In case you'd somehow missed the immediate difficulty discourse, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a rather challenging game. One of the things that has been proving particularly troublesome is the fact that so many enemies deal double damage, wiping out two masks of Hornet's health at a time instead of just one. However, Team Cherry has already offered a good explanation as to why.
The devs actually acknowledged this during an interview with Edge magazine for issue 354, which was released all the way back in February 2021. All those years ago, the piece acknowledges what we're all now experiencing – the slightly faster pace of Hollow Knight: Silksong, with the aforementioned frequent double damage that balances out Hornet's powerful healing abilities (which allow her to heal three masks of her health at a time once she's accumulated enough silk).
"It takes longer to get to the point where you can heal yourself, but you can heal yourself by more," Team Cherry co-director William Pellen explained at the time. "With the idea being that you spend more time either at full health or almost dead, and the gameplay is kind of snapping between these states."
This clearly wasn't just a gameplay-driven decision, however, as fellow co-director Ari Gibson added that it's also a nod to Hornet as a character. "Yeah, and again, reflecting who she is as well – this character of extremes," he said.
Getting back to today, players on Reddit reacting to these old statements largely agree that this approach is effective. "I gotta admit, it does often work out like they wanted," one writes. "I'll be about to die and then suddenly full of beans and it feels pretty fun and dynamic. Then I die."
As another says, however, it's still not particularly fun when you receive double damage after lightly brushing against a stunned boss. "Just feels cheap as hell," they write. "I don't think contact damage counts in their perspective of this, and the rationale kinda of falls apart when taking that into account."
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