Pyrian on 2/7/2020 at 06:47
I mostly died because I didn't notice they were doing two damage per hit, lol.
Renzatic on 3/7/2020 at 05:21
Hollow Knight is awesome. Anyone who claims otherwise is a giant nerd.
Al_B on 3/7/2020 at 21:20
This has been my go-to game during isolation. I played it ages ago on PC and got right through to the final boss which was a little too tough for me but I didn't feel disappointed as I enjoyed it immensely. Not something that I've really returned too much but I knew there had been quite a number of additions since the first release.
Recently bought it on the switch to enjoy while working from home while in (relative) lockdown. It's good for my mental well-being to be able to step away from the computer and relax on a couch when you're at the same desk for most of the day. Most of the game is the same but wow, they've toughened up a couple of fights. The Traitor Lord in particular caused me a lot of pain whereas I don't even really remember the fight when I played it on PC first time around. I'm also not quite as comfortable with the switch pro controller as with the xbox controller I used for some areas - bouncing on garpedes to get that fragment is something I'll have to go back to now I've performed some tape surgery on the controller to resolve the d-pad's tendency to give false inputs. Overall, though, it's still a fantastic game and I'm looking forward to the Silksong sequel / prequel when it comes out.
Pyrian on 3/7/2020 at 21:39
Quote Posted by Al_B
bouncing on garpedes to get that fragmentThat section has been kicking my ass, too. It's like I can jump and bounce OR jump and dash OR bounce and dash but I just can't seem to bounce/dash/jump/repeat.
Starker on 4/7/2020 at 04:48
Quote Posted by Al_B
The
Traitor Lord in particular caused me a lot of pain whereas I don't even really remember the fight when I played it on PC first time around.
Yeah, this is one boss that has been genuinely difficult for me so far. It must have taken me over a dozen tries, but once I got used to the patterns to be able survive a bit longer and make a better use of the shade cloak, I managed to rush him down with my usual combo of damage and speed upgrades and liberal use of spells.
Right now, the frustration I have is the Godhome fights. I got as far as the nailmasters in the first pantheon and got my ass beat the first time. They don't seem too difficult, but I would have to fight through all the trash bosses again just to get back to them. Now that's some shitty game design. Why does the game keep insisting on wasting big amounts of my time with artificial difficulty / unnecessary padding?
Thirith on 4/7/2020 at 09:01
Quote Posted by Starker
Right now, the frustration I have is the Godhome fights. I got as far as the nailmasters in the first pantheon and got my ass beat the first time. They don't seem too difficult, but I would have to fight through all the trash bosses again just to get back to them. Now that's some shitty game design. Why does the game keep insisting on wasting big amounts of my time with artificial difficulty / unnecessary padding?
Isn't
Godhome meant to be exactly that? As far as I can remember, the difficulty-minded fans of the game wanted a hard-as-nails boss gauntlet of sorts, and Team Cherry gave them what they wanted. Unless I misremember what
Godhome is supposed to be (I avoided it exactly because it added the sort of content that I'm not particularly interested in), you're criticising an entirely optional part of the game for being exactly what a bunch of people were calling for.
Starker on 4/7/2020 at 09:38
So, I gave up on Godhome for a while and decided to mop up everything else that was not looking like it would end the game. Fought the White Guardian and Lost Kin. Seems like with Zote, you can fight the White Guardian multiple times and while it is one of the more fun fights, I don't know if there's any point to it. That's one of the problems I have with the game -- you never know what you get. Sometimes you just pick up an incredibly powerful upgrade just lying on the ground, sometimes you fight a Boss or go through a lengthy ordeal just to get a badge.
Which leads to the next part what I did... namely the Trial of the Fool. It was
incredibly infuriating. It takes so long, you start making mistakes just out of sheer impatience and if there's a tricky part, you have to do it all over again. I must have done it for 7-8 times, every try taking what felt like half an hour. There's this one part where you have to cling to the wall and fight flying enemies in a shrunken arena. I usually take flying enemies down with one of the nail arts, but you can't really use it while jumping on the walls. Even when I went into it with full health, they just barely managed to chip away my health by crowding me or knocking me into spikes and there's so little room to manoeuvre. And you can't heal either. Typically, I would end this fight with one or two health and then the game shrinks the arena further and has you fight fairly fast enemies over spikes in a tiny box. Once I got past that part, though, the rest was easy. There are lots of trash enemies with plenty of space after that, so you get full health and mana for the final fight, which was not particularly difficult either. And what did I get for all the trouble? Useless geo and the hunter's mark, which does nothing, as far as I can tell.
