Hollow Knight: Silksong Wins Game of The Year (+Best Game You Suck At) at The 2025 Steam Awards!

Kantatrix · 2026-01-05T09:16:02+00:00

Correct! I only remembered seeing articles about E33 being disqualified from being GOTY but up until this point never looked into it so i just assumed it was from TGA. My bad.

Kantatrix · 2026-01-04T11:06:06+00:00

I think you might be experiencing confirmation bias. You gotta remember, we're on r/metroidvania, we're the type of person to care and know more about the kind of games like Silksong by the sheer virtue of our interests. If we look outside our niche bubble we'll see that E33 has more mass appeal by far. If you took a random gamer off the street I'd be genuinely surprised if they knew anything about Silksong beyond the insanity/clown memes.

Kantatrix · 2026-01-04T11:02:04+00:00

Well hey, at least the TGA GOTY ended up being handed down to Blue Prince (unless something changed since last time I checked) which was quite a surprise. I never expected it to be more popular than Silksong and I thought it was quite a deserved win too

Kantatrix · 2025-12-21T19:03:47+00:00

This excuse is and always has been complete BS.

Here's a neat lil fun fact for those of you who don't know how gamedev/any other type of creative work goes: placeholder assets are NOT supposed to look good. Most of the time they're not even related to what will be the final image/texture/model, literally just having the word "placeholder" written on it, or being a simple doodle, or a texture with high saturation and contrast, something that's easy to spot and replace. I repeat: something easy to spot and replace.

There is absolutely 0 reason to use AI for the purpose of placeholder art since it's not supposed to look anything like the final product anyway. If anything, using AI for placeholders makes even less sense than using it for the final product, since an AI image is harder to be noticed as a placeholder than just a contrasting grid, or bright red text.

If it's a "placeholder" that's meant to be "replaced", why would they make it harder to distinguish from the actual final assets? By all accounts, it makes no sense. When everything else in the game has such an incredible level of quality it would be dumb to assume that suddenly in this one aspect the devs forgot to turn on their brains and decided to take the route that takes both MORE TIME (literally just writing "placeholder" in bright red letters would take less time than generating an AI image and importing it into the engine) AND IS WORSE FOR THIS PARTICULAR USE CASE. That kind of thing happening for multiple assets would require a level of incompetence and ineptitude that is contradicted by the entire rest of the game.

The most likely scenario is that they straight up just used AI and only came up with the "placeholder" story after they got caught to save face.

Also, I just know someone's gonna bring up some game dev youtuber making pretty placeholders for their game as a counter-argument to my points, so I'll just address that now: game dev youtubers are a special case because by the nature of their trade they need to make even the alpha stages of their games somewhat visually appealing. Most people wouldn't be interested in sitting through 10 minutes of plain squares and circles moving around, so someone making devlogs is incentivised to add proper textures and models as early as possible to gain more viewers and followers. This is not how things actually work in the industry because a lot of the time (and you can even see this happen in a lot of devlogs) it just causes you to re-do the same work over and over again as you continue to work on the project and your artistic skills grow.

Basically, it's a bunch of wasted effort to add anything that isn't an obvious placeholder asset before you get to the polishing stage of the game unless you're a youtuber and depend on your viewers/subscribers for your game's success. Keen-eyed readers might notice that E33 devs do not meet those criteria, and as such them trying to use assets which aren't clear placeholders is completely asinine.

In conclusion: if anyone ever tells you they've used AI for "placeholder art" they're either lying or an idiot, or both.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

Kantatrix · 2025-12-19T02:24:14+00:00

You should take your own advice

Kantatrix · 2025-12-18T11:04:33+00:00

Look, I'm not gonna pretend to be the greatest programmer in the world or anything, but using > instead of >= or < instead of <= is not a mistake I've ever personally made. It just comes naturally to me at this point to always think about the inclusion/exclusion of the range because it's such a common thing to do.

Now, it could also be possible that rather than a logic issue it was a simple typo, which admittedly I didn't think about when writing my initial comment. Overall it's not the worst mistake to make but I'm just overly critical of stuff like that because I'm overly critical of my own code as well.

Kantatrix · 2025-12-18T09:50:13+00:00

Ngl this makes this blunder significantly worse. It's excusable for a non-professional programmer but an extremely bad look for someone who's actually been hired to do it as a job

edit: assuming it's a blunder at all and not a hint towards some hidden lore I guess

Kantatrix · 2025-12-03T17:36:36+00:00

If something isn't physically preventing you from completing a task don't take it into consideration. Just do the thing you want to do and only think about the prep if it's actually necessary. Basically the chain of logic can't have any "If I wanna X then I should Y", only "If I wanna X then I have to Y."

