Both times I managed to equip it right before getting ambushed by a difficult boss 
Don’t think I’ll bother with the fragile charms anymore. The busywork they punish you with for dying isn’t worth it.
Both times I managed to equip it right before getting ambushed by a difficult boss
Don’t think I’ll bother with the fragile charms anymore. The busywork they punish you with for dying isn’t worth it.
I will be so happy when the “soulslike” genre goes out of style and we can just have saves again
Yyyyyep.
For real how did “Hey let’s waste the player’s time if they die” ever catch on. Starting in the 80s we spent like 3 decades moving away from that.
The major innovation of soulslikes is, counterintuitively, that they provide a safety net to let players fail forwards instead of just resetting. Just like the conceit of their enemy design is about creating consistent rhythms, clear telegraphs, and ways to actually avoid taking damage. For all that people meme about the genre being hard or unfair or whatever, its core is the exact opposite: giving the player enough QoL features and fair design that the rest of it can be dialed in tighter without it becoming just annoying the way jankier games are.
That’s why every game that’s actually improved on the formula has moved more in that direction, with more “consumables” that just refresh to full on death or rest instead of being farmable or limited.
Although Hollow Knight is also a metroidvania, which are usually kind of the opposite of that design philosophy, hinging a lot more on farming bullshit and resetting to savepoints. I understand Hollow Knight leaned more towards the soulslike QoL stuff, though? I’ve never played it though; I don’t like metroidvanias in general and every time I’ve seen someone playing Hollow Knight it has not looked particularly appealing.
I’ve always enjoyed Metroidvanias, and it’s definitely that aspect of it and not the Soulslike aspect that appeals to me. Barring a few nasty surprises, I’ve been able to maintain a reasonable power level for the challenges I’m faced with despite never really grinding for cash. Only reason I tried to use the Fragile Greed charm is because I’m the kind of guy who immediately wants to buy every powerup he sees.
Outside of the Fragile Charms, Hollow Knight’s system is actually quite forgiving. If you die, you don’t lose any progress, though you do lose whatever money you were carrying and your capacity for storing soul energy (used for healing and certain special attacks) is reduced. You get your stuff back by going to the spot where you died and killing your ghost, which doesn’t put up much of a fight. The “you have to kill your ghost” mechanic is slightly annoying, but it’s well within the bounds of what I’m willing to tolerate for an otherwise excellent game.
I forgive the “you have to kill your ghost” mechanic entirely because the ghost acts as an object you can spawn in almost every room that you can bounce off of to reach areas early
There’s a huge skip you can do using this near a vendor’s house. It’s a tough one that takes some really well-timed hits to pull off but it’s wild.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SEu2ZtyBPDE
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
That’s literally less forgiving than the usual dark souls mechanic fwiw
Failing forward can work in tabletop with a living dm. Failing foward in video games just means fucking up saves on purpose.
The core design is a checkpoint system with progress being saved (so if you open a chest or a shortcut or beat a boss and then die without reaching a checkpoint again, that persists anyways). Ideally that also goes along with refreshing consumables and there not being any truly finite consumables at all, but including a few finite side things to hide just how hard this design favors the player and holds their hand seems like a tradition that won’t go away. Dropping but being able to recover a non-bankable but infinite currency is also one of the fake risks it commonly uses to make it feel riskier too.
The whole thing is a big attempt at merging save/reload and respawn systems to make a model where you always gain something if you make progress, even if you fail too, while cultivating an illusion of risk or consequences even as the game picks you up, pats you on the back, and fills up your health charges to full so you can hop right back into things without needing to grind or buy more or anything.
What do you mean when you say this?
In order for a failing forward system to work as designed, the game has to not include a fully functional save system, otherwise players would just revert to a save before the failure that the game wants them to fail forward from.
See my other question, I guess
If soulslike fail forward were actually more forgiving than saving, soulslike games wouldn’t have to remove the save feature to force people to engage with it.
