Yeah, no way in Hell I’m buying Silksong after the stuff I’ve heard about it.

I gave up lol. Got tired of redoing the Hollow Knight fight.

I don’t know about recommend over, but I found Axiom Verge and Hero Core both very enjoyable. Axiom Verge is impressive in particular for being a solo effort, and Hero Core is free.

Original Hollow Knight.

the kind of tension that a creator of a game wants to evoke

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.

payer-character

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”

I just wanted to ease the grind for geo. Some of the late-game upgrades are so expensive

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.

Was it supposed to be hard? The marketing doesn’t seem to emphasize that at all. The marketing mostly seemed to center around “Here’s more Hollow Knight, but now you play as that secondary character you all love.”

A setting with evil races is a setting in which genocide is implicitly justified. Anyone who finds appeal in such a setting should think long and hard about why.

Funnel-shaped: narrow at the beginning to avoid overwhelming the player, gradually opening up to allow more freedom as the player progresses and comes to grip with the mechanics.

Wasn’t that the game where the devs were like “yeah this whole thing is a massive shared universe where you can interact with everyone else” but it turned out they were just straight-up lying lmao

diversity of western media

Owned by a handful of billionaires and beholden to their interests. It’s like thinking that the different brands of bottled water are “diverse” because they have different packaging.

Year Zero was a product of American culture during the Bush administration, but it only becomes more relevant as time goes on.

We think we’ve climbed so high on all the backs we’ve condemned
We face the consequence; this is the beginning of the end

“What’s woke dog”

“Not much, what’s woke with you”