The elegance of movement in Silksong

Pain never felt this good

This is an article about Silksong, the new game from Team Cherry / the much awaited sequel to Hollow Knight. You may have heard of it even if you aren’t in the gaming sphere, because so many people were trying to download the game on release that virtually all digital marketplaces buckled under the load. But before we talk about Silksong, I want to start by talking about the startup world.

One thing that may not be obvious for people who are not in the startup world is that building a consumer facing company is very different from building a b2b company, especially when it comes to sales. Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money. If you give me $X, I think I can make you more than $X in return." And the business owner will evaluate if you are full of shit or not, and will then give you some cash. By contrast, selling to consumers is really hard, because it's never really clear why a consumer is using or buying your product to begin with. The conversation about money above doesn't really work. Sure, some people buy products because they think said products will save them money. But people will buy products for status, or because they think doing so will get them laid, or because it will get their parents off their back, or because they want to be entertained, or even for no particular reason at all.

“Consumers behave like rational actors” is total bullshit.

And some people will pay for your product even if it actively causes them pain and stress, or maybe because it causes them pain and stress. There are people out there who will look at a bottle of hot sauce called "Sphincter melter 5000" and go "yup that's the one for me" and drop $35 to have the worst time of their lives.

This is the thought that was running through my head as I died to the Savage Beastfly for the 23rd time. That's not an exaggeration. I think this one Silksong boss killed me over 30 times total, a grim toll made only slightly less painful with the knowledge that most people were never going to get this far anyway, and that therefore my desire to feel pain makes me somehow superior to all the other people who did put this game down and did something else with their weekend.

I’ve gotten very familiar with the Hornet death animation over the last 48 hours.

Silksong as a game should not exist. It is so brutally difficult that it stretches the very definition of the word "game". Games are supposed to be fun. They are meant to delight with their whimsy. Sometimes, yes, they are meant to be challenging. But that challenge is in service of fun. My work is a world of ambiguity and stress and responsibility. Games are meant to be a distraction and a release from that. So am I having fun? I certainly don't feel joy in my heart when I fall into the lava for the seventeenth time because I missed a jump (if lava was a boss it would easily take the top spot for the number of times it killed me).

And yet.

I have played this game obsessively since it came out. I cannot put it down. I have been an unresponsive zombie for the last 48 hours, much to Mia's chagrin and dismay. She just doesn't get it. This game is incredible, I say to myself as a small grub brutally murders me for the mistake of touching its seemingly soft and cuddly body.

This dude on his way to ruin your whole week.

The secret to why this game is like crack is the movement. The movement is so buttery smooth that simply getting back to the boss that just ripped you to shreds is a complex, skillful, and fundamentally enjoyable experience. Which is good, because you make that trek a lot.

I think the best games are expressive in some way. When you play the game, you constantly make choices about what you're doing that reflect your mastery and the way you choose to interact. This is very obvious in multiplayer or team games. Like, consider dunking in basketball. No one dunks because they need to. They do it because it feels fantastic to be so good at the game that you can literally dunk on your opponents, which is also why the phrase "dunk on <person/people>" has entered the lexicon. I'm not particularly athletic, so I can't dunk. But I imagine a close equivalent — in the dopamine receptor, brain psychiatry sense — is landing a crazy combo spike in Super Smash Bros. I love pulling off a spike. The blast of light from off screen. The crashing sound. Even the little trail that comes off your opponent as they go shooting down. All of this culminates in a shot of adrenaline and morale for you, and the hopeless feeling of devastation for your opponent.

Basketball and Smash Bros don't have a lot in common. But I think they both give players a ton of flexibility in how they choose to approach the game. That in turn makes these games extremely enjoyable to play and to watch, because you can constantly show off your mastery as you dunk both literally and metaphorically.

Even though Silksong is a single player game, I think it is expressive in a similar way. The simplest actions have an extremely large option space. Consider something really simple, like jumping from one ledge to the next.

In a crappy game, there would only be one way to traverse this. You would have to jump on the first ledge. And then you would jump on the second ledge.

A better game may give you more flexibility by allowing you to control the height of your jump based on how long you press the jump button. Now, you have two ways to traverse:

Anyway, here's Silksong.

You could jump twice. You could do a long jump. You could jump and dash. You could sprint-jump. You could short jump, grab the first platform wall, jump off, and dash back to the second platform. You could short jump, hit the edge of the first platform, spring off it, and land on the second. You could short jump, grab the edge of the first platform, spring off it, dash, then attack-downwards to get to the ground faster. There are so many options, so many ways of getting around, so many opportunities to show off your reaction time and scrape off frames on how quickly you get from point A to point B. Something as simple as jumping on a ledge becomes a display of technical mastery.