Your wording has a lot of weird question-begging in it: “not include a fully functional save system,” “remove the save feature,” etc. This isn’t an accurate representation of what it’s doing and makes it harder to talk about unless I just ignore what you actually say. The games do save, and typically they save constantly, though HK and Silksong don’t save your location in an up-to-date way, they tie that to designated save points (like almost all games with save points do). Dark Souls though actually saves your approximate location anywhere in the world so long as you’re not in the air or something, which is more than most games do. Regardless, both series do save lots of other information about the world, like gates opened, items retrieved or spent, non-respawning enemies and bosses defeated, NPC quests (but typically not if they died in a fight alongside you, which again is generous), and the currency isn’t “not saved,” the information isn’t lost, you just get a penalty that you don’t like. It’s fine to not like that penalty, but it makes things difficult when you describe it incorrectly.
Trying to address what you’re saying here particularly: I don’t think that makes sense as a criticism. Games usually aren’t made with a bunch of modular parts in the core mechanics to switch out, and they are designed based on the systems that they use. Dark Souls would mostly become harder if you had conventional saves instead, because you would need to make it back alive to a save point for your progress to be saved and otherwise it’s just dust in the wind if you open a shortcut but you get killed right after. If you could toggle systems, that would be confusing and harebrained for basically a trivial benefit if you understood the system, because as DS is designed it usually wouldn’t even be a good idea to use normal saves for boss runs, because you still might die after you beat the boss and then you need to fight the boss again.
Not just “let’s waste the player’s time if they die” but “let’s make a game where the player is supposed to die a lot figuring things out then waste the player’s time when they die”
And then when you say this some Soulslike fan will jump in and say “No, you don’t get it, that’s the point” and probably imply you suck at video games
Literally this but replace “capitalism” with “Soulslikes”
Imply? Soulslike fans will say it to your face, then suggest that sucking at video games also makes you a bad person.
I remember once being told on this very site that my dislike of Dark Souls was illegitimate because I didn’t spend long enough (about half an hour) playing it.
I have never played an actual FromSoft Souls game, and I never will. Their effect on every other game around is universally bad.
Super Meat Boy solved the “brutally hard but not frustrating” problem like 20 years ago
I disagree that it wasn’t frustrating but I do appreciate that Meat Boy sticks to the philosophy of getting you back into the action as quickly as possible. The harder something is, the more important it is that the game doesn’t waste your time getting back in
To answer seriously, a major part of the reason it started off that way was because video games were for a while mostly the purview of arcades and that sort of time-wasting death mechanic was the most obvious way to get kids to keep pumping in quarters. Make sure the game was hard enough that death was likely and frequent but if you wanted to keep going from where you died instead of starting over, just pop in some more money. Even for home consoles though, that sort of death mechanic was a way of padding out the game, making what was actually very little content seem longer because you have to keep redoing the same stuff.
As with the majority of shitty things in this world, when you trace them back far enough, you discover the profit motive (therefore capitalism) at their root.
I would say though that with the way games are played now in a very different set of circumstances compared to the 80s, the time punishment for player character death is used mostly just as a way to make the stakes feel high. I know I’m not saying anything that everyone here doesn’t already know, but if there are no negative consequences for dying, then there is much less incentive to avoid death and the tension the game relies on to feel meaningful would just be sucked out. The soulslike solution to making death consequential actually works pretty well imo in a lot of cases, but still can be very annoying (and sometimes detrimental to a game) depending on a lot of other factors, ranging from how well it fits with the rest of the game’s mechanics to individual player skill.
Well, that and technical limitations. On the console side of things, at least, password systems and then save batteries proliferated fairly quickly once they became viable.
I never really bought this as an argument in favor of Soulslikes because a negative consequence for death was codified long before they emerged as a genre: you fail whatever challenge killed you and have to try again if you want to progress.
