The Ringer-Verse - 'Hollow Knight: Silksong' In-Progress Impressions | Button Mash

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

There's a (silk)song in Ben's heart as he brings on Matt James to share their reactions to one of the most anticipated games of the past several years: 'Hollow Knight: Silksong.' In a largely spoiler-free discussion after roughly 60 combined hours spent exploring the land of Pharloom, they consider what made 'Hollow Knight' and its sequel such sensations, how the hype for 'Silksong' grew, how the new game retains and tweaks the original's formula, whether 'Silksong' is too hard, and whether it lives up to unrestrained expectations. Intro (0:00)'Hollow Knight: Silksong' Reactions (3:00)Outro (1:13:04) Host: Ben LindberghGuest: Matt JamesProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And the best part, you still earn the card rewards, points, and cashback you love. So say goodbye to the buyfold, add your card to Apple Wallet, and start paying the Apple Way, terms apply. Hello and welcome into the Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. And today, all things, Silk Song. I am Belmondberg, senior editor at The Ringer and Button Mash hosts, and I'm joined by the Ringer's deputy art director and my unlicensed therapist when I sent him two a.m. messages about being unable to beat bosses in Silk Song. Matt James, hi, Matt.

Woo, happy to be here. I'm so excited. Thanks for staying up with me in providing counseling. It was much appreciated. We are here to share our reactions to Hollow Night Silk Song, an actual game that definitely does exist. It's real. It's mostly spectacular. It's sometimes maddening, and it's immensely popular.

It is the talk of the gaming world, and we will contribute to our talk today. And we have a whole lot to say. Can you believe the moment has come instead of silk posting? We're silk playing, silk pop. adding no more memes or different memes, at least. Yeah, I mean, the memes are finally over. It doesn't feel real. It doesn't feel real, to be honest.

Yeah, it does seem somewhat surreal to be finally playing it, although the similarity to Holo Night's kind of makes it a little less surreal. It feels familiar, but we'll get to that. We're recording on Tuesday. This game came out on Thursday. We didn't get early access, nor did anyone else. So we aren't finished yet, though we're well into it. We're both in Act 2.

I've put almost 20 hours into it, though about a quarter of that was spent fighting a single boss. You're further than me, though it's sort of tough to compare because the game is so nonlinear and there's so much optional side stuff. So you can call this a review in progress. I think what we'll do is we'll give our impressions of Silk Song so far. We'll keep it pretty general and non-spoilery. and then on our next episode, which will primarily be about Borderlands 4,

we can circle back to Silk Sun and give our final verdict. Sound good? Sounds good. Ah, Bapanata. Okay. For any of our non-gamer listeners who are wondering what the fuss is about,

let's set the scene for Silk Song. This is the sequel to beloved 2017 Metroidvania Hollow Night. And like the original, it was developed and published by a small Australian indie studio, Team Cherry, Stong started as DLC for Hollow Night, featuring a character from Hollow Night named Hornet, and ended up being bigger than the original game, it seems like, based on what we've seen so far,

which is why it was infamously in development for seven years. It was so hotly anticipated that the game briefly crashed Steam and the Nintendo E-shop after launch, which led to some memes of its own and was kind of cruel. It's finally here, but I can't download it. So that was temporarily frustrating, but it was actually kind of good preparation for the frustrations to come. The player count has peaked at almost 600,000 concurrence

on Steam alone, even though this thing is also on Game Pass and every possible platform, current gen and last gen, you want to play Silk Song on Linux or Mac, knock yourself out, and you may want to at times. There are about 400,000 people playing on Steam as we speak in the middle of the North. American workday, salute to those folks. I would be one of them if we weren't currently recording a podcast about it.

And in fact, I can hear my wife, who's on her lunch break, playing and occasionally heaving heavy size in the other room. So, Sox, Song is a sensation. How did Hollow Night get this big? Yeah, that's really the question. I think that the hype cycle just blew it up. I mean, you had a game that was somewhat niche. like in Hollow Night.

I mean, obviously it was very successful, but as far as the general gaming landscape goes, this is no Grand Theft Auto. But, you know, after so many years of people, like, not seeing updates about Silk Song in presentations or Game Awards or, you know, Gamescom or anything. Yeah, there were a few false alarms coming soon, Silk Song, not so fast.

Yeah. But after so many years of that, it just became widely known, I guess, as like the anticipated game that won't come out ever. Right. And I think a lot of that is what kind of drove this hype, is it turned from this relatively small subsection of gaming into a main street of gaming event purely through. hype mostly because we didn't get in-depth previews of this. I know a few people played a build of it years ago, and then it was sort of never seen from again for quite a while. But yeah, it's fascinating to see hype build this big

for something that I'm not sure how many of the people who are playing it actually played through the first one or played a significant amount of the first one. It kind of reminds me of when Eldon Ring came out. And you had all of these people hopping into a soul's like for the first time, myself included when Alderman came out. And now you're having all of gaming hop into a Metroidvania, which is a genre that is beloved by many, but I wouldn't call it a main attraction within the gaming universe. for your average gamer. Yeah.

