As we deplaned, bags in tow, I couldn’t help but notice my wife sneering at me. “What?” I asked. “Do I look ridiculous lugging all these heavy bags?” She laughed. “No. I just noticed you’re still stuck at the same level you were at in the airport.”
She was right. I wasn’t weighed down by luggage; I was weighed down by Hollow Knight: Silksong. The game we’ve been clamoring for, begging for, for years is finally in my hands, and like the bags, it’s kicking my ass.
And I’m not alone. Across Twitter, YouTube, and everywhere else, you can feel it: that once-overwhelming chorus of anticipation giving way to a faint, growing crescendo of dread. We’re just a week past release, and already there are nerfs. There’s even a mod that caps enemy damage.
That’s not unheard of. We all remember the Promised Consort Radahn in Elden Ring or how Cyberpunk 2077 was dialed back because it was simply “too awesome” for consoles to run. Still, to see Team Cherry budge this early, so fast, in fact proves the chorus was loud enough to be heard above the piles of money made on day one, crashing servers and all.
The patch notes? Bosses nerfed. Enemy damage reduced. Checkpoint prices lowered. Rewards boosted. On paper, it’s relief. In practice, though, my frustrations started earlier.
Take pogoing. In Hollow Knight, years of muscle memory were built on clean, vertical bounces perfected in cruel crucibles like Path of Pain. In Silksong, we are introduced with a diagonal poke that feels awkward, unintuitive, and clunky. It’s the first of many moments where the game isn’t just asking for skill, but rewiring what you thought you knew.
And Silksong is full of these checks. Not just bosses, but movement puzzles, environmental hazards, and runbacks that feel less like jogs to the arena and more like entire parkour gauntlets lifted from other games just to die in one hit at the end.
What makes it sting more: unlike Elden Ring, there are no i-frames, no blocks, no panic-rolls to bail you out. All you have is spacing. Pure, punishing spacing. It’s easy to forget this. Many of us remember Hollow Knight with rose tinted glasses, its atmosphere, its exploration, the incredible bosses. But memory smooths over how brutal it was, how it kicked our asses again and again. I still haven’t beaten The Radiance, and even thinking about it gives me chills.
So yes, Silksong feels harder. Maybe it is harder. But maybe the bigger shock is that after years of waiting, dreaming, and theorizing, we forgot just how merciless Team Cherry can be.
And as we trudged toward the car, I died in the same section for the twentieth time. My wife glanced over, and asked, “Want me to carry that bag too?”
