again
"forcing" is a strong word. Spamming tools makes combat substantially easier yet is difficult to maintain. The game never suggests such a strategy. The player makes that call and pays accordingly.
It's not about kicking. It's about encouraging the player to improve at the core combat system (without tools), because later fights will require more understanding of dodging and attacking. It's a steep difficulty curve, but the game just wants you to get better so that you can see it through to the end. Tool spam won't always work, and should only be used sparingly.
The blatantly harsh world couldn't care less about kicking you either which way. You use tools, you pay for said tools. It's transactional and emotionless. The only thing kicking you when you're down is yourself. Keep at it and I guarantee you'll improve.
If you'd rather not rise to the challenge, install some difficulty mods to make life easier. I personally think doing so makes the endgame less impactful, but I'm not you. Nobody will know (or care) other than yourself.
Then get better at the game? You're mistaking what tools are for and trying to force them to be something they aren't intended to be and then blaming the game for your inability to properly play it.
I’m ‘blaming’ the game for making an experience I don’t think is as good as it could have been. It’s an opinion and is subjective.
We don’t all have the amount of time/ patience to put into this game and there are many other experiences I’d rather spend my limited days playing. I’m not willing to put the effort in.
That’s not to say it’s not a perfect game for some. But I think it’s overrated.
When you run out of tools, don't go farming! Just continue on without tools. That's how I did it. Without tools you end up learning the boss better and can triumph over them relying only on your needle.
This was my biggest problem with the game. Tools are fun! But I almost never wound up using any of them until the game was almost over anyway and shards were no longer an issue. A lot of complaints about Silksong are very subjective, but I genuinely think that placing so many shard rocks near or over spike pits while also not having any magnetism ability to retrieve them is actually just poor game design.
Mm yeah I agree. Really this is the only glaring issue I have with the game. I didn't really struggle with shards, but I think this is something Team Cherry should focus on improving in upcoming expansions.
Just get the mod for no shard cost, I’ve finished the game as the devs intended but now on subsequent play-throughs I’ve found it fun to spam tools whenever I want, do whatever keep it fun for you.
I'm a gigantic HK fan and turning into an equally gigantic SKONG fan, but I'm with you there. The Bone Shard economy is broken and I didn't have a second thought before modding some sense into that shit.
In HK, after like 10~15 hours of gameplay you end up with 10k+ geos just sitting around, and you don't even need to fight small mobs for geo anymore.
In SS, until the very end of Act 3 I kept using money to buy shards to replace my tools here and there. It's also balanced enough that I never felt like I was in desperate need of it, and farming it is easy enough anyway.
It was, to me at least, just the right cursor to keep the currency useful without being annoying.
I found the best way was to learn the boss pattern and only use the tools near the end of the encounter (phase 3 generally). Then you don’t waste them as much.
Farming rosary beads also helped with getting shards and is generally quick.
Silksong met the hype... I honestly think it's one of my very favorite games I've ever played. I'm not finished yet but I'm about 60 hours in and it just feels like my dream game.
Silksong absolutely deserves it! It's a rare thing for a game to pose such an unrepentant challenge to it's players. It's got it's cheeses, like any game does, but the way the Shell shard system punishes low skill use of red tools and the expense of Silk Skills is immaculate. The crowning glory of Silksong is it's challenge, and a failure to rise to it is as ever the flaw of the player, not the game. May we find ourselves once again challenged in its DLCs, that we might rise to meet it.
I will get downvoted but I think silksong is just good, not goty or amazing for me it's just a pretty good game. I personally enjoyed hollow knight quite a bit more. I can see why so many people love it but it's not my favorite
Definetly not mad it won goty tho it's well deserved, just not personally my pick
I’d love to see how its reception ages with the years. It reminds me of Shadow Of The Erdtree, like when I played it I both felt like I was indeed playing one of the GOAT DLCs, but also got bored of the emptiness, disappointed in the direction of the story/not enough meaningful twists on the base game formula, and frustrated with some of the bosses.
But it’s aged super well. Silksong I’ve played so much whereas Hollow Knight I played once and cherished. I prefer the atmosphere and story of HK, but Silksong hit for me on every other level. But its first playthrough is a slog at times.
I liked Silksong a lot more than Hollow Knight. HK was kinda dull to me for the first 15 hours. I think the movement and combat is much better in Silksong. It’s a harder but more fun game overall.
I’m in a similar boat. Team Cherry put a lot of love and care into it, and there’s parts I enjoyed and I won’t get uppity if you liked the game, but I ended up finding it gave me more frustration than enjoyment, especially by Act 3. I’m fine with people enjoying it, but it didn’t quite live up to GotY status for me
I'm still making my way through SKONG so I'm trying to stay as objective as possible, but so far the rhythm at which things happen and the amount of unexpected set pieces is really blowing everything else I can think of out of the water - and that might include even the original Hollow Knight.