This is definitely not like FIFA or NBA 2K level or first-person shooter level genre. And so it's fascinating to see the entire gaming community hop into what has turned out to be a very difficult experience. And I think that a lot of people I'm familiar with Hollow Night saw the graphics. So it's a 2D game and figured, oh, well, how hard could that be?

They say it's hard, but, you know, it can't be that hard. And now they're finding, oh, this is kind of on par with Eldon Ring as far as difficulty. Yeah, they hopped into it at a 45-degree downward ankle and missed their target entirely in many cases. Indeed. What's interesting is that HoloNite eventually became a blockbuster, but it didn't start out that way. So sales-wise, it was a slow burn. It sold half a million copies in its first nine months, which is very good for a Metroidvania indie game in 2017. but far from a blockbuster.

By the time Silk Song was announced in February 2019, that was two years after the original game came out. It had sold 2.8 million copies, okay, growing, better, stronger, but now it's sold more than 15 million copies, which as far as I can tell might make it the best-selling single-player-only indie game ever. It's huge. You said it wasn't GTA and it's not. nothing is, but it's kind of the indie equivalent. And I'm trying to figure out how that happened,

which is not a slight at all. I'm not trying to take shots at Hollow Night. Hollenite is a great game, but there are a lot of great games that don't break through the way that Holonite did. And maybe part of it is that it's had a lot of imitators and copycats. And it's kind of had an influence on games that have come after it. But then again, it's clearly influenced by a lot of games that came before it as just about any game is, but it didn't completely reinvent the genre. It's a blend of genres, as a lot of successful games are, but it builds on the traditional Metroidvania foundation of exploring and being blocked and returning to things after you have upgraded and gained new abilities that allow you to progress further.

And there's a little bit of Zelda DNA in here. And then there's a lot of Dark Souls and Bloods. born and they kind of melded and merged those things. And it just hit, even if it's tough to point to this is what Hollow Night did differently and it completely changed the genre forever. And you could sort of say the same about Silk Song that it's not really reinventing the wheel. So why? How did Hollow Night, which is a game that I love as well, developed this sort of success? I think there are marketing departments all across the gaming industry that are wondering the same thing because being such a small studio, they didn't have, you know, tremendous resources to market

this game. But that kind of never ending... The key is not to do any marketing. Yeah. That never ending like gradual snowballing of hype for this is just unmatched, I guess. Like should now, I guess, Half-Life 3 has taken the crown for games that hypothetically could exist in the future that people are hyped for. So I don't know, based on this trend, I would expect that if Half-Life 3 ever does get announced and released, that will be the next big hype game.

Yes, that could possibly match this. Yeah, it does seem like the hype for Silk Song drove a lot of people to Hollow Night. And then that was self-perpetuating because people played Hollow Night and said, this is great. Now I can't wait for the sequel. And then the anticipation built. but it became this online subculture, which in some ways was different from the standard toxic gamer, give me my game now,

why are we not getting updates on this, hounding developers? It was a little more pure and driven by just enthusiasm for a game that people loved and a sequel that people expected to love, but it also became sort of self-aware in a way. It was almost kind of a commentary on how games are marketed and how we anticipate them and how long they take to make these days.

And everyone was surprised when the Bloomberg interview comes out with Team Cherry, and they basically say, yeah, this was fun for us. We weren't stressing about this at all. We weren't even online and aware of all the silk posting that was happening here. We were just having the time of our lives making this game and we didn't want to quit, which was a nice refreshing change from the usual tales of woe that accompany any game that kind of has scope creep and takes longer to come out than expected. But because there was no word, there was no update for years at a time, I guess there was some question, will it ever come out? Is this vaporware? Has something gone horribly wrong? Or is there some vast, unimagined potential here? Is this going to completely reinvent the formula and be something

we couldn't possibly anticipate. So because Hollow Night was so big, obviously, you can't just do this with any game or any indie game. Just, yeah, we won't market it. We'll just rely on guerrilla marketing and everyone talking up our game. That only worked because Hollow Night was so successful that this fever pitch of anticipation was built in. But then it became its own sort of self-sustaining beast, this practice of silk posting, which was basically just like making up crap about Silk Song. It's coming out.

it's out. There's some unannounced feature, and it was just sort of self-aware in a way. We were kind of having fun with it while also being frustrated at how long it was taking. Yeah. And then for it to be announced that it's going to cost $20. Yeah. Was just, I think that also took whatever hype existed for it and kicked it up another notch or two, because for them to process the hype cycle, which by the time, time they pop their head out of the sand and stopped working on the game and looked around at the landscape. I'm sure they must have realized at some point that, wow, there is a tremendous amount

of hype for this. And then to say, $20 for this game that they've been working on for seven years that I can tell you you can put at least 40 hours into. I'm probably going to be at 50 or 60 before I'm finished with this thing. For $20, I mean, we're having Microsoft backpedal from $80. for Outer Worlds 2. Like, you know, Nintendo's just charged $80 for the new Mario cart on Switch 2. Like, prices are going up and they're not stopping going up. And then $20 for the most hyped game, I think that just built a ton of goodwill amongst the audience because I personally wouldn't have bet on an eye at $50 for this.

