Silksong should’ve came with a guide from developers
Warning: this post may contain spoilers
This post is full of spoilers of Silksong
I’m a married, working person so the time I can allocate for gaming is not much. I’ve been enjoying silksong very much and tried a spoiler free gameplay, having played hollow knight before and knowing how much team cherry loves secrets.
I’ve followed the normal gameflow and beat the boss. After that I wanted to keep playing and following leads I had before the ending.
Investigating missing parts, the boss runback in bilewater destroyed my nerves so I looked up if there was a bench closer to the fight - there had to be one since this was outright ridiculous. Turns out there’s a secret bench that’s so hidden I don’t know if anyone other than the most determined secret hunters could find. The boss was also as hard as it gets, felt kinda unfair.
Looking up bilewater opened a can of worms for me. I kept seeing spoilers and continued looking up info. After a day I found out there are 3 other endings, a whole another act, and bunch of unlockables.
I love when a game doesn’t handhold you and forces you to enjoy it. I get it. But I think this is too much, too obscure. It requires meticulous backtracking and there’s never an indication when you’re capable of taking on a new quest. Finding new items, you don’t know who should it be given to. You don’t even know if there are still areas you haven’t been to.
I guess team cherry wanted the player to have a play log each session and we should’ve kept logs of weird stuff we’ve seen along the way so that we remember to go back. Well, as fun as that might’ve been, I did not keep a log and forgot a lot of early game stuff.
I believe they should’ve prepared a guide themselves, spoiler free, which could include some info the game does not offer so the player can keep unlocking new stuff and would’ve known generally what to expect. Existence of act 3 honestly shocked me, and I don’t think I’m someone who doesn’t pay attention.
In their quest to be anti-handholdy gaming, I believe team cherry went too far. Onerous backtracking and note taking shouldn’t be the solution.
I loved the game and it’s easily GotY for me. I’ll keep playing it even after seeing spoilers but I can feel half the fun being gone now that I’ll just be chasing objectives I’ve seen online. If I hadn’t looked stuff up, I’d have switched to bananza or hades 2.