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Can I bother you for six minutes to discuss…

  • The quiet sadness HORRENDOUS, HEART-WRENCHING, SOUL-DESTROYING epiphany Silksong has made me experience;
  • God I fucking hate Silksong but I fucking love Silksong;
  • TTLY: Old posts.

CW: VERY very minor allusion to lategame content that could still be spoilery

If Hollow Knight is Team Cherry’s love letter to Metroidvanias, then Silksong is their love letter to Soulslikes. Or, at the very least, it’s their homage.

A lot of people – myself included – are approaching this cruel, nasty, vile little game as a sequel to Hollow Knight, and in so doing, believe that it is working with the same paradigm. It is not. Sure, Silksong’s got all the trappings of what I think qualifies as a Metroidvania – long periods of exploration, the platforming, the bosses, the locking of areas behind some key1 that requires even more exploration to find.

But as a lot of people are also finding out – myself included – Silksong is more than a Metroidvania. It was never going to just be Hollow Knight 2: Shaw Harder. It is the Metroidvania people wanted, and yet, it is ABUNDANTLY clear that there is a hell of a lot more going on with this game that is beyond the genre. I cannot fully articulate what – nonetheless, I’ve got a ceaseless urge to try.

See, I think the Metroidvania trappings are merely the game’s shell; there are certain design choices that People Finding Out are evidently finding reminiscent of Soulslike games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulslike#Gameplay

So, to me, those choices are the true soul of Silksong, the malevolent hatred that’s woven through every crumb of Pharloom’s strata, bound by its silk. Understanding this, the rationale to the cruelty is made clearer. I may not like the difficulty, but I must respect it.

Some people like to be challenged and punished by difficult games. Shocking, I know. Whatever I may find unfair, these masochists will argue that I am simply not reflecting enough on the decisions that lead to every death. I can throw the baby out, and the bathwater, but the game has rules I cannot change. The game asks me to persevere, and I must meet it halfway. git gud.

I know one of these masochists. His name is Razzle, and he will fall on every spike trap in Steel Soul mode to defend the elements of this game that have attracted my unbridled, apoplectic rage. Ah, but no, he could never fall for these traps, not really. He’ll just learn the route. Learn the patterns. Learn the bosses. Learn the map. Master the systems, become Pharloom’s god-king, then he can free himself in the void once more. I can neither stop him nor commiserate with him, because 1) I’m not strong enough to attempt Steel Soul, and 2) only the dead may know peace from its evil.2

Such determination, when I complained to him about a part of the game that I thought was genuinely flawed, and he replied with this:

Makes me anxious. There’s an irony in that disagreement. No, it’s not fine. Have I misunderstood the assignment? What does he know that I don’t? And I don’t want to ask him to elaborate: I know myself better. When I’m angry about a game, and feel justified in my opinion, it’s very difficult to talk me down. Razzle knows. Oh, how he knows.

Granted, what I perceived a flaw was so small a thing. Some of the tools in Hornet’s arsenal are limited-use, and must be rebuilt with shell shards, a secondary currency new to Silksong:

https://silksongwiki.com/database/tools

Now, the only way you can replenish these shards is to defeat enemies. Either you go ‘sploring, trying not to die, or you pick a low-risk spot where you can farm rosaries, and buy shard bundles from a shopkeep. You cannot avoid the grind either way.

Silksong incentivises the use of these tools. And then it disincentivises me, when I squander them all dying to the same boss over and over. It disincentivises me further when the runback to said boss involves several minutes of intense parkour. An overwhelming sense of ennui kicks my ass, the nihilism soon eats me whole; there comes a point where I feel there’s zero fucking point in using these tools, and instead, the only things I should ever use in combat are my needle and my silk skills.

Razzle tells me, ‘just don’t spam your tools when learning the boss, man.’ But… but I want to use these shiny tools! I want to not be punished, besides dying! Why is Silksong like this?

Shock, denial, and anger all at once. Then I jump to bargaining: surely I could’ve found a charm that refunds some shards upon death? But no – such luxuries I cannot have.

Despair. It’s the ennui again. The feeling that I cannot be fucked to go and grind for more shards. What’s the point? Yet I feel I must press on, regardless…

…And eventually, when I can be arsed, or when I’ve persevered long enough, I triumph. Did it feel good? Yeah, I guess, but what about all the pain I went through? Recompense me, Silksong! Not with memory lockets, or necklaces, or mask fragments, or more charms. It’s my soul that’s wounded – won’t you mend it?

No answer. It can’t. All I can do is progress through the labyrinth, and acknowledge time’s linear passage. I have tread Pharloom’s rivers, the likes of which I will never tread again3. I have suffered; raged at the suffering; sat with it; and quietly, I’ve accepted that it must end.

For time may be a running river, the way it always moves forward, but it’s also a flat fucking circle. If it wasn’t, then, and only then could I truly say that all these deaths were meaningless, succeeding nothing. Past and present reconcile to make future.

The pain, you see, is Silksong’s reward. Take that pain, bind the wounds tight with silk cloth, and grow as a person – or retreat back into your cave, let the wounds fester, and never dare to let another game hurt you.

Safe to say, Razzle and I are at odds regarding how Silksong has made us feel4. I know I’ve enjoyed Silksong – it’s just a complicated experience that evades being intellectualised. No pain it has brought me could be greater than that of the ignorance I was prepared to take shelter in. It’s art.

Thus I have learned. I paid £16.75 for Silksong, and got taken further towards Nirvana into the bargain.

  1. Usually, a moveset addition… but sometimes, it can just be a literal key. ↩︎
  2. And every YouTuber who finds it in themself to upload their Silksong All Bosses No Damage compilation. You frighten me. ↩︎
  3. That includes Bilewater. Fuck that area with a brick. ↩︎
  4. And what follows is not to say that Razzle is some Zen master who never showed Silksong a scintilla of rage. He’s fumed at the Savage Beastfly like the rest of us. ↩︎

TTLY…

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‘I Think I Get Silksong Now’ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.