Oh, no, not at all. Yeah. And good for them. And perhaps they've squandered some of that good will with how hard it is in the early hours, which we'll get to. But, no, amid this atmosphere of inflation and all the fear mongering about games prices going up, all the hype for this, they absolutely could have gotten away with raising the price. And the original was $15, which was quite a bargain. And good for them. You know, they're set for life as it is, right?

Because they make this game that sold 15 million copies. and this is, you know, a three or four person development team that seems to have decided to stay within its means and not to expand and not to scale up. And so they're just doing their thing, more or less in solitude, haven't even upgraded their office or anything. And they didn't get greedy here. They didn't say, yeah, the market will bear a much higher price. We're going to give you incredible bang for your buck here. So kudos to Team Cherry. Yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised if their next project is more Hollow Night because they seem to be having a lot of fun making this one. They didn't really want to stop making it and release it. And to be honest, playing through the game,

you can tell how much this world that they've created and these characters mean to them. There's a lot of lore and story in here that if you want, you can skip over. But if you really sit down and process everything and connect some dots, you'll really see the grand vision of this world that they've created. And I would be just shocked if after this success and what they've created here, that they aren't already like going back to the drawing board being like, all right, let's talk Hollow Night 3. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there's things cut from this game that they have

already worked into the next one. Yeah. Set our calendars for 2040 at this point. But yeah, they pumped out for free DLC. for the original game too. So that's another good way to sustain audience interest. I mean, look at No Man Sky still doing that a decade on, right? And every time you put out something free, you sell a bunch more copies because people dive in to check out the new stuff. So that's a smart marketing strategy if you can make it work as well. And this has been fun because there aren't

many monocultural moments in gaming or in culture in general these days. Because in gaming, especially, there are just so many games and so many subcultures that aren't necessarily speaking to each other and people playing at different paces. And then, of course, you have people getting their hands on games early. And I'm not out here requesting that companies give less access to journalists and podcasters early. We welcome the pre-launch codes so that we can get our hours in and bring these pods out to you in timely fashion. But because this was dropping two weeks after it was announced, just as the original was, and no one got review copies. And so we're all working our way through things at the same time. There's a conversation happening. There's almost sort of a schoolyard. How did you beat this boss?

I can't get past this part, even though the people who make guides have been cranking out guides and building them as they play, which is kind of incredible. But even so, there's more of a that's just kind of communal. We're all experiencing this at the same time, which is fairly rare and quite precious. It is quite precious. And it kind of harkens back to pre-internet days where you couldn't just go online

and find the answer to how to get past this thing or that thing. It's not just on a website right now because the game just came out for everybody. So the guides makers had no heads up notice of anything. thing. So what you end up happening is, what ends up happening is that people are communicating with each other more on a one-to-one basis about the game. They're in Reddit threads, they're in Discord chat, they're in your Slack DMs from me in the middle of the night. You have more people actually making connections with other humans rather than just opening guides or looking up videos on

YouTube. And that really, I think, that sort of forcing of human communication subconsciously will make your game more beloved. Because gamers don't have to usually ask questions to each other or talk to other people. So driving them to- That's the way we like it. To human contact is always going to make a memorable experience. Yeah. And that is kind of counterintuitive because this is a game that does not require human contact to play. It is a single player experience. So we're going through this journey alone, but we're really not.

It's almost alike when you have kind of quasi-multiplayer in from software games. You just have echoes of other people, leaving hints, trolling you, etc. That's not actually literally in Sok-Song, but it sort of, it's this halo surrounding the game because we're all just trying to get through this any way we can with a little help. from our friends. So let's talk about it. We've put a lot of time into this thing. What stands out to you? Let's table the difficulty and difficulty discourse for a second, because we'll certainly get to that. But in terms of the positives or the differences from the original Hollow Night. Well, as far as positives go, I think the boss fights in this game are beautifully realized. They're super creative. They're memorabilized. They're

memorable. The Hollow Night Control scheme and the Silk Song control scheme are fairly simple. These are not like the most complex controls you'll find in a video game, which I think is why a lot of people initially

sort of walk in with the assumption that this won't be that hard, perhaps. But the way that they're able to create bosses that run such a wide gamut of your strategy and and what it takes to beat them and the ways that you attack them,

the ways that you avoid things. There's so much variety for how simple the control scheme is, and there's so much creativity. And the bosses in Hollow Night were, of course, a highlight, and probably one of the things that people will remember most from that game. And the same is true here. And especially when you get into Act 2 of this game, some of the boss fights in here are just like,

