#l talks

Since last September, I’ve been trying to answer the question of whether someone who isn’t great at video games can beat Hollow Knight: Silksong. The context behind this question: I am somewhere between a bad and a middling casual video game player. The small handful of games I have played can be split into “sunk hundreds of hours into it and made it a core part of my personality” (Baldur’s Gate 3, Hades I and II), and “had fleeting encounters where I was absolutely wrecked” (the hour of Plate-Up I played with my friend M where I struggled to complete a single level, the time my friend very kindly let me try Skyrim using her controller but I got so motion sick I had to lie down and sleep at her house, etc.).

A lot of my issues in games stem from a lack of familiarity and practice. I only started gaming in 2023 when I got a laptop capable of it. I didn’t even play web browser games before then, and it frankly takes a really long time for me to learn and get used to new things. I’m decent at combat and builds, but the single hardest part of every game for me is movement and motion controls, even outside of the motion sickness. I forget how to navigate a space even when there’s a map; I run into walls and lava constantly, and when I’m in a higher pressure situation like a real-time boss fight or even a hard enemy room, I still get overwhelmed to the point of regularly forgetting correct button inputs. Movement and motion controls are often frustrating to me in a way that verges on genuinely discouraging.

Silksong is many things. Almost every single one of them says that I should love it: the beautiful stylization, the story about grief and community and the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters, the fantasy catholicism, the bugs (my entomology phase in elementary school was so strong that one of my teachers once gave me a birthday card with a praying mantis on it)—the gay fantasy catholic bugs, even. It’s perfect. I’d watched a lot of Silksong playthroughs, and I knew that I loved it from that. I especially love Hornet, with her poise and resolution and true paladin’s heart. But despite all that, there was one thing that kept me from playing Silksong for myself: the difficulty. If I’m still forgetting how to WASD in Hades, how can I expect to complete a notoriously hard platformer that was giving hell to players who actually knew how to platform? Additionally, I knew that if I committed myself to playing, my goal would be not just credits rolling, but the true ending. This is the gay fantasy catholic bug game. My spider princess paladin would do anything in her power to bring Lace from the abyss, and I would too. 

And so, 134 hours of gameplay and nearly half a year of real time after I first posed the question, I now have my answer. Silksong did literally break my computer in the process, as pictured above; I started playing on keyboard, but the A key snapped at the end of Act 1, and I had to buy and use a controller for the first time in my life. But nevertheless, it is possible for a middling casual video game player who is pretty bad at in-game movement and motion controls to beat Silksong. It was even possible for me to 100% Silksong. And I am now writing this rambling blog post on the off-chance that this might reach someone who is interested in that hypothetical.

A couple ground rules for this post: this is not a zone for “getting good.” Whenever I went looking for advice online for bosses or platforming sections that were grinding me down, that rhetoric kept cropping up, and I found it a little unpleasant and disheartening. Secondly, this is a zone the things that worked for me. Strategies or tools that were otherwise described as “trivializing the game” or “basically cheating” or “no skill” made Silksong just on the level of bearable to me in terms of difficulty, and I am actually quite proud of how I used the resources it gave me. Finally, again, spoilers for all three acts abound!

ACT 1: ABANDON HERE YOUR PRIDE

In my experience, Act 1 was by far the hardest. The tools and abilities you gain in Act 2 go a huge way towards alleviating some of the game’s most difficult and punishing sequences, and Hornet’s movement gets smoother and more natural as you get used to it. When I was in Act 1, I had never played a 2D platformer before, so movement was bewildering. Aiming my attacks was bewildering. Jumping correctly seemed unfathomable. These were the things that helped me get through Act 1, along with a lot of luck and sheer stubbornness:

Practice. I needed more practice than what the game naturally scaffolded. I cleared out rooms within the Marrow so I could practice moving around and reacting to the environment in them without worrying about enemies. The Marrow had a section of those red pogo flowers I must have spent hours on, because I had never pogoed before, and I needed a low-stakes area to get used to the movement before I entered Hunter’s March. Which brings me to my next point…

Get the Wanderer Crest early. I regret not using Hunter more, since I think it is so unique to Hornet and is also really strong in the game, but I was absolutely not in a position to handle a diagonal pogo in Act 1. The reach of it is a little short, but it is very easy and fun to use.

