what the heck is going on in pharloom?

thu, 28 may 2026, 09:12pm utc

spoilers for silksong below

i think hollow knight: silksong, hereafter simply referred to as silksong, suffers from a curious issue which is backloading the most interesting, engaging and difficult boss encounters while failing to make the stuff that comes before short and manageable enough to avoid complete player burnout. the community, i.e. some nerds on reddit voting on a poll, has reached a consensus regarding the most egregious encounters (i agree with their choices), and four of those seven bosses are placed in act 3, the technically optional finale that eventually leads to the true ending

it seems plausible that the developers wanted to filter out all the "normies" by giving them a default ending after a reasonable amount of hours played while the truly dedicated heroes or whatever would progress to act 3 and test their patience by going through yet another difficulty spike and fighting like thirteen more bosses over the span of tens of hours, but i find that somewhat hard to believe since the ending variety is just smoke and mirrors. make no mistake: the true ending is the only satisfying one, as was the case in hollow knight. so why would team cherry make its game such a tedious, lengthy slog if they want players to reach the true ending? maybe they got lost in their cruelty-first design approach. regardless, there's been discussions regarding demand for shorter experiences for a while now, i think primarily stoked by ubisoft-style open world "games", and silksong definitely qualifies for extensive trimming

my personal journey in pharloom was a rollercoaster, or in other words: an emotional disaster. i hit my first wall right before the grand gate to the citadel. to be granted access to the holy halls, you must first be judged by, well, the last judge. i truly love this encounter as it offers the player exactly what i want from a game with mechanics as tight as silksong's. she reminds me a lot of final fantasy xiv raid encounters, and learning to navigate those, where to move, when to strike, when to be passive is such an incredible rush. hollow knight let me down a little with its overly simple boss mechanics; there was so much more room for boss expression, considering how great the movement was. the judge being so well designed convinced me of silksong being on the right track. what i didn't so much love is the careful platforming you have to do to get back to her arena after you fail, and since chances are you will fail a lot, it gets old quick. i uninstalled the game for the first time after one run-back too many. on a mechanical level, i was really enjoying my time, and i didn't have anything else to indulge in, so my return followed a day later

the second wall was trobbio. or rather, it was my resentment that had been building up until that point and finally unloaded when i first fought trobbio. the run-backs through annoying trash packs coupled with the platforming sections really took away from what i liked: learning boss movesets and striking back. "why play a metroidvania then?" i didn't even know what a metroidvania was, unaware that the first hollow knight even qualified after finishing it, and that game's backtracking is way more tolerable. i also didn't enjoy the lack of numbers, both in terms of my own damage output and enemy health. boss phases are usually distinguished from one another via the boss pausing their onslaught to cry out in dramatic fashion, so you have a rough idea of how well you're doing on every attempt, but that's not exactly as reassuring as a dark souls health bar. the sour taste in my mouth intensified with each respawn and i had to face the encroaching thought that beating difficult games actually meant nothing to me. i have no online friends to brag to about beating silksong and don't care to either, and the people that i do know in real life who play are not competitive in nature. if anything, it made me want to finish it even less as i couldn't really recommend it to those casual friends to at least be able to talk about the game and find enjoyment in that. the frustration consumed me, and i right-click uninstalled once more. what brought me back the second time was the discovery of the health bar mod hosted on the nexus. it was exactly the thing i needed, and my mood improved significantly once i could see the numbers on screen. i'm usually a proponent of consuming the vanilla version of any particular game, stalker and rimworld excluded, but silksong only became truly playable for me after installing this one mod. i wish that was an exaggeration

after trobbio, i kind of breezed through the rest of the progression right up until 73% completion and the most difficult boss entity yet, skarrsinger karmelita. it was not so much that the admittedly intense fight was giving me an unprecedented amount of trouble - it was on the same level as the judge and i was enjoying myself as there is practically no run-back - but i had spent 45+ hours on silksong already, and my motivation to keep going was at long last fading. the gauntlet right before her fight didn't help. and it's not like the end is around the corner at that point either as i hadn't even begun collecting the three required quest items. this realization caused a mix of the aforementioned resentment and tiredness to flood my emotional underworks. i felt entitled to a conclusion and was begging the game to just stop stretching, but it wouldn't comply

and so it was i that stopped. i gave shrine guardian seth some half-hearted pokes, just to see what he does, and then i threw it all in the trash. for a short while, at least. i fished the game back out a couple of times over the following days to dip my toes in and see if it was truly all over for me or if a slim chance at bouncing back was on the table. this back-and-forth culminated in me attempting karmelita another twenty times or so and at long last beating the absolute fuck out of her with nothing but a needle and the multibinder/claw mirror combo i slapped on for the first time out of a desire to make hornet sparkle and freshen up the gameplay a little in the process. overcoming what many consider to be the toughest fight gave me enough of a push to attempt the other remaining bosses - the aforementioned seth, nyleth and the coral tower guy. i beat seth first try post-karmelita and got the remaining ancient hearts on the second attempt each which took practically no time at all. then came the final obstacle on the path to the true ending: lost lace