you're too busy admiring what's happening to learn the move set and you just get killed immediately because you're just in awe pretty much. I would say the bosses are just more memorable than they've ever been. Yeah. And not just the really hard ones. Yeah, which again, we'll get to. I have thoughts. I have grievances to air. But it's true. I think what you were saying before about how there really is kind of an idiosyncratic sensibility, you can feel the hand of the individual creators in these games because there are so

few of them. You can feel that it's a labor of love. And that shows up in just the distinctive look and sounds. Yet again, the soundtrack is great. The sound effects are great. The visuals are great. We should say we've both been playing on Switch 2, which has been just fine, but it doesn't seem like they're significant performance problems on any system. It more or less looks like more Holo Night, but a bit better, a bit prettier. And the art style, if there was one thing that really makes Hollow Night stand out, I think it is the art and the setting and the world and the lore, even more so than the gameplay.

Just this idea of the melding of cute and off-putting. It's just a bunch of bugs. and there's something deeply disturbing about a lot of the imagery, and it's sort of this dark, gothic, fallen world in a lot of ways, but then it blends that, again, with that sort of Zelda-esque Nintendo emphasis on character and idiosyncratic characters and humor and charm to go along with this grand lore and this sense of hidden depths, both literally and narratively. And that, I think, is what makes this game stand out to me.

That's not new necessarily. That was what worked so well for HoloNay 2. But it's perhaps here in even greater evidence. Yeah, absolutely. And that art style is just unmistakable, that cute but dark feel to it. It's the perfect runaway success for the Luboo era in that regard. Yes, that's true. Perhaps Labou can have a collab with the Silk Song devs.

and you get some of these characters hanging off of your bag in the near future because that is a similar vibe, to be honest, an unmistakable memorable vibe that these characters are not voiced in the game. They have sound clips that will play when you start dialogue where they'll seem to say something in a fictitious language. There are songs in this gobbledy gook that are sung that get in your head and all of a sudden

and you're sort of singing along to non-words while making your breakfast. Yes. It may all sound just enough like words that you can kind of convince yourself that they're saying something. Absolutely. Yeah. But that's very charming. I wouldn't want this game to be fully voiced in future incarnations because I find that there's a nostalgia in reading these things. and there's a charm to this fake language that they seem to have created that is really adding atmosphere.

Yeah. And they tell you some things, but they leave a lot unsaid. And that just deepens the intrigue and the aura and the mystery of it all. And it makes you want to explore, as does the traversal and the secrets that are hidden here. That's kind of the key to the Metroidvania genre. but Hallenite does it as well as any example in that genre. And it starts from the get-go in Silk Song. In fact, I think the very first room you're in, there's a secret room to the right.

So you start the game. Spoiler. Yeah. Spoiler for the first five seconds of Silk Song. But yes, there's a secret room right there, which reinforces, yeah, this is how you're supposed to play this game. You're basically supposed to try to hit every wall to see if there's some secret passageway there. And often you'll be rewarded.

And then you'll feel smart. Yeah. Oh, so many. And, you know, something that it's almost overload in a Metroidvania, I kind of like it. It feels more controlled when you only have a certain number of pathways and you go into a room and maybe there's one entrance and then there's another exit. In Silk Song, that is not the case. There are so many branching paths that it's rare to enter a room where there aren't three ways to go from there. And in a way, it can be kind of overwhelming because you're making a mental map.

Hopefully you have an actual map in game, but not necessarily. So part of me is just overloaded trying to remember, okay, I've got to remember to go back down this passageway or that passageway. But I've tried to free my mind from that pressure to just be kind of comprehensive and explore every nook and cranny. I figure I'll get there eventually

and I'll just follow each branching path. wherever it leads. So there's the sense of discovery that is just inherent to this game at all times. Oh, that's nice for your brain that you can do that, that you can not completely explore an area and just going to go through it. I have put enough hours into this game to have beat it from what I understand talking to people online and yet still have a long way to go because I need to explore virtually everything before moving forward in the game.

Yes. Yes. I know someone who completed this game in under 30 hours and beat the game without finding the double jump. Yeah. Yeah, there's all sorts of sequence breaks in this game where people can get to quote unquote leader areas, ostensibly late game areas, early in the game, because maybe there's some sort of exploit you can use to get to a place where you're technically not really supposed to. be yet, but they allow you to get there. It's very rarely gated. Yes, there are definitely times when you can't get to a place unless you can wall leap or something. But even then, there's often just a back entrance or there's some other way to get there. And that does lead to the constant questioning of, am I ahead of where I'm supposed to be? Right. Because especially if you get stuck on a boss fight, there are times when I question, am I underpowered? Or am I just bad at the game?