I think it might be this inconsistency that's turns me off the game the most. The game just doesn't know how to use difficulty for either its gameplay or its story. In Dark Souls, you absolutely need every upgrade and item you get, if it's your first time through. They are relatively rare and often hidden away behind bosses or tough enemies or tricky exploration. It doesn't ever feel like you have too many souls. Fighting and exploring in the game is a struggle, an adventure, a triumph. In Super Metroid also, upgrades increase your survivability and open up new opportunities. In Hollow Knight, though, I felt more like a garbage collector than anything else. When I got Desolate Dive, I had to go over the map all over again to places where the ground rumbled. When I got the Dream Nail, I had to get all those bicycle wheel trees and do all those warrior fights. And it's not fun when you have already explored most of the world -- often it feels more like busywork. In La-Mulana, there's at least puzzles to figure out and whatnot (much better in the second game, though). Comparatively, the Abyssal Shriek puzzle was fun enough to figure out, but there's just not a lot of things like that to do in the game.
Quote Posted by Thirith
Isn't
Godhome meant to be exactly that? As far as I can remember, the difficulty-minded fans of the game wanted a hard-as-nails boss gauntlet of sorts, and Team Cherry gave them what they wanted. Unless I misremember what
Godhome is supposed to be (I avoided it exactly because it added the sort of content that I'm not particularly interested in), you're criticising an entirely optional part of the game for being exactly what a bunch of people were calling for.
I didn't back the game, so I don't know anything about that. I'm just reacting to what I experience in the game. And how exactly am I supposed to know it's entirely optional and there isn't anything there that impacts the story or something like that? It's not like it was particularly difficult to reach or anything.
Thirith on 4/7/2020 at 09:51
I didn't back it either. Godhome came out 1 1/2 years after the game was originally released and at the time it was explicitly marketed as such. I can't remember if there was anything in the game itself indicating what it was, and if it wasn't it obviously should be. Though, not having played it, I don't know how well it is hidden and whether it indicates in any way that it is optional and infuriatingly difficult. It simply didn't come up when I replayed the game a year ago.
Starker on 4/7/2020 at 14:11
Okay, since this is not a proper part of the game, I went ahead and read the wiki to figure out whether I really had still things left uncompleted in the game or whether I was just doing extra challenges meant for the git gud crowd. It says it's the final chapter of the game, apparently, with new end bosses and all new secrets and stuff. Well, I beat the first 2 pantheons and 2 of 4 thingies in my inventory lit up, so it certainly seems like it's leading somewhere. Also it's right under the city just next to Royal Waterways and it doesn't seem like the narrative is entirely unrelated. Seems like you're meant to beat the original boss and then do this content afterwards for the true ending or something.
Also, I went back and beat the White Defender again, and it seems like he does increasing amounts of damage every fight (4 shield per attack for the fourth fight) and every fight his resolve seems to put to the test, so I think maybe you're supposed to break his mind or something by these fights? But, again, I'm not sure if it's a legitimate part of the game or something just put there at the demand of backers for more difficulty. All I know is that the more I play of this end game content, the less I want to play the game. I'm tempted to just go take the bad/regular ending and be done with the game. Apparently, I have 110% of completion (out of 112%) and the remaining 2% include defeating the last of the three pantheons plus another one somewhere. It's really a shame... I rather liked the game for the first 20 hours or so, but the last 40 have been just more and more draining. And now I'm so close to the finish too.
On the plus side, I (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daOt3HoiPSo&list=PL_ZI-8XkrmSl-AofbmA5MqTwF_W9SdVGR&index=1) finally found a good let's play to watch. Someone who actually comments on the game and the lore and bothers exploring at least a little bit. So I think I'll do that and finish the game myself when he's about the beat the last boss.
Aja on 7/7/2020 at 06:29
Hollow Knight was an interesting experience for me as well. I really enjoyed it for the first 50 hours or so although I found a lot of its personality to be cloying and overly precious, like it was trying to capture the feeling of Dark Souls without understanding what actually made Dark Souls great, which was its sense of solemnity and dignity. Hollow Knight certainly attempts this, but for me it came across as undeveloped and often silly.
Calling it easy, though, stings a bit because I found many of the bosses to be incredibly frustrating. I got quite far, not quite to the end, and then attempted the Path of Pain one afternoon. Like six hours later I was maybe 60 percent through it, having spent the last couple hours on one section, and I became overwhelmed and depressed by the futility of it. Normally I'd take a break and come back to a game later, but at this point I had wasted almost my entire day off, and I felt like a fool for having done it. I tried a few more nights to make progress, but the amount of time I was spending was feeling more and more ridiculous, so I quit outright. That was a while ago, and I should probably go back and properly finish it, but I still feel that tinge of shame and regret when I think about it. Hollow Knight is the game that beat me not just in terms of its challenge but emotionally, too.