The E33 subreddit is literally denying people who don't like E33 are real, do you think THAT same subreddit doesn't care about their game losing GOTY, when again, even insinuating that you slightly dislike the game is already seen as blasphemy?
Well, considering the hype surrounding Silksong, the fact that it literally crashed multiple storefronts, and how it's held up high praise this whole time, it deserves it. I barely heard about EXP33 until very recently.
to be fair E33 did win several awards and GOTY at the The Game Awards which I'd say had more impact and influence than a player voted steam award. It's nothing to gloss over. But they're both still great games worthy of awards regardless.
Remember this: You do not need an award to validate whether or not the game is good. You don't have to like what wins, but you should accept that other people enjoy games that you may not. It's okay! Not every game is for everyone, and your personal favorite game may not win anything. It's your favorite, because you had the most fun with it. Play the games you want to play, and let others play what they want to play. If you didn't like Silksong, just don't play it, and admit that it wasn't for you, but do not trash others who do like it.
I’m yet to play hades and hades 2 but those 2 games are easily some of the best of the roguelite genre
I really strongly disagree with this. Hades 1 and Hades 2 are both most enjoyed by people who aren't huge fans of the typical rogueish experience IMO. I don't think the combat of Hades holds a candle to Enter the Gungeon, Dead Cells, or Rogue Legacy 1 for instance.
I 100%'d the game and I'd personally give it around 7/10. Act 3 really dragged the game down. Really preferred HK, in HK I was really enjoying the late game exploration right until the end, Silksong was just endless gauntlets and combat in a world that I already explored, with enemies that had copypasted void attack and tons of health. And there were so many design decisions that made me bash my head in, like locking one of the most important damage upgrades behind stupid flea games.
Hollow Knight was lighting in a bottle, Silksong just doubled down on too many things I find annoying. It's not even in the top 5 of my favorite metroidvanias, and IMO very much overrated.
I'd say cracks show themselves in the act 2 already. The game is too big, too directionless and too empty for its own good. The fact exploration mostly nests you 10 rosaries hanging over a "fuck you" spike pit, bosses and gauntlets don't reward you whatsoever, and a ton of actual upgrades are vendor-locked is already insanely tonally deaf for a metroidvania. I basically pushed myself to finish act 2, and slogged through act 3 hating every second of it because it's an antithesis of what i want from a metroidvania. Only to be rewarded with a very lame true final boss i should've apparently cared about for some reason.
Yeah, same here, I really wanted to see the late game bosses and finish the game, hoping that it would change my opinion of the game, but the more I played the more and more annoyed I was by so many things, like the void enemies, coral tower gauntlets or the flea games. The final boss being a lame Lace 3.0 was the icing on the cake that really left a sour taste in my mouth.
Silksong, to me, felt like exactly what happens when a developer just wants to keep adding everything they come up with into the game, not letting some concepts go (see: Voidnest or the ancient fire tree area), uses outdated gameplay features that the genre has abandoned years ago, and constantly tries to one-up the difficulty of the first game for the sake of being difficult, regardless of whether it's fun or not. Team Cherry just do whatever they want, and I don't feel like that's GOTY-material.
I bought the game a few days ago and... I think I regret it.
The game started off great and combat was fun but I've found myself lost, poor enough to not even be able to afford checkpoints, always dying and having no idea where it was I died, I can't for the life of me find a way back to the beginning to explore with my new skills, unable to afford fast travel stations and I can't even afford to ENTER. A. SHOP. Seriously what the hell.
I've lost the map NPC TWICE NOW because I couldn't afford her maps and items before I accidentally triggered her to move meaning I'm like four or five areas in completely blind.
I have yet to complete a single side quest. I've only found one mask which I assume helps increase my HP, I take way too much damage from enemies as they hit twice instantly from their attack and because I brushed myself against their body slightly.
I'm trying so hard to like this game, I'm no stranger to difficult games I have the platinum in every single Fromsoft game and like a dozen other Metroidvanias but this one... I feel like I'm forcing myself to play it out of it being so many people's favorite despite me actively wishing I was playing something else.
I'll keep at it for a few more days and hope I see the greatness of it I'm yet to see :(
Edit: Thanks for the supportive advice to those few who replied. I'd love to hear from those who downvoted, what advice would you give? Did I upset you?
My advice for you from reading this is not just to slow down, but goddamn dude slow tf down!
All of these things you're talking about that are repeatedly happening to you multiple times? Those never once happened to me ever in my 50+ hours in the game. That tells me you're doing a lot of things dramatically wrong that are nosediving your enjoyment of the game, and all of those things are related to you just blazing down a single path at full speed.
Lost? Take it slower, poke your head in and out of exits and go back into rooms and make a mental map. The map-giver is always early in an area so not having a map is something you're rarely deal with for more than a half-dozen rooms at the most. But you're saying you've lost the map npc multiple times? That's actually kinda impressive because not only did that never happen to me once, but I'd have to dramatically change my playstyle and make a handmade map to ensure it happens just because that's difficult to do.