Why not both? It could be both. It could very well be both. But because there's no really clear progression where you get this and then that enables you to get that and go there, you can get to places before you're probably supposed to. And you can still beat them, but it's harder. And so there's a uncertainty to, am I progressing the right way? But there is no right way, which is liberating. It definitely feels like there are wrong ways to me. but yes that is true the start of the game is the most linear part of it there is kind of a golden path that they lead you along which is sort of like a silent tutorialization that you know it's not an explicit tutorial but they are teaching you and like there's nowhere else you could really go but this way and that sort of exists at the beginning but once the game really opens up in act two there are just a ton of different ways to go through the game. And if you want to go directly for the objectives that you know you have to do to advance the story,

you absolutely can. I have been specifically avoiding doing those things in Act 2. And I don't regret it at all because the upgrades that I've gotten have made things a lot easier for me. I've come back to things later. And I think the game wants you to do a lot of coming back to things later. There's an IGN article about one early boss in the game that is giving a lot of people trouble. And I think, you know, when I encountered that boss and I tried it two or three times, and I really saw its move set, and I was like, oh, you know what?

I don't have what I need to beat this right now. Given the environment and given those attacks, I will come back to this later. And when you come back to it later, not that hard to fight. but if you're determined to kill everything in your path as you encounter it, this game could give you a very rough time. And it can give you a rough time regardless of whether you're doing that or not. Yes. And you are sort of severely underpowered at the start.

So there's not much of a story set up or premise here. You have Hornet, who was an adversary turned ally, compelling character from the first game. Now you're playing as Hornet, who has basically been, kidnapped and brought to another land, the land of Farlum. And it's all about ascending to the citadel where all of these pilgrims in Farlum are trying to head. So Donkey Kong Bonanza was all about going down, down, down. Right. We going up. And along the way, you encounter all of these webs and silken strands and the pilgrims have been corrupted and they've turned into enemies. and then they're just the natural beasties that populate Faroom.

And I would say that in the early hours, you are sort of, as I said, severely underpowered, even more so than in most games, where it's kind of a convention. You start weak and you get stronger, and it fulfills your desire for empowerment and your power of fantasy, and there's the clear sense of progression and upgrades.

That's a staple of Metroidbanias in almost every genre. But here, when you start, you can't even sprint, right? You can't double-dump. There's just not a lot that you can do. On the other hand, Hornet is more agile and more mobile than the protagonist of HoloNite. So that I would say is one of the main differences, just the mechanics, the feel of playing as Hornet. And then also some of the customizable because, you know, there are RPG elements to this as there were in Holonite where there was a charm system. You can equip various charms. to confer various abilities. Here, that's a bit more fleshed out and full-featured. So there are crests that change your movesets and come with their own slots where you can equip various abilities.

And that can really allow you to customize your play style. Yeah, those tools that you have come in three colors, I think, yellow, blue, and red. And depending on how many slots you have in your crest, usually you can equip one to two of each of, those colors. So you end up kind of creating your own build within your own

move set. You pick the crest, you fill the slots out, and you can change those slots at any rest point in the game. And you will often be changing those out. This isn't a game where you'll find a few upgrades that you like, and

you'll keep them on for the entire duration of your play. You can, of course. But I think that the skills are created in such a way that there were times where there are better uses than what you currently have equipped with other things. And you'll be kind of shifting them out tactically based on where you are and what you intend to do, whether it's exploration or combat. And speaking of those tools, I just want to say one of those yellow slots is for the compass, which when you bring the map up in

the game, it will show you where you are on that map. And this is one of my actual biggest gripes of the game is that the compass takes up one of those precious slots. Yes. In a game where the map is pretty important. And I think they know that the map is pretty important because you have to hold down L1 to bring up the map. You don't have to pause to go into the map. There's an overlay by holding down L1.

So it's not like they don't know how important the map is. And yet they still chain the compass to one of those precious. slot, and that is really annoying to me. Yeah, that was the case in Hollow Night as well, right? So that's not new, but it's no less frustrating. It's been a while since I played the original. I did not recently replay it as many people did in preparation for Silk Song. But that's the thing about these games.

There's a lot of friction, and friction is not necessarily bad. Friction can be good at sign. You want to work for your triumphs at times, but this game does not give you anything easily. You have to earn it. That's just one example where you don't have a map, you have to purchase a map. And when you purchase a map, you have to equip a compass or you can't see where you are on the map, which is something that makes the map a whole lot more useful. Same for save points.

Not only are they few and far between, but you have to pay to unlock them. You have to pay to unlock the fast travel. Nothing is given to you in this game. Very little. Yeah, that can be frustrating. at times, especially because sometimes there's this economic doom spiral, essentially. You're collecting shards, which come from defeated enemies and then rosaries and beads, and you can trade those in for various items and also can enable you to use some of your

equipped upgrades, et cetera. And those things are fairly scarce in some portions of the game, and also you lose them when you die. And there's the souls like mechanic here, where when you die, you lose everything, and you have to go back to where you died to reclaim what you had. And if you die a second time before you reclaim it, then it's gone.

