Is Hollow Knight: Silksong too hard? Well, it depends on what you mean by “hard.”

For seven years, the discussion around Hollow Knight: Silksong focused on the cult-like levels of devotion among fans patiently waiting for the sequel. Now that Silksong has been available for about a week, though, that discussion has turned decisively toward seemingly endless takes on the game’s relative difficulty (or lack thereof). The discussion has gotten so loud that the developers at Team Cherry have vowed to implement a “slight difficulty reduction in early game bosses Moorwing and Sister Splinter” in a coming patch.

So is Silksong too difficult for its own good? Or do players just have to “get good” and stop whining?

To help answer those questions, we felt it was a good time to bust out the Ars Difficulty Matrix (ADM), which we first used to analyze Elden Ring‘s difficulty in 2022. By breaking down the various ways a game can be “difficult,” the ADM can more precisely critique the ways Silksong is and is not designed to challenge players, both for good and for ill.

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