More Silksong

[schneefink]

Day 3
I decided I would practice the enemies in the chapel of the reaper fight: turns out they were not that difficult once I started to approach them like I do bosses, namely trying to learn all of their moves. …kind of obvious in hindsight, yes. Anyway.
Because they give many rosary beads, eventually I decided to continue to grind until I had 500 and could finally buy the key from the vendor in Bone Bottom and unlock that door in the Deep Docks. I expected just one room, but turns out there's several, and a shortcut to Far Fields, and ways to other areas probably that I can't access yet. I also found some craftmetal, to buy another tool from Forge Daughter.
Back to Greymoor and the Chapel of the Reaper: the fights went much smoother, but I ran into a gameplay bug where some of the enemies would sometimes disappear into the ceiling and I got soft-locked. I think that happened around five times until I managed to kill them quickly enough. But then I found the Crest of the Reaper! Very cool, I didn't realize there'd be multiple crests. I'll have to experiment a bit, see what I like better.
After that I went back to Moorwing, I'm still struggling with the second phase but getting there. I have some other places I could go if this gets too frustrating, like to the right of Greymoor (though I was warned it would be challenging), but this fight is definitely doable.
I'm at around 11 hours.

Day 4
I woke up with a headache that never really went away, so not in the best condition to play a challenging game like Silksong. I fought the Moorwing a few more times, then did some more rosary farming to buy the spike trap and then I did some more exploring in the Far Fields and rescued another flea, but then stopped because I was too tired to keep fighting the ants. I did some more rosary farming to buy the mask fragment, then decided to explore instead and went to Craw Lake, but when I died early I decided to leave it here for the night because I was so tired.

Day 5
Called in sick that day and was so tired that I barely played, either. I explored Greymoor some more and unlocked a bench near Craw Lake, and I ran past the hanging poison mole above Bone Bottom only to find a locked door that requires a simple key and now I feel like I've wasted the one I bought because the rewards behind the door in Deep Docks were not that exciting. Ah well.

Day 6
I spent the entire evening practicing that stupid bird challenge room in Craw Lake. I was so close so many times! I played a couple of times, then took a break to do chores, then tried again, took a break to study – I think that's a great strategy btw, I'm going to try and keep that up :)
In my third session of the day I finally succeeded \o/ At least the rewards are nice: a new silk skill, a new tool, and a rescued flea. With that, on to Moorwing. (According to the patch notes Moorwing will be slightly nerfed in the next patch, so maybe I should wait until that is live and do something else until then? Hm.) I'm a little over 15 hours in.

Day 7
I did some backtracking in the hopes of finding new places to go, but only found some relics/beads, so instead I went back to Moorwing. Aand then took another break after a few attempts.


I have now looked at some Silksong comments online that promised to be mostly spoiler-free (and generally were, I am now just very afraid of some specific areas that people keep cursing that I have not found yet.) Many people complain about it being extremely difficult, much more so than Hollow Knight, and I'm a bit surprised because purely from the fights/platforming it doesn't seem much more difficult than HK to me, though maybe it gets more difficult later.

I looked at my notes from playing HK and realized that I gave up on a boss to go elsewhere first quite often. I would love to do that here, the world feeling so open to exploration was one of my favorite parts of HK, unfortunately I don't really know where else to go right now. I'm almost certainly missing something (there's some areas where I haven't done much backtracking yet), and I assume it opens up more later, but being stuck at a boss doesn't feel great. Maybe that contributes to the feeling of difficulty. (The runback to Moorwing, on the other hand, is easy, and people who complain about it are exaggerating imo.)

I also saw a comment saying that dying is less punishing than in HK, and on reflection I realized that's true, much appreciated. The only thing you lose on death are your rosary beads, and you can buy strings to store them and then you can keep even those (though it does come with a 25% cost.) You don't need to fight your shade, you simply slash your silk cocoon once, and it fills up your silk spool, too.

I still enjoy the game a lot, and I look forward to discovering new areas! The ones I've seen so far were cool, but none yet were as ~magical as my favorite HK areas. Still to come, I'm sure.