Poof. And there are ways that you can save that stuff. You can string the rosary beads onto strings and then kind of keep them again for a price. Nothing is free in Silk Song, even though the game is quite cheap, but you often end up, or at least I did, in these spirals where I essentially had no currency whatsoever because I just kept dying. Couldn't really find more without farming currency, which in itself would lead to me dying

repeatedly. So that I would be sort of stuck. Now, you don't always have to purchase upgrades. You can complete side quests and optional missions, and then you can earn them that way. But yeah, sometimes there were situations where I found myself unable to get out of the cycle of Silk Song poverty. For sure. And, you know, I don't mind in games when the features of it are difficult or challenging like that. But I think like the compass is a bit of an example of how Silk Song for as brilliant and great as I'm fun.

finding it, there are a few things about it that feel a bit antiquated with this game coming out seven years after Hollow Night. That's a long time in the gaming industry. And that's a lot of time where other Metroid-Banias have come out and tried different things and done different things. And I think as a developer, you have to strike a balance that's hard to walk of making the game challenging, but also keeping it,

keeping the game design feeling fair. And the combat, great. It all feels very fair, right? But this compass thing is like, sure, like I get it. It was like this in the first game, whatever. I think the quality of life would be vastly

improved if the compass just you pick it up and then you can see where you are on the map. And similarly, a big topic that we're going to be discussing today, speaking of quality of life, is what we call the runbacks, right? You face a boss, you lose, how far do you have to go? How long does it take to get from the save point back to the boss fight?

And this is a very divisive issue because some people will give you the get good, right? Yeah. Whereas other people will say, I shouldn't have to do a. three-minute platforming, fighting section between each attempt at an incredibly difficult boss to the point where I am essentially spending a large portion of my playtime doing the same platforming sections over and over again. That's how I feel with a few of the bosses in this game, one that we'll definitely talk about. that I don't mind fighting a boss 20 times learning the

move set making gradual progress sometimes just having a bad run going back getting in there trying again I can take 20 tries I can take 30 tries but having those runbacks that take three minutes between each fight where there are all these little enemies on the way and and it just takes it makes it so much longer to learn that move set it interrupts my enjoyment of learning the boss's move sets. And I think that in the compass, the runbacks in the compass, are two things that, that like when the Hollow Night One came out, makes sense, feels good.

It's a different age now. You have to be a little more conscious of that quality of life because people aren't used to this kind of thing anymore. And like, yeah, like, look, you and I, we both have beat a boss of the terrible runback. and it's my low point of the game, and I'm sure you're low point of the game as well, right? Yes.

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This one specific boss, because it's not the boss fights, it's the fight before the boss fights, because it's really this gauntlet that you have to run just to get back to the beginning that is so demoralizing, so frustrating. And it does take a ton of time. And it also interrupts that feedback loop where, okay, I died, but I see what I did wrong. My bad. I understand this a little bit better. I can get right back into the fray, and this time I'll be better. But now I have to run back from this save point that's across the map, and there are 12 enemies in the way who are assholes themselves and also difficult platforming, and maybe I won't even have full health by the time I get back to the beginning of the boss fight. That is immensely annoying. It's partly the placement of the save

points, the benches, which are pretty scarce. There was one boss fight where the closest save point, as far as I could tell, was actually in a different region of the map. And so I would save it. That's common. And take the traversal, the fast travel to this other region, then get to the boss, you know, instead of just going directly from the save point to the boss. So that stuff is just immensely frustrating, the backtracking, the prelude to those fights that actually makes it more difficult to appreciate the intricacies of the fight.

The fights themselves are very challenging at times, but in a good way, mostly, where you just feel a real sense of accomplishment when you finally master them. But everything else, and yes, it extends to that quality life or lack of quality of life stuff. I mean, even, you know, there's an ability to mark places, people of interest on the map, kind of in that Prince of Persia, the Last Crown way, except in Prince of Persia, you could just do that for free and take a photo. And look at the photo. And go back, right. Here you can place a marker, but even that is going to cost you. You have to purchase the markers, right? So it's really, it's challenging in that way and challenging in good ways, but also challenging

in not so good ways, because the other aspects of the difficulty, I remapped the jumping and attacking buttons. I swapped them on Switch to, which helped me somewhat, but only to some extent. There's no block. There's no dodge roll exactly. you can dash, you can sprint when you unlock those abilities. But there's really pretty unforgiving hit boxes. Like you get contact damage if you touch an enemy, if you touch a boss, even if they're stunned

or staggered at the time. If you run into one, that's going to deal damage and it's going to do double damage. And that's the other thing about Soxang that makes it more challenging, I think, than Hollow Night, which was challenging in its own right. There is so much double damage and not just in boss fight. but just standard run-of-the-mill enemies that you encounter across the map. And you start with five masks, basically five hearts, you know, health units. And you often lose two, and you can only heal in a lump sum.

So you can't heal until you recharge your full silk meter. And then you have to heal three masks at once, even if you don't need three masks at once. Even if you need one, you have to do all three, and you're just a sense. eventually wasting them at that point. So there are some things that make it easier. You know, you can heal in midair from the start of the game, for instance. But so many other things that make it more difficult. And sometimes really in a way, I'm not really a rage quitter, but Soxog sometimes seriously test me.