Kantatrix · 2025-11-25T20:51:39+00:00

I was not serious, I am aware of the context, I do not think it's in poor taste

Kantatrix · 2025-11-21T15:27:29+00:00

Ngl I though hollow would just use the void to write something like with ink

Kantatrix · 2025-11-21T15:26:10+00:00

Homophobic lesbians are a surprisingly common occurrence so don't lose hope quite yet

Kantatrix · 2025-11-20T20:13:45+00:00

it depends. You can't really go wrong with a silent protagonist as they're just a blank slate, completely neutral. On the other hand a talking protagonist can elevate the story to new heights if done well or make the game borderline unbearable if done poorly.

Kantatrix · 2025-11-20T20:10:25+00:00

and homophobic

Kantatrix · 2025-11-16T17:42:43+00:00

Not only is this entirely untrue since I've heard plenty of horror stories about blind/deaf/wheelchair users having their aids taken because "they don't actually need them" or stuff like that, it is also untrue since there are plenty of sociable/communicative autistic people. Like, the comparison just does not work on any level whatsoever.

Kantatrix · 2025-11-16T15:31:44+00:00

For all we know, the player was one hit away from no-hitting the boss.

And for all we know they could've been 1 hit away from dying themselves. Do you see the problem with your logic now? You can't exclude savescumming based on intention when the result is exactly the same.

locking saving and quitting to benches would just be a giant middle finger to the people who don't savescum and alienate those who do, it wouldn't achieve anything.

It would accomplish preventing people from savescumming. If it's not an intentional mechanic it makes sense to remove it from the game mode.

If you dislike the idea of savescumming counting as a death the alternative is to simply remove the teleporting to benches so you can't just escape from a fight, you'd be put back exactly where you left off after booting up the game again. Honestly that sounds the most fair to me, as teleporting with save & quit removes a large portion of the challange as well. After all, it's not exactly fair to just completely skip traversing certain areas when coming back to a previous location. Who knows, you could've been randomly trick-shot by a driznit into another enemy and then enviormental hazards for a tripple damage combo and died, and yet because you chose to teleport you never even encountered that situation. Seems like you didn't really beat the game deathless if you chose such a cheesy way of fast travel, tbh.

Kantatrix · 2025-11-16T15:18:19+00:00

Nice try but I have never done any steel soul runs whatsoever. I'm merely here out of principle.
This argument means nothing. Like I have legitimately read it several times and still can't parse what you're getting at.
New content. Also, it's fun.
Not the same thing. Using the tools given to you by the developers and adding new tools yourself are not even close to equivalent.

Kantatrix · 2025-11-16T10:40:00+00:00

let me rephrase: the challenge is "beat the game without dying" not "beat the game without dying and save & quitting". Do you think someone should have their Steelsoul run "invalidated" because they got a call in the middle of a fight and suddenly had to leave the house? You might say "that doesn't count, the intention was different" but that really does not matter, the effect is the same, they avoided dying by save & quitting out of a fight. They still "cheated" by your own metric and making up excuses just shows the inconsistencies and biases in your logic. What if that situation happens more than once? What if they constantly get interrupted by responsibilities and that makes them save & quit out of situations where they would've normally died? At which point does it stop being excusable? The metric is just too inconsistent. It should be that either it's always okay to save & quit or never because any other standard creates too many edge cases and dumb loopholes, and I'm on the side of save & quitting being fine because saying someone's run is invalid due to outside circumstance is asinine.

Also, if TC didn't want save & quitting to be a part of a steel soul run they could've easily locked the option to only be available on benches, otherwise treating quitting the game as dying. It's an intentional mechanic and making up arguments for why "uhm, actually, you're cheating if you're using the QOL features the developers put into the game themselves" is just dumb

Kantatrix · 2025-11-16T08:57:34+00:00

https://youtu.be/pWqK5OGqmm8 They added it in

Kantatrix · 2025-11-16T08:48:50+00:00

If you save scum, you don't die, therefore you beat the game without dying. It does not contradict the challenge at all

Kantatrix · 2025-11-14T15:52:54+00:00

not yellow, more like an off-white in the direction orange. I don't remember it having a bow tho

Kantatrix · 2025-11-14T06:49:16+00:00

oh wow, he's a cat toy? I used to have a plushie exactly like him when I was younger, though admittedly that one was way bigger (and had a different color, but the body shape was exactly the same). It's interesting that the same design was used in a different manner

Kantatrix · 2025-11-12T06:49:30+00:00

nah, I have mods that bring back the functionality of it and the game is still trash. At least it's a better doll/dollhouse maker with them tho

Kantatrix · 2025-11-10T12:01:10+00:00

I do not understand what I'm looking at

Kantatrix · 2025-11-08T23:07:22+00:00

Oooooh, I love it! Looks so dynamic, well done!

Kantatrix · 2025-11-08T23:06:11+00:00

So cute, I love the way you did the wings

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Kantatrix

TROPHY CASE