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.
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.
The bare minimum for a fully functional save system is a way to fully record a previous game state and then later return to it.
This is not present in soulslikes.
So you don’t like that you can’t have a selection of multiple save slots like in, for example, Skyrim? I think I probably have, by coincidence, a bias toward older and more primitive games that functionally couldn’t do that on the fly, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have save systems. Not having a save system means that when you turn the game on, there isn’t save data there and you need to start from the beginning or use a code or something. Certainly, to say that not having multiple save slots is “removing the save feature” is silly. They do save.
I suppose it wouldn’t be the end of the world to have a “Continue” or “Reload” option when you die, but given the auto-saving that means there would need to be a separate save for the last time you were at a bonfire unless you want to reload to .3 seconds before the death blow, and then you’d be motivated to return to the bonfire for every little thing in case you want to reload (like in any game with freely-accessible save points) or else you need to just eat the reset because again, reloading the save is usually disadvantageous and otherwise is usually trivial. That means there would probably need to be manual saves to avoid that issue, and then that gives the game a perverse incentive for constantly saving and immediately redoing every encounter until you get a perfect take. idk, it just seems like a less interesting game to me, but it’s fine that we like different things.