Use tools. I avoided them for a while because I didn’t want to think about input combos or aiming, but they are lifesavers. My favorites are the “set it and forget it” tools, which you can plop down in a relatively calm moment and then not think about anymore. From Act 1, these include the spike traps from Forge Daughter and the tacks from Sinner’s Road, which are an absolute MVP and permanently joined my main roster. There is also the plasmium phial from Zylotol in the Wormways, my savior, which I will talk more about below.

Get used to the farming lifestyle. At the end of every session of Silksong, I would have a farming run to get a couple rosary strings. As a result, I never worried about being short on rosaries, and I freely left my cocoon behind. Because I always had rosaries to buy shards, I also felt comfortable practicing with tools in every run at a boss. Farming was also another opportunity to practice, and if I wanted to get a better feel for a crest, movement ability, tool, or silk skill, I would use it while farming first. 

Book it. Just run. Silksong wants you to move fast. Figuring that out and also forcing myself to not stop constantly to gauge jumps made the platforming and runbacks a lot easier. The Last Judge runback is long as hell, but if you keep running and never pause for too long, you don’t have to fight a single enemy on the route.

ACT 2: THE GOSPEL OF PLASMIFICATION

I did both routes to the Citadel, going through the Last Judge first before turning around and taking Sinner’s Road. I think that the traversal in Sinner’s Road is harder, and the Mists were an incredibly frustrating region for me (they are the culprit behind my broken A key), but it is beyond worth it. Phantom is one of my favorite bosses, and Act 2 opens up much quicker if you go in through Sinner’s Road. You can directly get the clawline, which is a vital traversal and combat tool that makes exploring the rest of the Underworks easier, and you can also get my queen, my GOAT, the reason I saw that 100% completion screen:

The Architect Crest was the single most powerful tool for me in mitigating how punishing and frustrating the game felt. Because of the tool bind, Hornet can equip the plasmium phial and inject herself with plasmium nine times, leading to all her masks becoming plasmified. Under this condition, she cannot heal normally (her bind only restores one mask instead of three), and she is presumably high as hell. But in place of her normal healing, she instead slowly regenerates her masks automatically. This means that chip damage, like falling into spikes or other environmental hazards while trying to platform, automatically heals itself, and you can practice difficult sections as many times as it takes to clear them without being sent back to the start upon death.

I am not exaggerating when I say that the plasmium overdose was the reason I could complete the game. I plasmified Hornet for Mount Fay, the Cogwork Core, the Sands of Karak, the Wisp Thicket, that one cave with the tarmite gauntlet and the lava in Far Fields, the Putrefied Ducts, and Bilewater (and in Act 3, the Abyss escape, Voltnest, the Coral Tower, and Lost Verdania up until the Clover Dancers). Because of the limited regular healing, it’s not great in combat against really quick enemies, but the slow passive regeneration makes it amazing for platforming, maggot infested areas, and any other places where healing is very limited compared to damage taken, like the Father of the Flame fight or the Coral Tower.

Plasmification is not a perfect silver bullet. It is expensive, at 120 shards per round; you can’t rest on a bench for as long as you want to maintain the condition, and you will become deeply familiar with the route to Zylotol’s location from the Shellwood bellway because of how often you’ll find yourself there topping up your plasmium reserve. You can’t use the Pollip Pouch on your tools, because the poison eats away at your plasmium masks, and the movement also feels clunky. Despite all that, I absolutely could not have completed the game without it. The traversal would have just been way, way too punishing for me. Plasmification also meant that my experiences with some of Silksong’s most notorious pain points were drastically different from what I was bracing for. I now genuinely love Bilewater, with its bleak and mournful ambience and its lore. I feel like it’s one of Silksong’s most atmospheric and narratively strong areas, and I got to appreciate it because I wasn’t focused on how unpleasant the maggots are. And RP-wise, there’s something really compelling in Hornet passing through Bilewater in a haze of forbidden lifeblood and delirium, witnessing the horror of what the Citadel had done to the Stilkin and their waters.

