After watching the industry destroy itself with a focus on DEI, hamfisted commie propaganda, and predatory systems designed to squeeze every penny they can from their customers, I have become pretty cynical about every new game coming out. I was definitely worried that Silksong would become a victim to this same cancer, but am happy to say that it is amazing.
I'm not that far into it, and I am in no hurry to get to the end, but I can already tell that I am going to love every minute of it. I am relieved that Team Cherry can be counted among Fromsoft and very few others who still understand what matters in a good game, and give us something that is worth every penny. Other developers are losing their minds over a game this good being only $20, and they probably have a point. Just like with Hollow Knight, they could have charged $40 or more and nobody would have felt ripped off.
I am thrilled to see them doing so well that it crashed the servers for the stores on every console and on Steam. I hope they make absolute bank and keep on killing it. I just hope their next game doesn't take quite so long to come out.
Anyway, it's nice to have some good news for a change. If you haven't played Silksong (or Hollow Knight), you should definitely pick them both up. They are as close to perfect as games can get.
Silksong had 500k concurrent users on Steam. They made at least $10 million gross.
It is hilarious that all the rent seeking communist devs are all whining that they have to make better games now.
I work with some game devs that are like that. One of them described Silksong as unfair, and as setting false expectations in the industry. It’s nowhere near the game Elden Ring is for obvious reasons, but I remember people saying that about Elden Ring too.
The only way I could see that being unfair is if the devs had an injection of venture capital or something.
Yeah. The devs I’m talking about here are also a little woke, so they have the mindset of ‘my game should sell because someone like me is making it,’ rather than ‘my game should sell because I made a good game people will like and marketed it well.’
And it's the commies that are the most likely to get venture capital for their game development.
I think it's more hilarious that the people who complained that AAA doesn't innovate go all soyface over the bajillionth samey indie platformer.
I will worry about the AAA industry being innovative as soon as they show us that they can do the basics first. They have innovated the shit out of their microtransactions, same-sex romance conversation trees, and ray-traced bump mapped frame interpolated algorithm for perfectly rendering every hair on the adams apple of every female protagonist, and none of us ever asked for any of it.
I can tell you never even played the samey indie platformer that this is a sequel for. If you had, you would know that it was a better game with more polish than any AAA game released since that wasn't from Fromsoft or Nintendo.
Saw an indie dev say it should cost 40$
They really don't have to. They'll just make more pornographic visual novel games.
It definitely seems against the odds when a dev team makes big money on one game and doesn't immediately succumb to industry groupthink before putting out a sequel.
I saw some parts of the industry moaning that they were inconsiderate with the release date by not giving more warning for other games to plan their release around. Perhaps that's a good sign, that they barely even think about what the rest of the games industry is doing
I think one of the differences here is that they didn't really become part of the industry to begin with. One of the reasons this game took so long is because they just kept working on their own at their own pace at it, instead of immediately spending the first game's money to lighten their workload and become a "real dev team."
Team Cherry is 3 guys, from what I've heard.
Not the first game I've heard of that made it big with a dev team that small. One of my games in my steam library is a 5 plus year long labor of love by one guy.
5 years are still rookie numbers. If it's not a decade+ long codex of the fevered work of lone, crazed Siberian, it's not fully cooked yet.
Best I've played in that vein was 15 years from a crazed Japanese salaryman. Astlibra is a game more people should play.
Stardew Valley, Undertale, and Factorio get plenty of props for their super-indy development.
But I have not heard of Astlibra. Wuz dis?
Side scrolling beat 'em up platformer mixed with a JRPG and a bitchin' soundtrack. It's got some of the tightest controls out there in my opinion. Those 15 years in development were well spent. The story had some serious emotional gut punches too, which I appreciated. There's a playable demo available on Steam, but honestly you should just dive in blind and get the full experience.
If any of the gameplay in the trailer looks even remotely appealing to you, you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. It was absolutely my personal game of the year when I picked it up a few years ago.
Das not bad looking. Imma ad that to my list.
We should really have filters for games like this.
2030 GOTY winner right there
Closest I've seen to that is fakeportal.com
I heard there were gay bugs.
if there aren't, they'll come back and make a few bugs gay. just look at Celeste, which for the longest time was just a "really cool platformer" but is now transsexual propaganda.
Conquest's second law: any indie game not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
Anyone who didn't expect that with Celeste was fooling themselves. The game drips rich LA white Liberal from every bit of art and writing in it. Including a literal panic attack minigame.
There were in the first one.
Nailsmith and the nailmaster if I'm remembering correctly.
What about that really, REALLY hard character to reach that you have to take a letter across the entire map without being hit once? I remember this SOLELY because I had to redo it about four times. I don’t remember the character’s name, but I remember the special dialogue when you do it being something alluding to it and its letter writer being faggots or nonbinary something or other.
Now that I have a working Windows machine again, I was going to go through Hollow Knight again before playing Silksong. Maybe I’ll do that part again to confirm.
Make sure you kill the nailsmith once you fully upgrade your sword if do you plan on playing it again. Stop him from going full faggot with the nailmaster.
I played a bit of Hollow Knight but abandoned it. I just can't be entertained by 2D gameplay.
I enjoy 2D gameplay just fine but Hollow Knight just didn't grip me. It's well made and I can see the appeal but I just didn't find it a compelling experience.
Hollow Knight suffers heavily from its first few hours being quite a slog. If the atmosphere of it doesn't grip you then its pretty miserable. Especially with making you play a decent amount with no map, having to lose an equip slot for the compass that shows were you are on said map, and needing to get a ways before you get any "faster" movement mechanics.