let me get the positives out of the way first for lace. no run-back, which is great. i also really like the fight mechanically. very dynamic, and once you get into the groove, it feels good to do. still, i'm not sure what it is about the lace encounters. both the cradle fight i.e. lace 2 and lost lace caused me a tremendous amount of headache, so "getting into the groove" meant a shit ton of terribly poor attempts beforehand. i found it really difficult to balance aggression and passivity with her, and she seemed to demand positioning i couldn't figure out on the fly for a while in each of these encounters. that would be fine on its own, i can deal with mechanics, but what truly drove me insane was her character itself. her incessant yelling and laughing in my face with her head falling back made me irrationally angry. i turned off silksong's music when i started playing - the tracks are probably good but any video game music feels like a distraction and gets old after hearing it for a long enough time - and when i fought lace, i turned the rest of the game's audio off as well, just to escape her snickering. fencing meets psychological warfare, truly an art to behold

the usual process of making massive improvements after some hours eventually kicked in, thankfully or i would have ended up eating my beard. to come so far and not be able to crack it - i shudder at the thought. during both the karmelita and lost lace fights, i developed a hunch that victory might be right around the corner, so i recorded my final attempts for each. these videos serve as my personal banner, placed firmly on the mountain after the most arduous journey i have ever undergone in a video game. here is karmelita and here is lace (also, what the heck is going in youtube datacenters that makes the compression so horrible? these videos look crisp as fuck after rendering on my desktop)

the bottom line

if the above words didn't make it clear: i have mixed feelings on silksong. it was fun and in many ways more exciting than the first game for me, which i played immediately before starting silksong, but also overly demanding of patience in regards to its pacing and length, and at some point i think i fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy where i felt i had to keep going despite the metroidvania elements having completely lost their charm and me relying solely on boss novelty and pure, misplaced grit to hang on

in terms of difficulty, silksong completely eclipses its predecessor, to a fault. whether it be the initially rough economy that never ends up feeling good and incentivizes grinding, something i never had to do in hollow knight, the introduction of double damage for what feels like most things including environmental hazards, the constant gauntlet progression gates, sometimes even directly preceding boss fights, the constant platforming gauntlets, sometimes even directly preceding boss fights, the ABUNDANCE of flying enemies in highly inconvenient locations that with incorrect positioning will remain just out of reach for all eternity will hitting you with their projectiles using sharpshooter precision - it all combines into a behemoth of a challenge. on paper these individual things might not sound that bad but keep in mind that you will be encountering them endlessly over the course of 30+ hours while also battling the pacing

i cannot wrap my head around the fact that the same people who made hollow knight, a somewhat cozy, quiet experience also made silksong, a horrifying nightmare marathon that in spirit comes closer to an experimental fan-made mod for the first game specifically designed by a masochistic subset of the player base for their own consumption, at least in my mind. think misery mod for call of pripyat. i reckon it's been tuned down somewhat by patches since release, but i still can't help but think that had i played hollow knight and become a fan due to its qualities prior to silksong's release, i would probably feel really confused and forgotten by the devs for wanting a similar sequel and receiving some hornet fan service and the video game equivalent to an elongated prince albert piercing session in return

and with that, one must ask the question: who is this game for apart from the patently insane? for their next one, i hope team cherry takes the route fromsoftware did when making elden ring, creating a more inclusive experience that is still difficult and taxing if you want it to be while leaving the option to ease frustration via npc summons (which silksong set up perfectly with shakra, the green prince or the sentinel by the way) or, let's say, dubiously balanced weapon arts. maybe they would even win goty with that approach

anyway, here's the top 5 list of bosses i struggled on the most according to my memory in descending order:

the last judge - i wasn't fully comfortable with game mechanics yet and severely underutilized my dash, leading to really quick failures until it clicked after maybe two hours of repeating the run-back and the fight. fantastic boss design, possibly the best in my opinion apart from the classic first sinner/gms encounters that are reminiscent of the radiance in hollow knight and get practically obligatory bonus points for capturing the feel
lost lace - i've already elaborated on my lace problem, so not much more to say. i hit the d-generation x "suck it" when i finally beat her
karmelita - her hitbox feels weird when she turns into the spinning spike ball as she also seems to home in on you which is uncomfortable when you're pushed into a corner. the further you get in her fight, the more quickly she will chain her technically well-telegraphed moves together, really requiring you to identify the tells with precision and speed while positioning correctly to hit her. or just pogo of course. fun battle, but by god am i glad that it's over
trobbio (non-tormented) - when originally encountered, i thought this guy was gonna be a pushover due to him being set up in a comedic, overly theatrical way, but he's arguably the biggest challenge in act 2, a fact made obvious by the health bar mod showing how little damage you do to him. still, overall an incredibly enjoyable fight if you can stand the fuckton of red visual effects on your screen. now that i reflect on it, him and his tormented version might be my favorite encounters in all of pharloom. here is john wolfe's reaction to finally beating the one and only trobbio and receiving his claw mirror in return. he divides the player base, and i personally love him
bell eater - yeah, i don't know. it felt like you had to rely on good rng too much for decent damage windows and if you got unlucky, you could only stand back while the two overlapping ends would do two different types of aoe. a conservative approach i.e. prioritizing not taking damage over dealing it helped. took me probably 10+ tries and it made me really angry. remove this from the game