Outside of using the Architect Crest to mitigate the difficulty and frustration surrounding traversal and continuing to farm, here are some things that made Act 2 feel fun and manageable for me:

Look for examples to learn from. I did not play Silksong blind; it would have been deeply unenjoyable and 100% a deal breaker for me. I am someone who looks up what happens in movies, books, and TV shows before I engage with them, because I need to know what happens. But even if you are not like me, I highly recommend watching videos of let’s play streams for sections that are giving you a hard time, so you can see how they did it and know what to expect as you progress.

Prioritize key updates. This includes, first and foremost, tools or abilities you’re excited to use, because the whole point of this exercise is to have fun playing Silksong. I grabbed the Witch Crest as early as I could because it seemed really fun. This also includes mask shards, spool fragments, and tool pouch upgrades. Look up ways to get them and the closest benches to them, and don’t be afraid to dip into areas without completing them. I dipped into the Memorium for the final mossberry to upgrade Druid’s Eye and High Halls for the cogflies as soon as I got the double jump, but I completed those areas at the very end of Act 2. This further applies to advancing quests so you don’t have to go through the game alone. I prioritized advancing Shakra’s quest so she would assist in the High Halls gauntlet, and she was a huge help.

Get the Vesticrests from Eva. You access them by using memory lockets to unlock tool slots on every crest except Hunter and then visiting her. I was able to get both Vesticrests and Sylphsong in Act 2 by scrounging for memory lockets, and the extra slots and silk were absolutely worth it.

Prepare in advance. This is a small example, but I pulled off the Courier’s Rasher delivery, a quest that I thought I would literally be unable to do, in half an hour, all because I cleared out the rosary-bearing enemies and practiced the traversal in advance. I also did it through Sinner’s Road and Bilewater, and if you embrace the maggots, Hornet can do it at a leisurely jog without the flea brew or silkspeed anklets and still have a bar left over at the end.

My favorite Act 2 tools that carried me to the bitter, voided end:

Cogflies. I can’t heap praise on the cogflies that hasn’t already been heaped on them. With a fully upgraded tool pouch, poison cogflies will shred any gauntlet short of the High Halls and a full phase of any boss. They are also wonderful as a learning tool. For difficult bosses, I would use a couple cogflies sporadically so I could survive longer, see more of their moveset, and practice reacting to it. Once I could consistently get through the first phase, I would stop using cogflies there and start deploying them in the second phase, and so on.

The combination of Druid’s Eye(s) and Memory Crystal. Druid’s Eye(s) gives you silk for every two hits taken (the upgraded version, accessible after Mount Fay, gives two full bars for every two hits taken, which is huge), and the Memory Crystal leaves behind a crystal that damages enemies every time Hornet gets hurt. I took a lot of damage, and this let me regenerate silk really quickly, while the Memory Crystal meant that I was dealing damage whenever I took it in a chilly sort of Hellish Rebuke.

Claw Mirror(s). Since I got hit a lot and healed a lot, this let me deal damage while I healed. This, along with the above duo, makes it okay to situationally face tank.

Magnetite Dice. I actually got these late in Act 1, since I was struggling and didn’t want to wait to get them in Act 2, where they can just be taken without gambling with Lumble. The 40 minutes of real time it took for me to gamble for them was worth it, and I’m glad I encountered Lumble as well. Playing dice while the desert winds raged around us was a really sweet moment. The damage negation they provide is unparalleled; they are without a doubt the most powerful yellow tool.

Ascendant’s Grip. The most necessary yellow tool for me; I had it in my Vesticrest slot. This lets you cling to walls without sliding down. Mount Fay would have been impossible without it for me.

Weavelight. You regenerate your core silk hearts faster and get an extra tick of silk as well. I used this consistently for my plasmified platforming sections, since clawline requires silk.

Reserve Bind. Being able to heal at a critical moment and enter a boss’ new phase on firmer footing is clutch. It cinched me the win in the Lost Lace fight. 

I was horrible at using silk skills because I needed all my silk to heal, all the time. But my favorite pre-Act 3 silk skill was Silk Spear because of the damage burst and long reach; after Act 3, it’s Pale Nails by a long shot. We know my feelings on aiming by this point, and Pale Nails makes that a non-issue.

By the end of Act 2, I was kind of feeling cocky. Because I used tools so regularly and prioritized my upgrades, I was more or less able to steamroll my way through a good number of the fights. I felt good completing Silk and Soul. I felt capable. I saw the credits roll. And then….