Well sure, that’s one of the more obvious consequences and it works great for some games (someone mentioned Super Meat Boy, and another example is Celeste though those aren’t soulslikes) and works great even in some scenarios within soulslike, such as losing a health pip when you hit spikes but start back immediately where you were before hitting the spikes to try again. But that doesn’t mean other penalties can’t further improve the kind of tension that a creator of a game wants to evoke or the kind of risk vs reward that a player is meant to consider. With games where longer term exploration is a big part of what is meant to drive the player, a mechanic that penalizes multiple or continued health losses with being set back a ways in exploration is often a good way to maintain that tension. It’s not some evil thing that developers are trying to do to make players mad, it’s a balance they’re trying to find to varying degrees of success. For example, I love metroidvanias, and I love it when they are difficult in terms of putting high demands on a player practicing a platforming sequence to get it right, because when as a player you do get it right, it feels really good, but in my opinion, as I said in a different thread, Silksong has gone too far in towards heavily punishing players by giving them too little health, making enemy damage too high, and payer-character damage too low, with the runbacks are usually too long. But I can still understand why it is that way and what the game’s creators were trying to do, I just think they missed the mark by overshooting too far on the penalties. It’s not an either/or kind of thing. The soulslike death mechanic works better in some games than in others, though I’d agree that it’s probably being overused at this point and often put in games where it’s a lot harder to justify its presence.
I might just not have the right psychology for this, because the only tension Soulslike mechanics have invoked in me is a kind of weary “Ugh, if I lose this fight I’m going to have to do so much shit before I can try again.” My brain just processes the whole thing as an unwelcome interruption of my attempt to beat the challenge in front of me. It doesn’t matter how fun I normally find the core gameplay loop, in that context it feels like having to fill out and submit paperwork to get the approval to retry the challenge I just failed.
I know this was a typo, but I’m going to pretend it was a pun about how Silksong constantly makes you spend ingame money to do routine tasks.
It’s pretty funny that you say this actually, because I’m exactly the same but with a different variation on it. I tend not to like bosses in general. They often feel like they ruin the flow of a game for me and just become this bottleneck that if I am not able to overcome it relatively quickly, just becomes a chore I have to get through in order to continue on doing what I want to do by exploring the world. Pretty much exactly as you describe above, where it’s a skill check that if I can’t pass, I am denied the approval of the game to continue playing and progressing. I understand why bosses are there, and there are some that I’ve come to enjoy fighting again after I’ve beaten them and they are no longer a barrier to me being able to able to play, but in most cases I just wish they weren’t there, or rather that they are optional instead of mandatory (as is sometimes the case). It’s not a pleasurable experience to butt your head against a wall repeatedly and told you aren’t allowed to go further because you weren’t good enough to beat this one specific thing. But I realize I’m in the minority there, that most people enjoy boss fights a lot more and even find them be the highlights of the game. So needless to say, I hear you on just plain not liking that death mechanic. I think it does just come down a lot to personal preference though, some things just click with some people and not others.
lol, uh yeah… I uh meant to say it that way as a subtle criticism of Silksong’s highly flawed economy… really, it was intentional (*winkwink*)
@BeanisBrain@hexbear.net you called it lmao
What did I say that he “called”?
He said elsewhere in this thread
But I didn’t do that.
“no you don’t get it that’s the point”
“probably imply you suck at video games”
That’s not at all what I said, not even a little bit. BeanisBrain asked the question: “how did “Hey let’s waste the player’s time if they die” ever catch on.” And I answered. I started with the reason it began like that and continued with the reason it is so common in games today. Nowhere did I imply anyone “didn’t get it” and I wasn’t even defending the reasoning. Please don’t accuse me of things I didn’t do.
Absolutely nowhere did I even imply that BeanisBrain or anyone else “probably suck at video games.” Stating the fact that the degree to which a person can enjoy a game mechanic that demands high skill can be heavily influenced by how readily able that individual is able to meet that demand is not a putdown, and it’s disingenuous to act like it is. I am not very good at video games, it takes me a long time to get the movements down to muscle memory, but I am privileged enough to be able to have enough time that I can practice at it and build that skill anyway, so I am able to enjoy difficult games despite having poor reflexes (due at least in part to a TBI). I absolutely do not blame, look down upon, or cast even the tiniest bit of negativity on any person who either lacks the inherent skill to learn how to play a game quickly (like me), or any person who simply doesn’t have the time to put into a game, especially any game which has high demands on players to learn its mechanics.
