Hollow Knight: Silksong dev comments on the game’s difficulty and why it’s tougher than the original

At the ACMI Game Worlds exhibition in Melbourne, Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen commented on the difficulty of Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Just like the series’ first game, Silksong has been getting a lot of love. But there have been a few discussion points, including the difficulty.

Gibson shared the following:

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path. 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.”

“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty – but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

Even if players are struggling with a boss fight, Gibson doesn’t see this as a problem. That’s because players “have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

Hollow Knight was far from a cakewalk, but Silksong seems to be another step up in difficulty. But because of how different Hornet is, there needed to be adjustments this time around. Gibson said that “Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight – so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent.

Pellen also noted:

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

Team Cherry didn’t want to scale back Hornet’s powers. Instead, the studio decided to “bring everyone else up to match [her] level.”

Hollow Knight: Silksong did actually receive an update that nerfed a couple of early bosses slightly. You can read about that here.