ACT 3: LOVE AND THE ABYSS

Act 3 is my favorite act overall. I found it the strongest and most compelling story-wise. My favorite sequences, like the Red Memory, Lost Verdania, and Hornet and Lace’s final exchange before Hornet’s dive into the Abyss, are all in Act 3. It has the most exhilarating, thrilling, absolutely baller fights. The fusion of emotional, narrative, and gameplay payoff throughout is incredible. It is so, so worth it. Hornet jumping into the Abyss while she holds the Everbloom stands out as one of the most affective moments in any game I’ve ever played. It was so beautiful, and I think it hit all the harder because of how difficult and protracted the path to get there was. 

Speaking of difficulty, Act 3 is also hard as nails. It is brutal and unforgiving, and there were times when I fully did not feel tall enough to be on the ride. Everything hits like a bullet train. Even run-of-the-mill enemies have the ability to grind you to paste at the flip of a coin. There is a mandatory gauntlet entering Act 3 where you fight voided enemies with nothing but the base Hunter Crest without any tools equipped, and I genuinely thought for a bit that my run would end there (I strongly recommend using the Hunter Crest more than I did, because I wasn’t used to the moveset and that really fried me). With the exception of Gurr and the Crawfather, Act 3 has to be learned the hard way. And when sequences in this act get hard, they get really, really hard—looking at you, Abyss escape and Coral Tower. 

I guess now would be the time for me to add my two cents to the mint’s worth of change that is the Silksong difficulty discourse. The game is absolutely too hard for me; I have no shame about that. If I didn’t already love Hornet and Pharloom, I would have quit after an hour, the way I did with the original Hollow Knight. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too hard overall, necessarily. What I will say is that the elements of the game that were the most rewarding were when platforming sequences allowed me to learn without being overly punished, and when bosses were technically difficult and quick, but readable and gradually learnable. There were a lot of times when I loved the challenge of the game. It made playing as Hornet and experiencing the dark, melancholic world of Pharloom more immersive, and I felt amazing when the challenge was surmounted. 

On the other hand, my most frustrating moments in Silksong were when I could not tell what I did wrong but still failed, or I couldn’t tell what I could have done differently in the situation upon failure. There were more than a few of those, whether it was a traversal sequence I didn’t understand how to land or a boss covering the floor with adds which I didn’t understand how to avoid. The game seemed impossible and frankly not enjoyable then, not because I was dying a lot, but because it felt like I wasn’t afforded the chance to learn what I did wrong and how I could improve. I didn’t mind any runback in particular, but that’s because traversal was so monolithically difficult for me in the game that everything just pushed over the limit into “hard.” The Sister Splinter and Phantom runbacks felt every bit as challenging as the Last Judge runback, and I would lose just as much if not more health in them. The constant grind of gauntlets was certainly not my favorite. I thought they were thematically poignant before Karmelita, Khann, and (sorry, I know I had a Bilewater experience that’s a massive outlier and this isn’t a properly informed opinion) Groal, since they were leaders of kingdoms which had been destroyed by the Citadel’s influence, summoning the remembered might of their peoples one last time. Moreover, I think they would have had more thematic and emotional impact if there weren’t so many other gauntlets cluttering up the game. 

As I’ve talked about above, there are ways of mitigating Silksong’s difficulty once you enter Act 2. I played it as my first platforming game and Metroidvania, and as the fourth video game I have ever completed. This means that it is, technically, possible for people of all skill ranges to play Silksong. But I am also someone who had already fixated on it before playing it, who has fast and twitchy reflexes despite her terrible grasp of motion controls, and—most important of all—who has a lot of free time and not a lot that’s urgent to pull her away from the game. Silksong isn’t just hard as nails; it is also really punishing and demanding. If you aren’t already good at the game, it demands so much uninterrupted time and focus to learn. I know a lot of people don’t have access to that, even if they want to experience the game at a level that is challenging for them. So much of Silksong was thrilling and enjoyable to me, but I am also saying with my full chest that this game would be hugely improved by more accessibility considerations, along with the option to adjust difficulty as needed. Even something like slightly increased checkpointing would make an enormous difference.