I’ve actually said many times that I literally despise the “git gud” attitude and its ubiquity when people criticize the difficulty of games. Here is an example from a year ago where I also mention coming around to being able to enjoy a genre I had previously decided I was simply not good enough of a player to be able to enjoy. Whenever the argument about whether or not games should have difficulty settings so that anyone, regardless of their skill level (again, it’s usually just a function of how much time they’re willing or able to put in to practicing it) can play a given game, I am always the one advocating for the inclusion of difficulty levels that allow everyone to be able to play the game even if that’s not how the developers “intended it.” I am literally the opposite of the kind of person who just jumps in to tell someone they suck at video games and I am genuinely offended that you’re trying to paint me that way.
We solved that in the 90s through things called cheat codes. Or more specifically, extra lives and level select cheats. And a lot of xennial/millennial g*mers hate admitting this, but the reason why we were able to play and beat those hardTM games was because we first beat them with cheat codes and we slowly eased on the amount of cheats we needed until we practiced playing through the game enough that we could finally beat it without cheats. That’s more or less how I played through the Doom shareware.
G*mers still care about game difficulty in 2025 as if every game doesn’t become hardTM if you’re trying to speedrun it at WR pace. Any moderately popular game will have WR times that would take hundreds of hours for someone who’s not part of that speedrunning community to even crack at.
But of course, most g*mers don’t actually want hardTM games, but games that celebrate their mediocrity. Notice how “git gud” didn’t come from any speedrunning community but from a franchise community that inflates the difficulty of their games even though those games sell millions of copies.
This is misunderstanding how saving in Soulslikes work, because typically they let you keep everything except the currency and one other resource (humanity in DS1, the full vessel capacity in Hollow Knight, etc.). Nothing else is undone by death, so you can keep items, defeated non-respawning enemies*, and so on. In many respects, it’s much more generous than conventional saves.
*Yes, most enemies reset like in basically every game, but some just die and they stay dead even if you die right after, unlike in most games.
I understand how it works, I just hate it
So you want games to be less forgiving?
Dishonest wrong framing
Weren’t you and your friend just complaining about people calling you a bad person for feeling differently about a video game thing? Now you’re attacking my character for an honest opinion about how a design choice impacts difficulty?
You can just say that my characterization is “dishonest and wrong” you want, but you yourself admitted just a second ago that the DS system is in several respects more generous than those in most games. Normal saves mean much more frequent brick walls in terms of difficulty. If you’re already out of currency and whatever the other resource is, then what you get is all upside, and that’s even more true in a game like Silksong where doing the corpse run gets you full silk irrespective of what it was at when you died.
I have not attacked your character. I stated that your framing is dishonest and wrong.
I have also not “admitted” that a soulslike system is in any way more forgiving than saves.
You’re accusing me of dishonesty
If that’s your perspective, you didn’t communicate it very clearly, because I said, emphasis mine:
And you simply replied:
So it sure reads like you tacitly agreed with what I said and just dislike it anyway (which is fine). Perhaps that’s not what you meant to convey.
This part I understand and hate
This part is dishonest and wrong
I dislike corpse running, especially in games like Hollow Knight which are supposed to encourage exploration, but otherwise I really like how the genre handles death. It prevents save scumming, which I am always very prone to, often making my experience worse.
I do think basically any game should have difficulty options, and in case of a soulslike an opt-in easy mode (that maybe prevents getting some achievements) is perfect. Nine Sols did it quite well with customizable sliders for received and dealt damage, except for calling it “Story Mode” like there is no reason you might want to slightly lower the difficulty other than just wanting to breeze through.
In general I wish the discussions on soulslike difficulty were more chill, there is merit to both sides.
I have never had an experience made worse by save scumming. I have frequently had an experience made better, or a game made tolerable at all, by save scumming.
The game I save scum the hardest is Rimworld, because it’s made to be a tragicomic story generator but I like to play it as a happy commune builder. Rimworld pretty much always has a way to fail forward, it’ll send more colonists whenever you’re running low, but it would be absolutely unplayable for me if the designer had thought that meant it didn’t need saves.
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