Hollow Knight: Silksong Players “Have Ways to Mitigate” Difficulty, Says Team Cherry

While the recently-released Hollow Knight: Silksong has been praised for its gameplay, the title has also been called quite a bit more difficult than its predecessor. In an interview with Dexerto, developers of the title spoke about its difficulty, and how they approached the general difficulty curve and gameplay balance of the metroidvania.

Ari Gibson and William Pellen described Hollow Knight: Silksong as a difficult game that also gives players more freedom to approach challenging encounters. Gibson went on to say “that’s fine” if a player has been struggling against a particular encounter for several hours, because “they have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” he explained. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.”

As for the design decisions that led to Hollow Knight: Silksong being more difficult than its predecessor, Gibson and Pellen noted that it was due to the fact that the new protagonist, Hornet, is faster and more skilled at combat than the original title’s protagonist. Pellen went on to add that the move set that players use in Silksong is based on the move set of the Hornet boss from the original Hollow Knight. These choices made Team Cherry decide to offer encounters befitting of Hornet’s skill level, with the hopes that players would also rise up to face the challenges.

“Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight – so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said.

“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen followed up.

“The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

Hollow Knight: Silksong had finally been released earlier this month after being announced several years ago and developer Team Cherry essentially going radio silent on it. According to Alinea Analytics analyst Rhys Elliot, the hype behind the release of Silksong paid off quite well, with it being played by more than 5 million players in its first three days alone.

PC was seemingly a major platform for the metroidvania, allegedly selling more than 3 million copies in its launch period. Other interesting notes about the player base for Silksong is the fact that 78 percent of those that bought the latest title also already own the original Hollow Knight. There also seems to be a crossover with FromSoftware’s games, since almost half of the buyers had also previously played Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and the Switch 2, and is priced at $19.99. For more details, check out our review.