I’ll end with my standout moments, starting with some dishonorable mentions:

Dying multiple times in Moss Grotto even before the boss

The eight consecutive hours of real time it took for me to get through Hunter’s March, not counting the practice time in the Marrow I put in beforehand. I could only do this because I was on break from teaching and also very sick and therefore quarantining. I told my wife afterwards that this was harder than my qualifying exams. If you are not in my situation and do not require intensive trial by fire to learn how to pogo even with a crest other than Hunter, enabled by having a lot of spare time but being unable to do anything else, skip this area and come back when you have more movement abilities. I also skipped the Chapel of the Beast until I had gotten clawline, and it was a good call.

Shellwood and Greymoor traversal. Ignominious and painful; I died multiple times in the same room as Threadstorm and in the room after Cling Grip.

The six hours of real time and the broken keyboard it took for me to traverse the Mists. I found being placed back at the start after falling to be really punishing, especially if I had already gone through four or five rooms. It made it so I no longer enjoyed the genuinely cool atmosphere of the area and was just frustrated. Even being reset to the middle checkpoint corridor after the third room would have made all the difference in the world to me.

The tarmites in Far Fields

The flintflame flyers in Deep Docks

That one flea in Far Fields that took me three hours to get. The platforming through the red spikes was fully cruel and unpleasant.

The lava and pogo parkour course to the mask shard in Weavenest Atla

The initial void gauntlet from the Cradle into Act 3 proper

Ecstasy of the End. The Flea Festival is adorable and beautiful and perfect. I would not change a thing about it, except for how the minigames are the cutest thing in the world for the first three attempts and hell for the rest. It took me a cumulative eleven hours to fulfill the fleas’ final wish. It was tedious and not enjoyable. Flea Dodge alone took me four and a half hours to clear, which was longer than any boss fight. It felt so random, and I just couldn’t react in time to what I was seeing onscreen. I finished this solely for the 100%; this is a part of the game I would never ever do again. 

And the glittering highlights:

Hornet as a protagonist. I’ve been complaining a lot about movement, but I will say here that Hornet feels so, so good to control. She is quick, agile, and gloriously acrobatic. When her movement clicks, it is incredible. The very act of running through Pharloom was enjoyable. Just as important, Hornet is also so extremely cute, and even at my lowest moments, I never felt alone because of how vocal and expressive she was (even if she sometimes sounded exasperated when I ran into a wall, spikes, or lava). It was like having a little buddy with me. She has her own voice and a steely resolve that comes through in all her dialogue, and I adore her with all my heart.

The charm, personality, and continuity of the NPCs. Everything about Sherma, the Flea Caravan, Shakra’s quest, Pilby, the Green Prince—they’re all perfect, and your interactions with them carry through all three acts. If you see Sherma, the little pilgrim you meet in the Marrow in Act 1, one last time after getting the Everbloom, he sings a prayer of protection for Hornet and calls her his dearest friend. It is the sweetest thing. In a game that can be really bleak and brutal, the sense of community and care Hornet develops with the people of Pharloom is the light that you look to. It is the emotional core of the game, and Silksong nails this. 

The bosses. My favorites are: Widow, Last Judge, Phantom, Cogwork Dancers, Trobbio, First Sinner, Karmelita, and Lost Lace. The rush of fighting and beating a good boss in Silksong is unparalleled. You feel simultaneously like you’re invincible and like you’ve clung to survival by the skin of your teeth. It’s incredible.

Hornet’s bellhome. It is draped with fairy lights. She can nap in her bed. Perfection through and through.

The overall atmosphere of the game. It’s so rich and melancholic, filled with mourning and wonder in turns, and I experienced that much more while playing myself, compared to watching a playthrough.

Lost Verdania. Talk about mourning and wonder. 

Finding the survivors’ camp in the Marrow after seeing Bone Bottom destroyed in Act 3

The Red Memory. Hornet, who has grieved for so many, speaking to the White Lady about her unflinching hope for a better world despite how well she knows loss and darkness—that’s my baby!!!!

Lost Lace, who deserves her own individual shoutout, and the Sister of the Void ending. The fight was beautiful. I was so keyed up and focused that when it ended, I felt like I had just run in a race. I could feel my pulse in my hands. My emotions were high to the point that I started to tear up as I watched the final cutscenes. What a phenomenal fight, the perfect culmination of learning over the course of the game about Lace’s fighting and Lace herself. What a phenomenal ending about bonds of connection amidst the void.