Hollow Knight: Silksong has been one of the most anticipated games of the year. Shortly after it came out, its player count skyrocketed, peaking at nearly half a million players. Unfortunately, there has been some controversy regarding the game’s difficulty, which prompted developers to release balance patches.

Ari Gibson and William Pellen from Team Cherry recently spoke about the difficulty of Silksong and the importance of freedom in the game.

Hollow Knight: Silksong emphasizes freedom of choice

Speaking with Dexerto, Silksong developers talked about the game’s design and the importance of players’ choice. “The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Ari Gibson said. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes,” he added.

Gibson admitted that Hollow Knight: Silksong has “moments of steep difficulty,” but explained that this comes from the game’s greater freedom, where players constantly choose where to go and what to do.

If players are stuck on a difficult boss fight, developers aren’t worried about it. According to Gibson, they have given players plenty of ways to deal with the challenge. Instead of players repeatedly attempting a boss fight for hours, they will have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.

Gibson and Pellen compared Silksong to the original Hollow Knight game, explaining why enemies had to change to mesh with other adjustments properly. “Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight – so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said. “The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen added.

Instead of scaling back Hornet’s abilities, Team Cherry chose to elevate her opponents. Alongside the familiar mechanics of dashing, jumping, and diving attacks, enemies were given new abilities, such as evading and checking. “Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away,” Pellen concluded.