I've uninstalled Hollow Knight
Added 2022-03-28 17:58:03 +0000 UTCSouls-like is a kink: you're the sub of a gloomy, smelly, world-sized dungeon, and the game is your master, that keeps on humiliating you until you start doing exactly what it wants. Then, after being tantalized for hours, you get your satisfaction and proceed to be beaten again.
Hollow Knight is a 2D souls-like that makes the formula even smellier, by removing a dimension for dodging boss attacks and giving enemies contact damage.
I’ve downloaded the game because I like the idea of crawling in a 2D vertical labyrinth and I liked the art style. I still like the art style, the creature, and the background designs. It’s the best part of the game.
Too bad that at the time I didn’t know what the souls-like tag on the Steam shop means. It doesn’t stand for “Like a Souls Game”, you mean, a challenging RPG set in a world where everything is wasting away because a god of rottenness has been unleashed; but “Like the first hour of a Souls Game” when you keep on dying when you haven’t yet figured out the controls and the battle system but stretched for the full length of the playthrough.
How so? Well, in the case of Hollow Knight there have been some specific solutions to make the player experience absolutely miserable.
I’ve already mentioned the contact damage because all of sudden this is a platformer where you don’t get to stomp on enemies because you’re the puniest creature of that world. But it doesn’t end here.
You keep being the puniest creature of that world, because you know that crucial aspect of every RPG, making builds and evolving a character skillset? Screw that!
You have to hunt for fucking quarters of additional health points. You get the ability to heal but it takes so many seconds that’s unusable during boss battles, you get an attack spell but it will deplete your mana gauge in three hits, and it will miss all the enemies with a bit of mobility.
The passive ability system of the charms? Negligible. The charms will increment the avatar’s stats in terms of percentage points, they’re costly and inconvenient, like revenge damage that doesn’t let to collect mana or a shield that still lets enemies interrupt your cure.
Every boss battle video on Youtube from this game is always conducted in the same way:
Hit and run, like the player is still in the first hour of the game and hasn’t yet found any new ability or charm.
Because they’re that useless.
It’s the “Whoa! This is worthless!” meme, but with the entire ability tree pasted on.
And you know what’s the most frequent comment under those boss battles videos?
“Gosh, the problem isn’t the boss battle, is the slog to get there.”
Because this game punishes you for dying: the spawn point is several screens behind most of the boss battles, most of them populated by mobs that won’t let you arrive with a full health bar, and there you will find an additional enemy: your own shade, that you will have to fight to get back your money and mana gauge. Good luck if the boss battle has already been triggered.
The message of this game is pretty clear:
“Do it as I say, do it perfectly, or I’m gonna wipe my dung-crusted boots with your face.”
Like every other kink, it can get dangerously out of control, and the people involved let that subtraction of agency, dignity, and free thought seep into the other aspect of their life, transforming themselves into cultists of punishing and frustrating games that can’t take any criticism about their masters, and respond to people timidly saying “Hey, this boss pattern looks like a load of bullshit” with an expression that sounds like self-mockery, but it’s used with no irony at all.
“Git gud.”
That’s what happened when I vented a bit of my frustration on Reddit, in the Hollow Knight subreddit. Link to the post here, please note that I haven’t used any of the colorful expressions I’m using here, but still, like poking a hornet's nest (pun intended), especially about my critique of the lack of difficulty settings.
Then I’ve discovered that difficulty settings are quite a joke inside the soul-like community. And I wonder, why? I bought that game. Can’t I have a version with a handful of different numbers in the code to not spend most of my time catching up with my vindictive corpse?
Is the Soul-like community so bent on itself to not accept a function that the rest of the action-based games in the 21st Century have?
Yeah, it is and Reddit is enthusiastically helping them to bend on themselves so much they can lick their own asses.
The comments are quite many considering that this post cost me negative karma points (it’s not a metaphor, they’re an actual function of Reddit) inside that community and make my post less likely to be read.
That means that a platform for the discussion is structured to obscure any opinion divergent from the most popular one inside a community. It’s an echo-chamber generator.
To the point that one of the commentators asked “Why do you criticize the game in a community dedicated to the fans of the game?”
Well, no, formally it’s a community dedicated to talking about the game, it shouldn’t exclude good-faith criticism, but I cannot blame the guy for not knowing about something that the algorithm itself has been suppressing.
I’ve experienced first-hand how the gaming community is paradoxically so advanced in terms of communication and technology, and so retrograde in terms of style, and culture.
The unavailability of difficulty settings in games is a fragment of the past.
The memory from a period when the chosen audiences for video games were white or Japanese children of families wealthy enough to buy a console, with enough free time to play for entire afternoons, often the same game, grinding or retrying a boss over and over.
Today people have many reasons to want to play a game but do not have the possibility to strictly memorize every enemy pattern and develop reflexes.
Maybe they haven’t trained as kids, or they have disabilities, or it’s their first game of the genre.
