What's The Point Of Hard Games, Anyway?

This week, the game design discourse is all about Hollow Knight: Silksong. Which, don't worry, I won't show any footage beyond Act 1. No spoilers here. But, yeah, this is Team Cherry's much anticipated, much hyped sequel to 2017's incredible Hollow Knight. But pretty much the only thing people are talking about with this game is its rather brutal level of difficulty. For context, this is a Metroidvania about winding through an interwoven map - looking for upgrades and secret passages.

There's nothing too strenuous about that. But along the way you'll have to go toe-to-toe with a huge cast of terrifying bosses - many of which will put your skills to the test in a punishing war of attrition. Now, the first Hollow Knight was pretty tough at times - but Silksong seems to turn the dial further, with even early and mid-game bosses - like the bullying Last Judge at the end of Act 1 - requiring dozens of failed attempts as you learn the patterns, safe spots, and phases you must go through in order to win.

All of which has left some players feeling dejected and frustrated. Review site VGC gave the game 3 stars out of 5 - praising almost every aspect, but trashing it for a level of difficulty that feels "demotivating" and "sadistic". And so, with all this chatter going on, I thought it might be interesting to talk about the design of difficulty in games through the lens of Silksong. To look at why game designers choose to implement a higher level of challenge.

And - crucially - how they should go about it. I'm Mark Brown, and this is a GMTK Mini.

Okay - so the first question is, why would a game designer choose to make their game hard, in the first place? What can you gain by amping up the challenge? Well, I think there are three main reasons to do it. Number one is that the harder a challenge is, the more satisfying it feels to finally overcome it. If you breeze through a boss fight the first time you play it, it might barely even register as something that happened.

But if you struggle against a boss for an hour, slowly improving your skills, your reflexes, and your knowledge with each failed attempt, and then you finally topple that monster - well, that moment of triumph is something you might never forget. That's the idea behind the Dark Souls series - creator Hidetaka Miyazaki says "I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming hardship".

And Hollow Knight: Silksong certainly plays into this. When I finally beat the Last Judge, my palms were sweaty, my heart was racing, my eyes were straining from not blinking - and I let out an embarrassing, involuntary noise like "ahhh!" to mark my victory. You don't get that with an easy game. The second reason to amp up the difficulty is to tie in with the game's narrative or aesthetic goals. Like, if a game tried to tell you that this kingdom is a place of misery and death, a no man's zone where hope goes to die.

And then you play it and it's full of enemies who die in a single hit... well that's going to be pretty dissonant. So if you want to tell a story about suffering and failure, then the gameplay should reflect that. That's how Celeste works - the game is about hero Madeline stubbornly persisting through hardship and setbacks as she climbs a legendarily high mountain. And so the player must also stubbornly persist through hardship and, well, you get the idea.

Silksong plays into this too. The game's world - Pharloom - is a withered, haunted land. There is death everywhere. Other characters are seen failing on their pilgrimage to the Citadel. Main character Hornet must grow in strength and wisdom to succeed. And so must you. And the final reason for increasing a game's difficulty is to ensure that the player approaches the game in a certain way. Take the game Furi - a game about being patient and observant as you dodge and parry every incoming attack.

Before exploiting a rare opening to deal some damage. The game is designed as a brutal back-and-forth ballet of defence and offence. But if you could also just run up to the boss, dodge a few simple attacks, and then wail on it until it dies... well you wouldn't have to do any of that stuff I just said. And the game would be pretty dull. So in Furi, difficulty acts like a teacher: punishing you if you play it wrong, rewarding you if you play it right.

Where easy games let you get away with simple and repetitive strategies, hard games require you to use every mechanic, every system, every tool, and every inch of the level design. And Silksong does play into this also. You'll need to learn every boss's patterns, make use of every charm and tool, and understand Hornet's moveset on a deep, molecular level. So - I think those are the three main reasons to make a game more challenging.

To increase the sense of satisfaction. To mirror the storyline. And to discourage boring playstyles. All of which turns difficulty into another tool that a game designer can use to create the exact experience they want. But! But but but. Big but.

A tool can't be used carelessly or thoughtlessly. I mean - it's simple to make a game really hard. Just put spikes everywhere and send the player back to the beginning of the whole game every time they fail. That's done - but you've now alienated 99% of players. No. Instead, difficulty is a careful balancing act. We want players to feel challenged. Maybe even frustrated. But we also want them to get that moment of catharsis from winning before they go all the way into rage quit.