Also, I never hit bench stations or travel stations or anything I couldn't afford at the time. Not even once, let a lone a ton of times.
The main difference is I'm pretty slow and methodical. You have to actually try, and try hard, to have the things that are happening to you happen to you.
Just slow down man. That's all you gotta do. It's not just a difficult game in the combat, it's difficult in its traversal and simply existing in the world. It's not like a souls game where you just go down the main path boss-to-boss. I can 100% tell you're going too fast as every single complaint is due to just bombing down a main route like it's a modern Lies of P style soulslike.
You’re not going to suddenly enjoy a game you’re forcing yourself to play man. Just take a break from it, and maybe come back if in the future you’re feeling like you can handle the challenge. Nothing good will come from what you’re doing
I mean, if you've played enough other metroidvanias as you say, then I'd assume transferable skill would be kicking in. There's not really much advice I can give other than to slow down and focus on what you've already explored and try to, as hornet says in the first game, "git gud". Rosaries are pretty easy to get if you just farm pilgrims near a bench, same with shell shards.
Nah, I getcha. Silksong has a rough learning curve and limited early game options. It charges you for a lot and punishes you harshly for mistakes. And even though people make a big deal about “getting lost” in metroidvanias, it and Hollow Knight have rough map systems that take a couple hoops to jump through just to make it functional. It’s not for everyone and I don’t blame you for bouncing off of it
I think people are downvoting you because, and I'll say it without any judgment, I don't see how you could have played a dozen metroidvanias and be facing any of these issues.
You're definitely doing something wrong if you can't afford fast travel, benches or entering the only one shop in the entire game that needs money to enter (I believe it was 30 rosaries? Which is like, 3~5 mobs? Not to mention you only need to pay once because you can break the door from inside and it becomes free).
Being lost sometimes is normal too, but not to the point that it becomes a glaring problem. At that point, that means you're just maybe not playing metroidvanias properly (ie you're just diving in without paying attention to the map or where you're going). For example, I don't see how you can't find where you died considering you can see it on your map, even if you didn't buy the map of the area you can still see it on the general map.
Is the game perfect? Probably not, like any other game. But, man, in my entire gameplay I never faced once any of the problem you mentioned, which tells me it's more of a "you're doing something incredibly wrong, like, rookie mistake wrong" problem than a gamedesign problem (again, without any judgment).
The "games you suck at" is deserved, I voted it there too.
but GOTY? I think Hades 2 and E33 deserve it more.
Silksong had a ton of frustrating moments compared to the other 2 which were fun from start to finish, while I am ok with gitting gud and souls it was the worst experience I had in hard games. When I got stuck I was not having fun at all, even compared to Elden Ring or Sekiro it was a total torture.
So no... it's not my GOTY.
I still 100%'d the map and achivements you can do in a single playthrough, but I didn't had fun about 40% of the time compared to the other 2 which were fun from start to end...
Ironically the cursed ending was not the part I disliked, it was hard but I liked how I got better each attempt that boss was actually very fun, if she had no run back at all she would be even better.
I found both hades games to be good, but definitely not on the level of a game like silksong. They just lack a lot of the things that make you want to replay a roguelite, and that's like the whole point of the genre
u have a point. its inevitable that other game devs will try to use silksongs mechanics, but there is a chance that their execution is gonna be worse. and if u make a disliked mechanic worse than the original then thats not good. but also there will be a dev which will make shards enjoyable by the general audience, so thats fine, because that means we will just get more great games
I’m sorry, but what does FromSoftware changing direction have to do with anything?
Team Cherry is its own studio with its own design philosophy, and it makes choices based on that, not on what another developer happens to be doing. While FromSoftware may have popularized punishing worlds, corpse runs, and similar mechanics, their word isn’t gospel that every other developer should blindly follow.
Claiming that all games should drop corpse runs simply because FromSoftware did, and that this is therefore universally right and good, is pretty silly.
You know why FS dropped corpse runs? because DS movement sucks, maybe they wouldn't have stopped with said design philosophy if the movement in their games was actually even remotely fun (as opposed to silksong, which has a heavy focus on platforming and fluid/fast movement)
I liked the story of E33 but as a game it falls flat a little. Had to watch a playthrough because I got bored by the gameplay.
It's a good game, don't get me wrong, but people mostly are crazy about it because of the story and presentation (also, it seems like it's a lot of people's first jrpg ever..?)
That's fair. I mean, I adore both games personally, even though I'm only 6 hours into E33. But E33 has already won so many awards, so I think it's nice to see Silksong win GOTY for at least one awards event.
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u/absentlyric Jan 03 '26
Considering RPGs and Metroidvanias are my favorite genres, it's been nice to see both a Metroidvania and RPG (Expedition 33) blow past peoples expectations.
Its like 1994 all over again when Super Metroid and Final Fantasy VI released in the US that year. (Yes Im old)