Destructoid Checkpoint: A Difficulty Question

Silksong is out, and it has been a lot of fun to dive into Pharloom and find all the terrifying beasts within. The game itself is smart and clever, and Team Cherry has taken natural points of growth and divergence from the design of the first one while also taking the time to add in some welcome surprises. 

There is one topic that has been somewhat dominating the discourse, however, and that is the difficulty. People are definitely feeling the heat in Silksong, and it can be a tough and unforgiving game. 

I have always enjoyed the “Is this game too difficult?” conversation wherever it has popped up, and I cannot resist the urge to dive into it this time. So, with my two cents in one hand, and my oar in the other, let’s talk about why it’s perfectly fine for some games to be hard.

This isn’t Dark Souls

One of the standout elements that people have gotten used to in modern gaming is what I like to call degradable difficulty. Even games that don’t contain mechanics that allow you to bypass some difficulty via grind will get easier over time due to the culture in which games now exist. 

No matter how hard a game is, if you wait a while, there will be a written guide or video tutorial to help you with what you need. If you are lost, they will show you the route. If you are struggling with a boss, they will teach you tactics and tells that will help you fell the beast. Indeed, from the moment a game launches, you can sit back and watch very talented gamers play it via your preferred streaming service. There is help out there to be found as the gaming community comes together to race to the credits sequence.

Not to age myself, but I grew up in a time when hard games were just hard. There wasn’t much you could do to help yourself unless you had a friend or cousin who could get you past the part you were stuck on. I’m talking about the late ‘80s and early ‘90s here. There might be a cheats section in a magazine, or a helpline to ring, but mostly the game was just hard. If it got too hard, you stopped playing it and started playing something else. 

There was also a degree of understanding that game design still had a lot of hangovers from the arcade days, when designed difficulty spikes would lay hopefuls low, forcing them to put more quarters in the slot or take their jilted dreams of digital dominance off to get a soggy slice of arcade pizza while the next player took their turn.

Do not mistake this as some sort of pining for better days, as gaming right now is the best it has ever been, for a myriad of reasons. One of those reasons is an almost feral competition between developers to design things that are hard to complete.

The Soulsborne games have emerged from the zeitgeist, rightfully or not, as a new benchmark of hard games, yet they are stuffed to the brim with ways to make things easier. You can summon other players, you can summon NPCs, and you can grind levels and equipment to become more powerful. You can respec your build if you messed up or just need more or less of something for one fight. 

Hollow Knight: Silksong offers none of that comfort. 

Pogo

The reason Silksong is so hard is that it is an ever-evolving skill check. You cannot simply get good at jumping. You must learn the art of the downward slash, known as the pogo, and intersperse that pogo with the various movement mechanics that can be found in the game. A dash, a wall grab, a harpoon drag, a float, a double jump. All very simple things, yet the challenge is putting them together in such a way that you get from A to B without losing health. Then B to C. Then C to D. 

You cannot tank a missed platform. You cannot summon someone to do the jump for you unless you live in shared accommodation. There is no stat to pump resources into that makes you jump a little higher or fall a little slower. You just fall and hit a spike, or lava, and you lose health and get reset to the start of the jump. Mess up too much, and you die. 

Dying sends you back to the last bench you sat at, and some of those benches can be a cruel distance away from the thing designed to make you fall and die. Guides don’t help because they can show you where to go, but not how to do the jumps. 

It really is just you and the difficulty. I know people are also talking about how tough boss fights are, but all boss fights in Silksong are really just more jumping puzzles. I would argue that there are sequences of jumps that are harder than many of the bosses in the game.

But, is that a bad thing? Why is a game being “too hard” such a big deal?

That sting? That’s your pride.

This is perhaps a little unfair, but I feel that some people want the fairness line to be something that they can achieve, but others can’t. When they find themselves in a group of people who cannot complete the task they want, then the task itself must contain some inherent unfairness. They can’t just be not good enough at a thing; of course, there are reasons as to why an otherwise skilled and talented person such as them cannot achieve their goals. 

