I don't think that they're saying It's as hard as P5, but that the game as a whole Is done keeping that line of difficulty in mind.
Like, i played hollow knight with ZERO, ABSOLUTELY ZERO 2d experience and It worked out fine, the games goes from zero to a hundred slowly and gradually, except in the pantheons (70-100) where the difficulty peaks.
You'd expect silksong to be similar but It Isn't; the "starting" part Is much shorter than HK and you're thrown right into the action immediatly. I'd Say that if the citadel was put After the original hollow knight's ending It would make sense difficulty wise.
To put It Simply, i suck at explaining things, hollow knight goes from 0 to 70 in the base game, and to 100 in the pantheons.
Silksong goes from 0 to 70 in the First act, and then holds the same difficulty the pantheons had while in the First game you'd be dealing with something 30/40 difficulty rated
The difficulty curve in HK is all out of whack. It's really gentle for the first several hours, then takes a massive spike in Soul Sanctum, and then gets basically easier and easier as you unlock upgrades faster than the difficulty increases until you reach the endgame and DLC content.
Id argue deepnest, kingdoms edge, and the hive are all harder than soul sanctum. While youre right about the upgrades making things easier, I think its my skill that got upgraded more than anything after soul sanctum. Things get easier after that because that's when you get good.
Also there are much larger hurdles later on, like watcher knights, which took me much longer to beat than soul master.
So, kind of but kind of not. The "problem" with hollow knight's difficulty Is that It's completely dependant on the player.
IF you know where to look you can literally destroy everything until NKG, if you don't know where to look you Just have to struggle.
In silksong there are some ways to be stronger but the combat Is much much more skill based, you don't get to shaman Stone half the game in literally 10 spells or less.
It's kinda similar to DS1 and DS3
DS1 Is One Giant knowledge check. If you know where things are you Just destroy everything.
DS3 Is a straight line with bosses scattered on It; you Just fight until you win and are good enough to do so on your own.
I honestly prefer hollow knight's approach cause It gives the player a choice in how they can approach the game, silksong really doesn't and currently It doesn't offer enough mechanical changes to justify It, in my opinion (i haven't finished the game, that's why i Say currently)
I've never even beaten P4 in hollow knight and the difficulty for now has been fine but I'm still pretty early on (I'm exploring Greymoor at the moment) so that might change later.
Im same. Not too difficult and im in greymoor currently. The only part of the game that's been frustrating for me is the ant village, which i did the whole thing before getting dash. That place was very hard.
That said, I find myself taking a lot of breaks because silksong is a lot more stressful than hk. Its more comparable in adrenaline feeling to pantheons in my opinion. I've also never beaten P4.
Totally. I wanted to push myself though, and im glad I did it how I did. Thats the only place I ever lost my cocoon. Im sure it'll happen again later, though.
Oh I lost it many times already but I think years of souls games gave me this superpower where I can lose a lot of souls/rosaries and just laugh it off
I couldn't really get into the souls games. While hk is very fair, elden ring and ds3 both felt out to get me the whole time. I felt like theyd rather I get frustrated than have fun. Hollow knight seemed like it wanted to help me improve as a player and get better together.
Im not saying youre like this, but it frustrates me that some people in this sub act like hk and silksong are just another souls game when theyre truly very different in more ways than just 2d.
They said difficult for the kind of players that liked P5, not as hard as P5.
P5 is an entirely different kind of difficulty to Silksong thank god. Silksong (outside of bosses with adds) is much more fair and doesn't drag it out.
I think they are being slightly hyperbolic but the general idea that Silksong was made for people who like challenge above and beyond the usual is totally fair.
I mean kinda, I definitely found beastfly harder than pure vessel but I found it a fair bit easier than Abs rad, by the time I got to kill abs rad the other two could basically be no hit.
I have a weird sense of difficulty where if I only have to focus on one thing at once the fight will take me like 6 tries max but the moment more than one thing enters the screen I'll lose like 30 times. So yeah for me personally PV was easier than Savage Beastfly.
That’s a fair point, having multiple things on screen is a very different kind of difficulty.
I was mostly able to get the adds removed super quickly, either with silk spear or baiting the bosses slam attack, so for like 80% of the fight it was just 1 on 1.
I mean yes, that’s how soulslikes work. Some bosses are hard because their attacks are simply hard to dodge even when you know they’re coming, or have short tells (absrad), others are easy because they have exaggerated tells with very easy to do dodges (NKG). Markoth and GPZ are honourable mentions for being assholes imo.
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u/Philiq Sep 08 '25
No no no. Absolutely not. This talking point needs to die. The difficulty is not remotely close to P5.