Okay. I want to start off by saying that this game is an immensely huge achievement by Team Cherry. They have crafted a world full of charm, detail and richness that grounds you in a place that feels like it was there long before you arrived. The backgrounds, the character design and the music are top-tier. The mechanics are well-executed, responsive and intuitive enough to allow aOkay. I want to start off by saying that this game is an immensely huge achievement by Team Cherry. They have crafted a world full of charm, detail and richness that grounds you in a place that feels like it was there long before you arrived. The backgrounds, the character design and the music are top-tier. The mechanics are well-executed, responsive and intuitive enough to allow a seasoned practitioner to feel in full control of their actions and progress. Also, as has been stated, the world is a massive, sprawling maze of variety, unique enemies and new challenges that keep you guessing.
Big, obvious influences on this game are classic elements from DaS, Super Metroid, Castlevania and Rayman etc. And it borrows from all these games and combines these elements in ways that are both familiar yet just the right side of new to make this game feel like its own entity. The retrievement of your currency by backtracking to where you died ala DaS is there, the unfurling, slow-reveal of connecting rooms and areas on the map screen ala Castlevania 'Symphony of the Night' etc, the double-jump ability that opens up previously unreachable areas etc. These are all derivative, predictable but, as stated before, there's something about the world that draws you into it, willing you to keep going. It all just feels so of-a-piece.
The boss battles, too, are challenging, surprising encounters, full of variety, unexpected twists, phases and attacks. And, there are so many that you'll likely be reaching for Google to find one you should have encountered 10 hours previously into your gameplay but holds an imperative upgrade or item to allow you to march to the next area, so you have to find it. And, this brings me to some of the downsides to this game...
The game time on my first playthrough is upwards of 50 plus hours. During that time I must have backtracked at least 50% of my time, trying to reach a previous area, planning my route and trawling through challenges and obstacles I'd previously, emotionally moved on from. Guys, this is a huuuuuge time suck. Fast-travel is limited to hitching a ride with an awesome stag beetle character who has stations scattered at various points in the game world. Sadly, many important vendors, NPC's and bosses are far from these stations, leaving you to pump time into navigation and retreading old steps. As the game is so massive and impressively so, the desire for more bus stops looms large by the end. I know that Dark Souls did this, but that game was interconnected, employing short-cuts and time saves as the world opened up to you. In HK, this just doesn't happen. instead, it all just feels out of control by the end.
Another drawback is how un-signposted both the story and the next direction of travel feels. Where I'm used to this in games I love, like Dark Souls, Hyper Light Drifter, those games used the environments to punish you into the right direction, or used cut scenes to elucidate where you had to go next. Things generally pointed their way towards a specific destination or goal. Many times in HK I was lost, unable to know what to do and reaching for Google, youtube videos and walkthroughs to help me gain clarity where none was given by the game. So, I guess you can add all those hours to my overall game time also. Very, frustrating and disappointing considering what joy it is to discover these places the first time around.
The boss battles, too, were sometimes excruciatingly hard, making you Git Gud to a degree that simply demands too much time, and then so remedially easy, you smash them first try. Very inconsistent. Also, many bosses were recycled into OP versions of previous iterations, by simply making them faster, more aggressive and a slightly different colour scheme. This feels cheap at times, especially when the reward for beating these bosses is simply the knowledge of knowing you beat them. After a while of this, the difficulty starts to feel arbitrary, or intentionally hard just to draw more time out of you, instead of more joy. An example of this was The Path Of Pain area. Needless to say, it is painfully hard. Without adding spoilers, the reward for this area does not match the effort in completing it. And, so much of it feels this way.
Lastly, there is no NG + where you get to carry all your rewards, skills, charms and ability into a fresh, slightly harder playthrough. That's a gigantic missed opportunity from Team Cherry, in my opinion. What a joy it would have been to traverse the world again, knowing where to go and what to do, defeating it with style. I enjoyed parts of the DLC's. But, again, they were so hard to find, I started to feel like Team Cherry were being deliberately obtuse, almost relying on the existence of Google as a crutch for badly implemented world design.
So, in closing, I both in awe and in frustration at this game. I just hope Team Cherry's 'Silksong' sequel learns from some of this, imo, fair criticism.… Expand
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