And I'm grateful that pro controllers are so expensive because it helped with my impulse control. If the controllers were cheaper, I might have had to hurl my. mine, we might have had some controllers down. And that one particular fight, which it's called Last Judge, and we won't spoil everything about it. But if you know, you know, it's at the end of Act 1. Yeah. Yeah.

And I see people complaining about earlier bosses, just wait until you get to last judge. This is one of the worst boss fighting experiences of my life, certainly of my year, just the worst. I messaged you in the middle of the night as I was vainly. tempted to do this for hours on end. And you knew exactly where I was without me having to tell you which boss it was. You were just like, oh, last judge, yeah. Yep. Yep, I knew exactly where you were.

And, you know, you're saying this is the worst, like, boss fighting experience. But I feel like having beaten the boss, you do feel like the boss fight itself was good and fair, if a bit spongy, if a bit long. Yeah. I honestly, how would your impression of that fight change if there was a save point very close to that boss fight? That would change a lot. Yeah. Now, this boss has three phases as bosses do.

And at first, it's just overwhelming. And it seems like, well, I will never advance beyond the first phase. But you figure it out. And that moment when you pick up on the patterns, that is bliss. Yeah. That's what I'm going for. I want that hit. And that's something that doesn't happen when you're doing that traversal from the save point to the boss.

You can only get so good at that. There is only a tiny bit of satisfaction to be earned from becoming more effective at navigating that route. Whereas the boss fights, you're making progress. You're like getting good at these moves and how you react to them and programming your reactions to each animation. Yeah. And yeah, so those run backs are just, I will say, though, that the healing dynamic in this game, I think is brilliant. I know you can only heal three of the health heads at a time, which kind of makes you question when you should heal, when you should wait, which is interesting. But the idea that you can recharge your heel slowly by getting individual hits in on the enemy has led to some scenarios.

where I've entered a boss fight with low health and no heels. And just by my good performance in the fight, have not only managed to get my health back, but have built in an extra heel. And all of a sudden, like, I've played this fight really well. I walked into this room in dire shape, and I'm in the middle of this fight, and I'm doing better than I have been doing in previous times

when I've walked in with full health. And that is a really fantastic dynamic. of like digging yourself out of a hole by doing well, feels excellent. Yes, that is immensely satisfying. There were times when I wished that I could tag you in,

like let me solo her against last judge because I was just at my wits end, but then there's that moment where you see the light at the end of the tunnel and you think, okay, I'm going to fuck up 50 more times,

but this boss can be beaten. There's that moment where the switch flips and you go from being hopeless, to having hopes. Being hopeless to like, I'm into the second, I'm deep into the second phase every time now. So can I get into the third phase now?

Incremental progress. I understand the patterns. I'm still screwing up, but this can be done. But yes, that bus is sadistic. All my homies hate last judge. Absolutely just the worst. But really, it does pay off in the end, just the pure relief of it,

just because, wow, the rush. Now, the other thing I'll say, I guess this is a slight spoiler about this specific boss fight, but you know what? If I save you the pain and suffering that I experienced at the end of this, then I think it's worth the spoiler.

This asshole, last judge, you beat the boss. And so what immediately happened is I put the controller down because first of all, my hands were like claws at this point, because I'd been gripping the thing for my life for five hours.

I put the controller down. I went to message you to tell you that I'd finally done it. So this is your fault indirectly. This boss explodes after you beat her. And I was just standing there. I finished her off and the animation played and I thought I did it.

This boss blows up. And if you're standing too close, you die after you beat the boss. Keep away from the eyes. Suddenly I got myself back at that damn bench starting from scratch again, not even knowing what has. happened because I took my eyes off the screen for a second. I was like, just evacuated in our moment

of triumph. I'm Tarkin here being blown up on the Death Star. It's just like, how did this happen? Suddenly, I'm back in square one and then pieced it together with your help. Oh, I must have been caught in this blast that I wasn't anticipating because I let my guard down. Yeah. You're celebrating in the end zone and the kickoff happens and they return it for a touchdown and you'd be blown the game. the ball before the goal line is the worst. It's not over until it's over. Yeah. I was, keep the stance on the controller, y'all.

I was, I was like, I got blisters on my fingers and suddenly until the door opens. You keep your hands on that controller. Yes, this game will screw with you. It will troll you at times. Keep that in mind. Just do not let your guard down

at any time. Word to the wise or the unwise in my case. But the nice thing, one nice thing is that I didn't usually feel stuck. Now, sometimes I was stuck on a boss, but there's always something else to do. It's like Eldon Ring in that respect, where you can just go do other stuff. And there are so many pathways in this game, you could go fight some other boss. You could go power up and level up and come back to fight the bus.