I bounced off it half a dozen times before I finally pushed through long enough to feel right. And if it wasn't so cheap that would be a huge mark against it.
This is part of being a metroidvania game IMO. At least a well designed one. If you start the game with the full move set, the developers are stuck with using locked doors and keys to separate the map rather than doing it with good map design that ties directly to the move set.
The map design being so intrinsically tied to movement is why Hollow Knight is so beloved. It makes it where backtracking across the map is still fun because every area was designed to challenge the player's mastery of it just as much as the boss fights were.
So I see the "slog" at the beginning as short term pain for long term gain.
I want a new castlevania
I don't disagree, but its still a filter that will remove people from getting to the part to see why its so beloved.
The first zone is grey, slow, and not all that interesting if that despair and emptiness doesn't catch your interest. And the slow walking speed, spaced out check points, and linearness of it make it hard to appreciate the first time through.
It pays off, but not everyone is gonna want to push through. And that's fine.
I don't disagree that it is a bit of a filter either. The genre has always been more niche than typical platformers, and I think this filter is a big reason why.
In the end, it's probably a good thing that it weeds people out, as developers are forced to cater to the target audience rather than falling for the trap of trying to appeal to everyone. Which we have seen over and over again inevitably leading to chasing the "modern audience".
As someone whose played most things in the genre, from mainstream to forgotten indies, I think it is a bit too much of a filter for its own sake. Like I earlier, I bounced off it numerous times before finally getting into it.
But it was also a kickstarted game made by a bunch of dudes as their first go around, and sold for basically a pittance brand new. I can forgive a lot of little things like that weighed against those factors without it marring my opinion.
And if the post game content is any indication, they lean almost too heavily in the opposite direction of "git gud, and fuck yourself" challenges. I'll never be able to do all of those and I fear the man who can.
They definitely ramped it up to the absolute breaking point of the combat system for the dlc. I used to feel similarly until I just decided to give it a serious try after unlocking all of the other achievements.
Once I did, I realized I truly didn't master (or fully appreciate) the game until I beat Absolute Radiance to finally get to 112%. Godhome and the Path of Pain being so hard make it apparent just how perfectly tight the controls are, as every death is always the player's fault. It ended up being some of my favorite content in the game, and I initially wrote it off completely.
(Edit. I still haven't beat Absolute Radiance on a playthrough that I saved Zote on, so I still haven't technically gotten everything on HK done. One of these days though. Maybe when I want a break from Silksong for a bit.)
I am also the kind of masochist to 100% every fromsoft game, NG2 etc. so take it for what it is worth.
I've suffered through enough "not having a map" in FFXI to last me a lifetime. Give me a map or give me level design doesn't that doesn't call for one to begin with. No other options are acceptable at this point. Maybe that's why I bounced off it.
I mean, its solid enough design that the lack of map isn't impossible or even ridiculous. Part of making it technically optional and the compass an equip (instead of default) was making that possible. But its still a Metroidvania which requires returning to old areas and the like.
The real problem is if you take a break from it and don't retain your internal map, then its a real problem that you basically are better off reseting if its not too deep in. Which is why if you don't get gripped and power through a few zones then its just lost.
It felt generic, gameplay-wise. I feel that way about most 2D games.
can confirm, it's good. It also filters low IQs who can't into 45° angles.
Literally everyone I know is going around telling people "buy the key to get to the weapon with the old downslash as soon as you start the game" to get out of the angle problem.
These people are weak and they will not survive the Hunter's March.
I'm into Act 2, did all of the optional stuff in Act 1 that I could find, my observations so far:
If you liked the original style and atmosphere, you'll like this one too. Though I preferred the dead bug motif of the original to the "bells everywhere" motif in this one.
People who don't like difficult boss fights will not like this game. People who don't like long corpse marches to re-attempt difficult boss fights will not like this game. I would put several required bosses at at least Soul Master or Lost Kin, or even Hollow Knight difficulty, ignoring optional ones which are well into the difficulty of the dream bosses from the first.
So far power-ups (mask shards, thread spools, pin upgrades) are extremely limited, so there's really no "go find everything and come back when you're stronger to beat the boss."
Far more female characters. I never liked the Hornet character from Hollow Knight. Maybe I'm too sensitive, but she always came across as a girlboss to me. And she still is in this one; fortunately there's not much dialogue to suffer through, but still enough to be eyeroll-inducing on occasion. There's a balance between "bugs aren't human" and "they're anthropomorphic bugs that are human stand-ins" to make the number of female bug NPCs in human male jobs kind of jarring. Team Cherry is clearly very gender egalitarian and Pharloom's engaging in a lot of DEI hiring.
The map is very large. Act 1 is close to the size of the original map and Act 2 appears to roughly double the size again, though I'm not done with it yet.
At first, I was happy because it looked like perhaps the rosary currency was tied to exploration and there would be no grinding for it. That is not the case, and you need it for everything. Save point? Yup. Travel point? Yup. Opening/enabling random stuff in the world? Yup. Far more than the original game. I haven't run into problems with not having fund to open stuff as I explore, but it never leaves me with anything to spend on the expensive stuff from vendors. I think grinding for money in a Metroidvania is stupid kills the pace.
I don't like the quest/wish boards. I want to complete them just to see what happens when you've done everything, but most of the rewards are very underwhelming. Most of them require you to revisit areas that you've already finished to pick up X of thing Y from an enemy you've already killed dozens of times, or to find NPC Z. (for that matter, some of the kill totals to complete your bestiary are ridiculous. I didn't like this about the first game either.)
TL;DR: I'd give it a solid 8/10. If you liked the first, especially if you liked the technical boss fights, you'll probably like this.