It’s safe to say that one of, if not, the hottest game at the moment is Hollow Knight: Silksong. After the surprise release date announcement, the launch of the game literally crashed the video game industry, so to speak, as every online storefront selling the game bugged out. Similar to the original, the sequel has garnered lots of discussion regarding its difficulty. The game’s first post-launch patch made things easier early on as developer Team Cherry said that the game was tuned a little too hard at release. Now, speaking at the new gaming-focused exhibit at Australia’s national musuem of screen culture, ACMI, Team Cherry took the time to discuss the difficulty and their design philosophy for Silksong.

Silksong’s protagonist Hornet is faster than the Knight from the first game which led Team Cherry to make enemies tougher.  “Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight, so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,”  Ari Gibson said. William Pellen revealed: “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss.

“[There’s] the same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

With this in mind, Team Cherry wanted to make the enemies more powerful to present Hornet with a challenge. In other words, they had to “bring everyone else up to match [her] level.”

Regarding Silksong’s design philosophy, Team Cherry insisted that by presenting the player with the choice to constantly divert from the main path, they are able to dance around Silksong’s now infamous steep difficulty curve. “Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty,” Gibson admitted, “but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

Gibson also noted that there are “ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled,” by bosses that players are stuggling against for an extended period of time.