Last week I was: Reviewing Borderlands 4, a game I like very much despite its many warts.
There's been a healthy heaping of difficulty discourse surrounding Silksong, and with good reason. This game's tough as nails. I just wrapped up my 60-hour playthrough of all three acts, and I did not walk out of Pharloom with the same thumbs I started my journey with.
I did almost all the mementos (I didn't bother with the Hunting Journal; I'm here to hit stuff, not collect things), got all the fleas, and alt+F4'd out of petty spite while trying to beat Seth's score in Flea Dodge. Managed it later, though. Shudder. Never again.
Silksong isn't just hard, though. It's actively mean-spirited at times. I've managed to write not one, not two, but three bench-based PSAs about hidden resting spots in terrible areas. At times, the game actively goes "ner-ner" and gives you a wedgie for daring to play; It hits you over the head with an Acme frying pan; It paints a tunnel on the side of the cliff, watches you splat into it, and then nicks your wallet while you're twitching on the ground.
Pharloom has so many rakes for you to step on. What's that, headbump into a wall while doing the Courier's Rasher wish? Should've looked where you're going, bozo. Ran out of rosaries and can't afford the bench? Should've stringed them up, idiot, go farm more. Oh, you healed in the wrong spot? Say bye-bye to your silk, chump.
And you know what? Maybe we've outgrown boss runbacks, and I've sure done my fair share of whining, but I'm kinda glad it's this way. I'd still like the game (as I would most games) to have a proper easy mode for accessibility's sake, especially since it's a step up from the prior entry, and some players might just be here for the vibes. Contrary to what some punters might have you believe, difficulty options—or just accessibility settings—hurt no-one.
But after saving Pharloom, I sat there and asked myself if the journey would've been as memorable without the many thorns on the stem of its rose. And my answer is a solid no, it wouldn't have.
A wicked web
Fair disclaimer: I'm a bit of a masochist soulslike enjoyer freak, and in recent years I've slowly been noticing (shudder) compromises leaking into my games. Elden Ring is perhaps the most compromise-filled souls game you could imagine—don't want to struggle? Slap on a mimic tear and go to town. Boss hard? Go somewhere else.
I don't have a problem with these from any critical standpoint, to be clear—they're just difficulty options with extra steps—but they're not for me. I don't use them because I like to chew my meat. Or because I have an unhealthy relationship with pain, but that's between me and my therapist.
Alright, maybe Promised Consort Radahn is an overwhelming and unassailable light-show full of wonky hitboxes and aggressively punishing attacks. But I don't want to think about him any more than I have to—and even then, actually getting to the guy isn't the hard part. It's fighting him that's a headache.
Generally, though, there's been an overall easing-up on the more punishing bits of "hard" games—what some might even call "artificial difficulty". Boss runbacks are the most obvious example, but FromSoftware games (and many of the Soulslikes in their footsteps) are now engineered to be difficult, but fair.
Silksong is mostly fair, and it shares its "go explore if you're stuck" mechanics with Elden Ring, but it's far more reserved in the options it gives to the player. Also, it'll sometimes just saddle you with just some absolute horseshit.
Groal the Great's perhaps the biggest example: An enemy gauntlet, next to an arduous, health-sapping boss runback full of maggots that can stop you from healing. An absolute sadistic knife-twist of an ordeal. Terrible, terrible, awful. Not inherently bad design, but arguably hostile to your enjoyment. Bilewater hates you. It hates you so bad.
But had Team Cherry relented and put an extra bench there, would I have discovered the 'just embrace the worms' tactic? Would I be able to do the Bilewater runback in my sleep? Would I have felt that wave of relief after trouncing Goral with a thousand throwing knives? I don't think I would've done any of that.
Instead, I would've done what I do in every soulslike with a comfy checkpoint right outside the boss door: Calmly rinsed the guy by running my head into him 10-15 times, then moved on with my life.
Furthermore, as I played, these utterly baffling decisions kinda started to charm me. I might've just been losing my mind—succumbing to Silksanity—but the randomly-applied cruelty of Pharloom, the trapped or hidden benches, the obscured shortcuts, the goddamn maggot pools? It all contributed to the game's texture in a way I'm struggling to describe without sounding utterly pretentious.
It helps that I can point to story reasons why things are that way—the bench in Hunter's March is trapped because the ants would trap it. Bilewater is awful because it's a poison swamp. You don't get many rosaries until Act 2 because the Citadel's been hoarding them all.
There's justifications for all of it—justifications that Silksong refuses to back down from just because it might make for a slightly bumpier playthrough, and for that, Silksong stole both my heart as well as several years off my life via elevated blood pressure.
There's justifications for all of it—justifications that Silksong refuses to back down from."
I wouldn't quite say the game was more enjoyable because it's cruel. Heck, I'm hesitant to say it was even really better. But it made Silksong stick with me, and it even made me nostalgic for the videogame that convinced me I could enjoy harder difficulties, too.
Remember when the OG Dark Souls simply allowed players to walk into Gravelord Nito's domain, flooded with invincible skeletons? Or getting womped by those archers in Anor Londo for the first time? Shoot, remember just… all of Blighttown? Oh, it was all terrible, yes. But I can still speedrun the Undead Burg in my brain to this very day—I cannot say the same for Elden Ring's wide, open plains.
It's possible to overdo it, of course. Lords of the Fallen's 2023 remake was incredibly capricious, with ambushes around every corner—but I think the solution is to only be uncompromisingly infuriating in small doses. Twist the knife too often, and it becomes the one trick on your pony: Do it just enough, and you get one of the most absorbing Metroidvanias I've ever played.
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