Silksong should’ve came with a guide from developers
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.
I also just played through Silksong and loved it. It took me about 70 hours to get 100% and all collectables.
The Bilewater bench you mentioned was the one and only time I broke my own rule about spoilers and looked it up. I searched long and hard for the shortcut/bench, knowing there must be one, and was getting way too frustrated with the area.
Later I kicked myself, because I'd been over that breakable wall 2 or 3 times without seeing it, but I agree it was very well hidden.
Beyond that though, I thought everything was pretty discoverable. I'll not go into any details because I don't know where you are now, but Act 3 feels pretty signposted posted once you finish Act 2. It took a little experimentation to figure out where to go exactly, but I feel there's enough hints to point you in the right direction. The Act 2 ending feels rather incomplete otherwise.
Similarly with backtracking, the game does provide map markers for points of interest that you run into along the way. My map was bespeckled with them by the end. I think that mostly eliminates the need for a notebook (though Steam's Notes feature is still very convenient for metroidvanias).
I hope you're able to enjoy the rest of the game even with these frustrations!
70 hours, wow! How did you realize act 2 could not be the ending?
First, it felt very sudden to me. Acts 1 and 2 weren't exactly short, but the ending seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a very easy boss, and there was no real build up or denouement to that point. My actual spoken reaction was "Wait, what?" when the credits rolled.
Second, the ending itself felt like a "bad ending". Hornet absorbs the Grand Mother's power and starts to transform. Your masks in the HUD turn into 6-eyed masks, and Hornet absorbs an ungodly amount of silk. In the next scene, she's shown insulated inside a cocoon, and begins to painfully grow limbs. It didn't seem right.
I had the feeling there was more, so I went to the usual haunts (Bone Bottom, Bellhart, Songclave) and asked around. One of the NPCs had some unique dialogue which then pointed me in the right direction.
Don't get me wrong, I still had some cleanup to do once I finished Act 3. I missed three bosses and an entire area. There's plenty of secrets buried deep! Thankfully, very little of the content is fully missable, so I was still able to max out my upgrades and such afterwards.
I felt the same way about the “final” boss and rushed to Act 3 (I had been doing everything as it came up and it was nearly immediately available to me). I’m currently replaying for a few reasons.
Spoilers
I missed your items 2 and 3 as well. Thankfully, they're not required for 100% completion.
On your fourth item, I don't believe that is missable. The original enemy is still available in Act 3 (try deeper).
I found this save game analyzer that made it a lot easier to finish up my bestiary. It includes links to a Map Genie site that shows where each enemy can be found. It doesn't cover every category of collectable yet, but gets you most of the way there.
This is a very nice tool, thanks!
Something happens if you kill worms in wormways?!
I didn’t play this but apparently the new Prince of Persia metroidvania had a feature that let you screenshot when you placed a map marker. I wish Silksong and all Meteoidvanias would do this. I tried to use the different colors of map pins for things like “ability needed”, “item needed”, “quest location for quest I haven’t started yet”, etc. but it takes a while to unlock all pin colors so I was constantly backtracking early on and going “oh right, this pin was for double jump, not for clawline, I guess I’ll be back later” or running out of like, yellow pins and going “well I guess I’ll use red here even though it should be yellow for my system” a small complaint but PoP’s screenshot system would have saved me some time for sure.
I'm currently most of the way through Act 3 now. Id say that probably about 90-95% of my exploration and completion has been my own, but there were definitely multiple times (bilewater) where I straight up searched reddit for help, or asked my gamer god friend, who already has the speedrun achievement, for some gentle hints.
Honestly I agree, I feel like some sort of really gentle in-game hint system, whether though an NPC or another more immersion braking method, would have been very very very helpful.
For instance: there's an item you get later in the game that's described as letting you "observe from a distance". Would have been cool if that speckled some markers on the map for areas you should check out, because it's actual functionality is kinda meh.
I wish a mid game npc sold a vague map showing how many areas there are, or at least told us. Similarly for quests. And sometimes, npcs just chat for a couple of times until giving a quest. That makes talking to npcs tedious rather than entertaining
That's my main issue with metroidvanias in general, most of them are not that fun to backtrack and that's why I don't play them often. For me it would be better if Hollow Knight and/or Silksong were linear games.
That being said the only metroidvanias I can tolerate are the Castlevania ones because the artstyle and the music makes the backtracking so much fun.
I generally feel the same way about Hollow Knight. I was really invested in it for a few weeks and then I got to a point where I'd lost all of my geo, sans a couple hundred in the bank, had no idea what was next, but I knew getting there would require a lot of backtracking through an area that was already tough to get through. It's just completely wiped out my interest in playing any more :( Which sucks because I was enjoying it and I liked the difficulty of enemies and boss fights a lot.
If I'm going to give up on a difficult game I want it to be because a boss is hard, not because the game itself has started to feel tedious and unclear. And from everything I've seen Silksong doubled down on the parts of HK I disliked the most.
Would love to find a game similarly challenging, but less frustrating in that regard.
I can suggest Metroid dread!
Metroid Dreads difficulty I found perfect, and unlike most metroidvanias this game was much more linear, you always knew where you could go next. Overall a very solid recommendation.