For others, things are far simpler. They just want to see all of the game they paid for, and they want to be able to do that in the available time they have to play it. They are happy to play for a while, but very hard skill checks feel like bad design to them rather than a high challenge, and I suppose they have a point.

Remember, games are still very much a product and not art, so when you buy a game, you are not purchasing an emotional response to the game first and foremost, but the experience of it. If you are unable to experience all of the game, that is, in a way, a bad product. Imagine buying a book that, halfway through, required you to learn a new fictional language to be able to finish it. That’s great art, but it’s a bad product. 

This is where Dark Souls—and other works by the great Hidetaka Miyazaki—can often be cheeky, blending art and product into a meta-difficulty and sitting back and chuckling about it. The antagonists of Miyazaki’s art are rarely heroes, nor are the main characters of his games. You are, quite often, remarkable only in the normalcy of your mediocre efforts. 

NPCs will line up to tell you that they have seen your type before. Idiots who believe. Dummies who walked out into the world and got their head kicked in by a giant dragon, or a sentient apple tree, or an elder god born of horrors here-to-fore unseen.

It has been done, mate. In fact, it was done last Wednesday. You are not special. Even in the event of victory, many Soulsborne games end with little more than a restarting of the cycle. The entire world rebooted, back to Year Zero. 

The narrative will always contain that element of the weak falling away. Many so-called heroes try and fail, eventually losing the strength to keep going. Oftentimes, you will fight them on your own journey, the corrupting nature of their failure and weakness having turned them into what they once found vile and repugnant. 

This is beautifully echoed when people give up playing FromSoftware games. Their player characters are left behind, having reached a point in the game and gone no further. Maybe they furtively scratched messaging in chalk on cold cobble and blood-slicked flagstones, beseechments of help and intervention that never came.

Afterward, they take to social media, chalk still clasped in wizened fingers, leaving messages for all who stumble across them about how Miyazaki is a hack who doesn’t know game design. 

Most people, I have found, accept their defeat with grace. When a game proves to be too much, and when available measures to reduce difficulty are not enough, or simply do not exist at all, it’s fine to turn around and walk away.

The simple reality is that there will always be things that are just too hard to do, and it is right and fitting that the art of game design should include these things within its canon. We cannot always concern ourselves with games as a product. Being exposed endlessly to products makes us consumers; being exposed to at least a little bit of art among the drudgery makes us human.

That means, along the way, some of us will go hollow. It’s in the threads that weave our destiny, and the fire that lights the way. And I think that’s okay.

After all, it’s only a game.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Over on Destructoid, Scott Duwe is embracing the fate of all who long for a Bloodborne remake. - “And at this point, I give up. It seems like such a slam dunk for both From Software and Sony to come together on some sort of remaster, and it doesn’t even need to be one that’s on the level of Demon’s Souls as a full-fledged remake. A PC port alone would do massive numbers, especially with the success of other recent games by the dev like Elden Ring and the Dark Souls franchise.”

Andrej Barovic celebrated the launch of Borderlands 4 by playing the very first game in the series. - “I’m addicted to looter games, no matter what they are. Seeing colorful items drop left and right, their stats highlighted with green arrows indicating that they’re upgrades over what you already have, induces a high in me that I cannot even begin to describe. Offloading all the excess loot at a trader, getting better gear, and grinding for hours is all too satisfying, and Borderlands has plenty of it.”

And Adam Newell has been thinking about Pokémon Pokopia. - “Look. I am not here to judge anyone about their requests for Pokémon Pokopia, especially when we know so very little about the game, other than it being some kind of Animal Crossing-like game in a backwards Pokémon Mystery Dungeon-type universe. However, I think the internet has been pretty vocal about one particular thing they want in-game.”

And that’s it for this week. Don’t you dare go hollow!