Now, I think if a game feels fair - like you can see how you might learn from your mistakes, you can feel yourself getting better, you blame yourself for slip-ups, and you have ample opportunity to repeat and improve - then the game can keep you in that challenge zone for a long time. And oftentimes, this is where Silksong lands. I spent a long, long time fighting the Last Judge - but I kept going because I could see a path to victory.

I was lasting longer and longer. And mistakes were my mistakes. But if the game is bull-[beep], then the player is going to dip into frustration, and perhaps even rage quit, much more quickly. And, sadly, Silksong has a fair amount of BS. Things like the long, repetitive journey to the boss fight every time you repeat. Things like unpredictable troll moves. Things like boss encounters that use extremely random patterns.

Things like how the ammo for your secondary weapons don't regenerate upon death, so you'll have to farm enemies to top up. All of this stuff... this is what pushes players to get mad. To stop playing. To write reviews where you call it sadistic. And that also means it no longer fits one of those design goals from earlier. The first one - where overcoming a tough challenge feels rewarding. Because the player either doesn't overcome the challenge at all, because they stopped playing.

Or they feel a different emotion when they finally win - just sheer relief that they'll never have to do that again.

So as game designers, we can't think of difficulty as a single monolithic thing that we can add or remove from our game. But instead, it's a broad category that includes a whole catalogue of different tools - each one changing the game, and the player's relationship with it, in a unique way. But there's another type of tool we can use. And that's giving the player an opportunity to change the difficulty in some way. To decide just how hard or easy the game should be.

Perhaps the most obvious version of this is to provide difficulty modes, or assist options that let you modify the game. And Silksong - like the original Hollow Knight - does not include anything like this. Which, in some ways, is a shame. Because, well - difficulty is a really subjective thing. What's "challenging" is different for every player. If you asked me to run a 100m dash in, say, less than 12 seconds that would be a really tough, but plausible challenge to overcome.

But it would be practically impossible for a young child. And completely laughable for Usain Bolt. Difficulty adjustments let everyone find a place where they feel challenged. And also - there's more to Silksong than just beating bosses. This is also a game about untangling an interconnected web of maps and areas. And a game about understanding the deep lore of its storyline. It would be a shame to deny people of those aspects just because they can't beat the bosses.

It reminds me of Tunic. My wife loved playing this game and uncovering its many secrets and riddles. But she simply would not have been able to play it without the accessibility adjustments that let you tone down the difficulty of its crushing Souls-like boss battles.

But - with that being said, Silksong does have one big thing that allows you to adjust the difficulty. And that's being able to explore elsewhere. You see, one of the bosses that pushed me into the frustration zone was this guy - the Savage Beastfly. It's not actually a very difficult fight - he has pretty simple patterns to avoid and exploit. But, he also spawns in loads of enemies who just get in the way and drain your health.

The overlapping patterns make it almost impossible to predict where will be safe. But, instead of deleting the game and cancelling Xbox Game Pass, I decided to just explore somewhere else. I found new powers, more charms, I increased my maximum health. And when I finally went back to the Beastfly I was able to defeat it a lot more easily. And in many ways, Silksong is designed around this idea. The game is full of completely optional bosses, and there are very few times where a boss acts like a complete bottleneck to progressing further into the game.

I'll explore this more fully in the inevitable Boss Keys episode on this game, but, basically: you can almost always go somewhere else and come back later. Also - Silksong has a mechanic where you lose your cash - your rosary beads - when you die and you've got to go back to your cocoon corpse to pick them up. It's a mechanic that, in most games that do this, forces you to keep going back to the same area again and again.

But it's not as egregious as other games. Like, in Hollow Knight 1 you'd have half as much mana until you found your corpse. Not so in Silksong. You can also find ways to bank your rosary beads. All things that make it okay to leave your cocoon behind and just go somewhere else. And perhaps you could even point to the way ammo works. Like I said before, ammo doesn't regenerate on death so you'll need to go and kill some enemies to top up your reserves.

This breaks the pattern of going back to the boss over and over again, and may encourage you to just do something else. In all of these ways - and more - Silksong is telling you that the solution is almost never to just keep hitting your head against a brick wall until you get through. Instead, if you get stuck you should explore. Go elsewhere. Get more powers. Maybe you'll find a friend who will help you in battle. Or that one special item that will make the boss fight easier.

Or maybe you just need a break.

So, in a nutshell: difficulty is a tool that game designers can use to craft a specific experience. But, really, difficulty is a huge set of disparate tools - which must be deployed carefully. And finally, it's always worth thinking about how to give players ways to adjust or circumvent the difficulty. Right now, Silksong is still in my sweet spot - it's tough, but I'm surviving. But how about you? Let me know in the comments down below.

See you soon for a new episode of Game Maker's Toolkit.