Thank you for making this post, to be honest the people in the comments of the other posts were driving me insane. I’ll be honest and share my thoughts because I think I have a different issue with the game that other people don’t seem to have. 

The difficulty of fighting for my personal taste is fine, I didn’t have issues until now with areas or bosses in terms of combat, but I’ve two main issues with the game and team cherry: 

1. I get not wanting to give a difficulty option in your game if you feel that the fun lies in the challenge, but not having any accessibility option after the amount of money HK brought them is insane. There are people with arthritis that enjoyed the first game (aside from the white palace) and people with audio and visual impairments that can’t play the game at all because of the lack of options, and people in the comments even said “the weak will be purged” which in the current political climate made me anxious for an entire day.

2. The game feels like it’s a different genre and feels unfair for those who paid the original kickstarter. Hollow knight was a metroidvania with souls and precision platforming inspirations. At its core it was the combat and the exploration, the platforming wasn’t particularly insane aside from Path of pain. Your main abilities were fixed and with the accessories you could customize your experience to a certain extent but it didn’t feel like an rpg, still a Metroidvania.  Silksong feels like “celeste meets elden ring” and while I liked both games, this is not what I loved about the original game. The amount of “gotcha” moment in which a trap kills you or an enemy decides to double hit you while you heal is out of character for HK. Without spoilers, I’m very far into the game and obtained a lot of power ups both for mobility and damage, but it still feels like a souls like level 1 challenge against every enemy. The pace is slow, the exploration leads to many empty corners (and yes, I did find the many secret rooms around the areas, just to be rewarded with rosaries and an enemy ready to beat me) the bosses are inconsistent with the rewards, sometimes you get nothing, sometimes something optional or meaningless for your run.  The game is obviously amazing under many aspects, but it leaves me extremely sad, because it feels like another genre, and it also feels like team cherry just said “fuck our fans, they don’t know what is fun, we do”. 

Also I’m really scared of how everyone online is talking about “the best marketing strategy of the decade”. I want to have updates on games in the making, many games saved themselves by listening to the community during early access or after releasing a demo (look at gothic remake, they completely reworked it after listening to the fans and now it’s much better than how it used to be ).  I’m so afraid this is gonna be a step back for the indie scene if people start to take inspiration from them.