Or they already spent the entirety of their day staring at a computer screen and for the hour or so they let themselves play a game, want just to have a good time and not having to wear a chicken hat because of that.
Hollow Knight is a 2D souls-like that makes the formula even smellier, by removing a dimension for dodging boss attacks and giving enemies contact damage.
I’ve downloaded the game because I like the idea of crawling in a 2D vertical labyrinth and I liked the art style. I still like the art style, the creature, and the background designs. It’s the best part of the game.
Too bad that at the time I didn’t know what the souls-like tag on the Steam shop means. It doesn’t stand for “Like a Souls Game”, you mean, a challenging RPG set in a world where everything is wasting away because a god of rottenness has been unleashed; but “Like the first hour of a Souls Game” when you keep on dying when you haven’t yet figured out the controls and the battle system but stretched for the full length of the playthrough.
How so? Well, in the case of Hollow Knight there have been some specific solutions to make the player experience absolutely miserable.
I’ve already mentioned the contact damage because all of sudden this is a platformer where you don’t get to stomp on enemies because you’re the puniest creature of that world. But it doesn’t end here.
You keep being the puniest creature of that world, because you know that crucial aspect of every RPG, making builds and evolving a character skillset? Screw that!
You have to hunt for fucking quarters of additional health points. You get the ability to heal but it takes so many seconds that’s unusable during boss battles, you get an attack spell but it will deplete your mana gauge in three hits, and it will miss all the enemies with a bit of mobility.
The passive ability system of the charms? Negligible. The charms will increment the avatar’s stats in terms of percentage points, they’re costly and inconvenient, like revenge damage that doesn’t let to collect mana or a shield that still lets enemies interrupt your cure.
Every boss battle video on Youtube from this game is always conducted in the same way:
Hit and run, like the player is still in the first hour of the game and hasn’t yet found any new ability or charm.
Because they’re that useless.
It’s the “Whoa! This is worthless!” meme, but with the entire ability tree pasted on.
And you know what’s the most frequent comment under those boss battles videos?
“Gosh, the problem isn’t the boss battle, is the slog to get there.”
Because this game punishes you for dying: the spawn point is several screens behind most of the boss battles, most of them populated by mobs that won’t let you arrive with a full health bar, and there you will find an additional enemy: your own shade, that you will have to fight to get back your money and mana gauge. Good luck if the boss battle has already been triggered.
The message of this game is pretty clear:
“Do it as I say, do it perfectly, or I’m gonna wipe my dung-crusted boots with your face.”
Like every other kink, it can get dangerously out of control, and the people involved let that subtraction of agency, dignity, and free thought seep into the other aspect of their life, transforming themselves into cultists of punishing and frustrating games that can’t take any criticism about their masters, and respond to people timidly saying “Hey, this boss pattern looks like a load of bullshit” with an expression that sounds like self-mockery, but it’s used with no irony at all.
“Git gud.”
That’s what happened when I vented a bit of my frustration on Reddit, in the Hollow Knight subreddit. Link to the post here, please note that I haven’t used any of the colorful expressions I’m using here, but still, like poking a hornet's nest (pun intended), especially about my critique of the lack of difficulty settings.
Then I’ve discovered that difficulty settings are quite a joke inside the soul-like community. And I wonder, why? I bought that game. Can’t I have a version with a handful of different numbers in the code to not spend most of my time catching up with my vindictive corpse?
Is the Soul-like community so bent on itself to not accept a function that the rest of the action-based games in the 21st Century have?
Yeah, it is and Reddit is enthusiastically helping them to bend on themselves so much they can lick their own asses.
The comments are quite many considering that this post cost me negative karma points (it’s not a metaphor, they’re an actual function of Reddit) inside that community and make my post less likely to be read.
That means that a platform for the discussion is structured to obscure any opinion divergent from the most popular one inside a community. It’s an echo-chamber generator.
To the point that one of the commentators asked “Why do you criticize the game in a community dedicated to the fans of the game?”
Well, no, formally it’s a community dedicated to talking about the game, it shouldn’t exclude good-faith criticism, but I cannot blame the guy for not knowing about something that the algorithm itself has been suppressing.
I’ve experienced first-hand how the gaming community is paradoxically so advanced in terms of communication and technology, and so retrograde in terms of style, and culture.
The unavailability of difficulty settings in games is a fragment of the past.
The memory from a period when the chosen audiences for video games were white or Japanese children of families wealthy enough to buy a console, with enough free time to play for entire afternoons, often the same game, grinding or retrying a boss over and over.
Today people have many reasons to want to play a game but do not have the possibility to strictly memorize every enemy pattern and develop reflexes.
Maybe they haven’t trained as kids, or they have disabilities, or it’s their first game of the genre.
Or they already spent the entirety of their day staring at a computer screen and for the hour or so they let themselves play a game, want just to have a good time and not having to wear a chicken hat because of that.
