Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game seven years in the making and one of the most anticipated titles of 2025, released a few days ago. Player anticipation was so high that Silksong’s release on September 4th crashed storefronts due to the sheer volume of players attempting to purchase it. After a few days of playing the game, many players have begun criticizing Silksong for its unforgiving mechanics and steep difficulty curve.

In one reddit post on the Hollow Knight subreddit, a player carefully outlines various fanbase critiques of Silksong. One such critique is the amount of random enemies or environmental structures who do “double damage.” In Silksong, players have a number of “masks” which denote their health. Players start out with five masks, but can create additional ones by finding mask shards scattered across the world. In the original Hollow Knight, basic enemy attacks only cost players one mask of damage when hit. However, some of Silksong’s basic enemies or obstacles, such as the wormpits in Blasted Steps or the traps in Hunter’s March, hit for two. 

As reflected by a review on Steam with hundreds of positive reactions, the increased damage has frustrated some players. The “double damage” forces players to upgrade their health multiple times in order for a fight to be of similar difficulty to the original Hollow Knight. The review also points out the limited number of accessible “benches” or checkpoints throughout the open world, which forces players to tediously run back through challenging areas in order to retrieve the currency they lost or re-challenge an enemy. 

Fans have already begun to express their disappointment with the title, as the Steam Reviews for Silksong have changed from “Overwhelmingly Positive” to “Very Positive” in the short time since the game has been released. Some players have struggled so much with these new mechanics that they are debating if Team Cherry, the developers behind Silksong, should release a patch making the game easier for casual players. 

Given how recently Silksong was released, it’s unclear if Team Cherry will address these fan critiques in future updates or leave the game’s challenging nature untouched.