The only other videogames that have this much focus on movement alone are the Mario 3D platformers — Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, Mario Galaxy 1 and 2, and Mario Odyssey. There, the focus on movement is extremely intentional. Nintendo devs will spend months polishing Mario's movement in simple, empty rooms. They only build the rest of the game when the movement feels perfect.

Miyamoto back in 1996:

Miyamoto: That’s how we make games at Nintendo, though: we get the fundamentals solid first, then do as much with that core concept as our time and ambition will allow.

Interviewer: And in this case, that fundamental basis was the model you made with Mario and Luigi running around that room.

Miyamoto: Yes, it was being able to move Mario and Luigi around with the 3D control stick, and being able to change the camera view with the press of a button. One of our big development themes was letting the players move Mario around any way they wanted. We wanted to make a game where just moving Mario around was fun.

And again in 2007:

Miyamoto: The good part about Mario 64, was how you were able to freely move Mario around, who was now in 3D for the first time. Being very blunt about this, I actually felt at one point that this didn’t really have to be a game.

Iwata: You felt that it was so fun being able to move Mario around, it didn’t need anything else.

Miyamoto: Right. There was no other game before Mario 64, where you were able to truly move around freely in a 3D environment. It was great just being able to move Mario to find a star.

This kind of deep, intricate movement is a fantastic match for the Metroidvania genre. There are dozens of ways to move through any single room, which means even when you're backtracking through old territory you never really feel bored. To be honest, I find myself enjoying how quickly I can move through a familiar room, deftly bouncing from one wall to the next as I make my way to my nearly-inevitable demise at the hands of some boss.

That's the other part of all this, the boss fights. Have I mentioned how difficult these boss fights are? But here too, the movement is a fantastic fit and a saving grace.

Difficult games are not created equal. Many games are artificially difficult. It's not that they require more skill or more expertise or more practice. Rather, they are poorly built, which results in unpredictable consequences. The most common example of artificial difficulty is shitty hitboxes. You expect to land on a ledge but you fall through. You think you'll dodge an attack but it hits you anyway. You fire a shot that passes through an enemy without doing anything at all. I love Don't Starve Together, it is a fantastic game, but it has some of the most atrocious hitboxes I have ever seen in a game ever. There are so many times where I am confident that I am out of range of an attack, only to die anyway. It makes the game meaningfully worse.

This is bullshit.

As a one-time game developer, I'm sympathetic — collision detection is a surprisingly hard problem. Everyone knows what the ideal is. You want every pixel to have 'mass', as if it was part of a real-world object, regardless of how complicated your character model is or how fluid your animations are. But if you try to handle collisions for every pixel, you will rapidly bump up against the hard reality of CPU processing power. That in turn causes frame drops and input lag, which together are the second most common example of artificial difficulty.

Still, as a consumer, my sympathy only extends so far. Games that are artificially difficult feel unfair. Especially if the game simply requires a level of precision to proceed. In fact, as a general rule, the more a game requires precision, the more important it is to have extremely dialed in hitboxes and a really consistently high framerate. If I am constantly dying to shitboxes or lag, I will stop playing the game, because the tight connection between 'do thing' and 'predictable outcome' and 'dopamine lights up' begins to unravel.

Blue boxes are ‘hurt boxes’, i.e. where the character can take damage. Red boxes are ‘hit boxes’, i.e. where the character does damage. Some games are better at this than others.

They will have to invent new numbers to describe the amount of times that I have died to Silksong's gauntlet of bosses. But I have never, not a single time, felt like any of those deaths were unfair. Silksong's movement is so finely tuned and so precise that I know deep in my bones that any hit or death is entirely on me. Of course, that in turn makes tangible improvement extremely visible. You go into a boss fight and die, and then you die again, and then again. Each time you get a bit further, and do a few more hits. And slowly, finally, painfully, you come out on top victorious. The game does not pull any punches, so if you win it's entirely because you have developed your expertise to the point where the impossible became possible. As a result, the joy of beating a Silksong boss is perhaps unrivaled in gaming, akin to Sisyphus finally rolling his boulder up the mountain and resting while gazing at the view…only to then encounter the next boss and do it all again.

To say that Silksong is not for everyone is an understatement. Silksong is a love letter to exactly one kind of gamer: the perfectionist. You could play Silksong's predecessor, Hollow Knight, and not be all that good at it. Hollow Knight was a tough game, but I think you could get through it and fall in love with the environmental story telling and the lore and the music and characters. Silksong has all of this in spades, too, but it is so damn hard that you will not be able to access any of it unless you are willing to put in some serious effort. As a result, I suspect many of the people who enjoyed Hollow Knight will actually bounce off Silksong precisely because it is so hard, and they simply won't have the tenacity. You have to be motivated by mastery. You have to seek out improvement. And most of all, you have to love pain.

But for us few who manage to make the climb, I think it will be worth it.