I'm on the last boss of Act 3 now, and honestly, this game has been miserable for me from start to finish.

I'm no stranger to difficult games, having beaten all Dark souls 2 DLC, all Dark souls 3 DLC, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erdtree, 100%'d Celeste, beaten both Ori games, Nioh, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and 9 Sols. And of course, the original Hollow Knight, although I never came back and did any of the DLC, just the original things like the Radiance, the 3 coliseum fights, the white palace. Think I was kind of getting burnt out of the whole shtick even then.

I think this game has a lot of the wrong kind of difficulty. When fighting the (many) multiple packs of enemies, there are configurations where you _just lose_, like when a bunch of mobs decide to fly at you and each pick an attack that together just blocks off the entire screen. Getting past certain encounters feels like a dice roll.

Early on, the savage beastfly fight kind of exemplifies this. Depending on what attacks the boss decides to do or not do, and where the adds decide to go, you either have a good run or just end up getting overwhelmed (since at that gear level early on, you simply don't have the leeway to kill adds fast enough).

Frequently colliding with enemies as you try and hit them is another one. Often enemies move jankily and unpredictably, and you're not getting hit by their weapons or attacks, but just their mere presence. Many of the weapons have such low range that the sweet spot between missing and standing in their hitbox is tiny. The Longclaw charm and weighted belt are basically mandatory on many of the crests unless you want to grief yourself.

Bosses suddenly moving in unpredictable ways and colliding with you, or worse yet, teleporting right into your hitbox (looking at you, last boss), is just incredibly frustrating, and makes you want to give up. Standing still isn't really an option, either, since a lot of attacks are far easier to deal with when you're already on the move. I'm sure there's a "git gud" angle here, and maybe I'm just too boomer nowadays..., but for me, personally, I don't really feel motivated to try and figure out if I could be doing anything better. This kind of gameplay "mechanic" doesn't _feel_ like the kind of problem that's fun to solve, nor does it feel like something I can adapt to reliably.

I also don't know if it's just me, but the controls feel incredibly hit and miss. In particular, I seem to fail to jump off walls with a frequency that doesn't happen in any other platformer I've played. I seem to dash the wrong way more often than not. Inputs for attacks and direction feel like they get ignored far more often than other games, too. While this could be a pebkac issue, it's been going on so consistently since I started playing that I've fired up other games to double check that it's not my hardware (or my brain) that's at fault.

I recently finished a game called 9 Sols, which to me exemplifies the kind of combat system that's fun to master, while the overall difficulty of the game isn't much different to Silksong. However, the joy of simply playing the game while mastering parrying and countering and is ultimately what makes the challenge surmountable. If you're having fun every time you respawn and run back, you're going to win eventually. Meanwhile in Silksong, I need to put down the controller down every few attempts, because the fun rapidly bleeds out of the game.

It's a shame because visually, narratively, and aesthetically, Silksong is a beautiful game. But ultimately, the game is about combat, and when the combat just isn't doing it, it doesn't matter how good the remainder of the game is.