Okay, let’s tone it down a little. I was talking earlier to someone about kinds of conversation, and I realised I’m okay at completely throwaway “how’s the weather” type stuff, and I think I’m okay at the deep and meaningful talking about the troubles and yearnings of the soul, but I just kind of lack a lot of the stuff in the middle. I’ve been trying to get better at that, but it’s still a work in progress! That said, I suspect actually elaborating on it would turn this into more of a deep and meaningful type post, and I did just say I was trying to tone it down a little. So let’s talk about my day instead.
Today I woke up to a whole bunch of people on the internet talking - okay, well, screaming wildly - about Hollow Knight: Silksong after it appeared in the Nintendo Direct last night. I was very late to playing the original game, so I don’t quite have the deep, soul-cracking yearning for the sequel that many people seem to, but all the talk did remind me that I got quite close to finishing Hollow Knight1 but got stonewalled kind of hard by a specific boss. In all my hubris, I felt certain that I was now emotionally and spiritually prepared to return and actually finish the game. - after over a year since last opening it, I was surprised to learn. How time flies.
To be clear, the rest of this post is going to include spoilers for Hollow Knight and possibly also Hades and Celeste (though I’m not sure on the latter two yet). If you haven’t played any of these games, you should go look at them and try them if you think they seem like something you would enjoy! No game is for everyone but they’re all quite lovely in their own ways.
Generally speaking I’m not good at difficult games. My natural hand-eye coordination isn’t great, I am not particularly dextrous with a keyboard, mouse2 or a controller, and I get overwhelmed really easily. But what I am, sometimes, is persistent at difficult games, and that makes up for most of the difference, I find. Hollow Knight has been pretty good to me, it’s a little slower paced in most things than some of the games I like to play, but that just means the bits I get stuck on are the overwhelming ones - the areas and challenges that just keep adding new things to worry about and account for until I just can’t keep my nerves under control any more. This is part of the reason I think I am better at Celeste, because it’s typically more relaxed about presenting its challenges; every room in the game is presented kind of matter-of-factly, and it will wait there for you to figure out what you’re meant to do and prepare yourself to execute on that plan. At the other end of the spectrum is Hades, where you walk into a room and your father’s booming voice says “here take this you little shit” and then fifteen million guys with swords appear and leap at you.
So the thing that I got blocked on hard enough to quit the game for a year was one of those bosses, a series of big guys with swords at the top of a tower, who wake up one after the other and stab you and roll around and start to gang up on you if you can’t kill them quickly enough, only keeping track of your target so you can take one down gets harder when there are two of them, and all of a sudden there are giant bugs crashing down on all sides and they’re just a bit too big for your dash invulnerability to get past them reliably, and then you’re dead again. They’re a real pain, and last year I spent honestly hours fighting them with not much success - longer, I would estimate, than most of the other bosses combined. So imagine my surprise when I loaded my save file and found that I had left off in the middle of some fucking bee hive that I had completely forgotten existed.
I eventually found my way back to the dreaded tower orbs and set myself back at the task of slaying them, with not much luck - for a while, at least. I started to get better. Started to learn the fight again. And then at one point my partner asked “hey what charms do you have equipped?”
My general game build leans into covering my weaknesses, mostly - I am slow and thus will get hit, so I want the upgrade that hurts things when I take damage, and the one that gives me a bit of healing juice at the same time, and the one that gives me a shield while I’m sitting and healing, and so on. But in this case, the fight is a bit too fast paced for that - you don’t really get much time to sit around and heal, so building around taking damage and then recovering means you are planning to fail from the start. So I dropped them, shifted to something a bit more aggressive.
And then I died again. Obviously.
But I got further the next time, and the next. Dropping the charms that benefit me for getting hit helped push me to learn better, so I could survive for longer. Replacing them with the ones that let me attack and heal faster was tough to get used to, but over time I found, predictably, that I could learn to keep up after all. I never really got any better at managing lots of enemies at once - apparently magic is good for that, but I’m kind of trash at using magic - but attacking faster meant I could just barely manage to keep their numbers under control until somehow, eventually, they just… stopped getting up again, and the doors opened. After over a year.
When I started writing this I had some eloquent bit in mind about how actually, beating this boss fight is more about beating your own mind than anything else. Nothing you need to do is that difficult, technically, the entire challenge is can you do it again, and again, and again, and can you keep doing it while the number of things you need to keep in your mind keeps counting up? All of these games understand this, and it’s interesting to me that while Hollow Knight and Hades both kind of lean into it, Celeste goes the other way - Celeste stops, gives you a moment, and reminds you to just breathe. You can do this.
Unfortunately, I haven’t quite put the thought in to come up with the bit properly, and it’s 1:30am at this point. I would like to do more writing about interesting games and what I think about them, but I should aim to write those posts in the daytime, I think.
I didn’t actually progress the game much after beating the Watcher Knights. I got entirely distracted with finding somewhere to spend all of the money I was carrying around. I’m kinda proud of managing it, though, and I hope to go back and actually finish the game sometime in the next few days, maybe on the weekend. And then I will actually be ready for Silksong when it releases! Which means it will probably be time to go back to Hades and beating up my dad instead.
Thanks for listening~
To my understanding, though I understand there is a whole host of optional bosses and ghosts I can stab and maybe some boss rush mode kinda thing? And honestly I don’t know for sure that what I think is the ending isn’t just the start of Act 2, though I can’t imagine it is with the way the pacing has been. ↩
Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to write the joke this footnote would be if I was less of a coward ↩
