(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Hollow Knight: Silksong to tone down difficulty amid player outcry [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-09-10

"Git gud" has been the pushback against gamers complaining about difficulty since the release of the first Dark Souls, but it shoves aside a very real conversation about accessibility in games and how difficulty factors into that. Hollow Knight: Silksong is one of the most popular indie games in recent memory already, but it's also crushingly difficult by design, which doesn't quite square with the massive audience it's attracted. There is a point, after all, where pleasant challenge shifts to something outright demoralizing. Just look at the Elden Ring expansion and its much-maligned final boss.

This point has dominated much of the discourse online about Silksong, whether it be from those put off by the game's excessive difficulty or those who think the former group need to, again, git gud. Either way, the developers have heard it, and Silksong will be getting a series of tweaks to make things easier, the list of which reads as follows:

Slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter.

Reduction in damage from Sandcarvers.

Slight increase in pea pod collider scale.

Slight reduction in mid-game Bellway and Bell Bench prices.

Slight increase in rosary rewards from relics and psalm cylinders.

Increase in rosary rewards for courier deliveries.

Various additional fixes and tweaks.

While these are all well and good, I can't help but feel like this entire issue might have been avoided if the game had just shipped with a set of standard, selectable difficulty levels in the first place. Even a single optional easier mode would have gone a long way.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/10/hollow-knight-silksong-to-tone-down-difficulty-amid-player-outcry.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/