You can just explore. So you never have to hit your head against the wall. Now, I wanted to beat this boss to finish the act before we did this podcast. Yeah, and I'm glad you did. It was close. Yeah. But if you're not, I mean, someday years from now, I will wake up in a cold sweat with my clenched hands, pressing invisible buttons from the muscle memory of the sequence of platforming to get to last judge. But you always do have the freedom to do something else.

Yeah. Especially in act, too, what you're going to find, Ben. So this isn't spoilers. but in the first act, there is sort of like a fast travel system with a few fast travel points. And when you get into the second act, which is a new area, that area has its own fast travel system. And there are a few points along that fast travel system that intersect with the first acts travel system. And so once you get to a point in the second act where you have unlocked enough nodes in that transit system and the first transit system, the game really opens up.

You can really start opening your map and looking at it and being like, oh, I just got this ability. So maybe now I can find out what part of the map I didn't have uncovered over there. And you can really go on all of these tangents. But there will be times throughout the first act, the early first act and the early second act, where you are going to feel kind of like trapped in a route. Yeah. And once you stop feeling trapped in that route, man, this game gets so much fun. So don't get discouraged if you're playing this game in Act 1 and you feel things are kind of on rails and there isn't as much exploration as you like.

Because it will definitely get there. And by the end of Act 2, you're really, if you're someone who likes exploration in games, it will give you everything you want eventually. despite those moments of on rails kind of trapped. Yeah, and I played a bit beyond the boss, and it's already opening up for me. And I hope that not too many people bounce off of Silk Song because of the difficulty, because there is so much that I would want people to experience here.

There's such an atmosphere to this world. You just, you want to be in this setting, and that's why at times some of these hurdles that they have placed, make it harder to spend time here to want to go back. And that's frustrating for me because I want to live in this world that they've created, even though they're actively repelling me, it seems like, sometimes. And, you know, some of that is just, it's a group of a few people who've been working on a game in isolation for seven years. It's kind of hard to calibrate these things, even if this is a sequel.

And then it's out in the world and you adapt. And there is already a patch announced coming as soon as next week. it seems like, that we'll be nerfing some of the early bosses and enemies, not last judge somehow, but other enemies. And it's weird, there's a part of me where it's like, I have climbed the ladder and now I want to pull it up from underbell. It's just like, oh, they're going to have it so easy now. They're never going to know the pain that we experience and where the true

silksong sufferers, when I should be saying, this is good. other people won't have to experience the same struggles that I did. They'll just have a good time. That's the mindset that I'm trying to adopt here. There's no difficulty level is the other thing. So it's not as if we're imposing this on ourselves because we're unwilling to play a game on easy or something. You can't change the difficulty level. I mean, you can do things to customize your play style to make it easier for you personally.

But there's nothing in the menu that you can tweak to say, Yeah, I want story mode. I just want to progress. The difficulty slider is just waiting for enough people to complain online. And this happened with Eldonring, too. Like, I beat Rodon before he was nerfed. Yeah. And, you know, that's the kind of thing that you talk about later.

You get that on a T-shirt, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a point of pride. Put a tattoo it on a certain section of your body. You just all of the bosses that you've beaten before they were nerfed. Yes. And I was worried that I would just spend as long playing last judge as I was waiting for this game to come out. I know people have joked that they took so long to release it because they couldn't beat it themselves.

I don't think that's true. I will produce that impression at times. And it's no coincidence that the most popular mods for PC are all about making it easier in some way. Reducing the damage, those enemies. Yeah. Or even just like showing me a damage indicator, right? because there's no health bars. And there are some boss fights, last judge,

that are so long and involved and protracted that you kind of lose track of time and you're just like, I will forever be just slipping in one hit on this boss between attacks that can kill me, not knowing how close I am to actually beating it. Because there's no visual indication, really, other than...

It's such a mental exercise. Yeah. You can't let your concentration slip. not thinking like, am I almost done? I was about to beat it? And then you like frantically, you're like, let me just throw all my tools at once right now. And then you get hit by something

because you're doing something outside of what you've programmed yourself to do and you mess up. Exactly. The mental exercise of staying calm and staying focused throughout this is kind of a life skill, to be honest. Yeah. There were times where I died because I sneezed or something or my dog came in.

You got to get good at holding and sneezes. That's clearly. My dog came in to sit on my lap, which I always welcome. But I was like, not now. Drum kid, I'm in the middle of this bus flight. Please, I can't let my concentration slip right. I can't blink. My eyes were dry when I beat that bus.

Just because I'd been staring clockwork orange style at this bus for so long. The other thing that has been a source of frustration for some people, although again, this is customizable, though you might not know that if you're not playing in consultation with other players and the internet at large. So Hornet is different in a number of ways from HoloNate's protagonists. Hornet speaks, for one thing, not full voice, as you said, but text and sounds. So you actually have dialogue, conversation with characters and PCs you encounter in this world. So there's a little more agency or a sense of who Hornet is or what the goal is. and it's less inferred and more sort of stated,

though there's clearly a hidden backstory here to Hornet. But also, the move set is different in ways that are welcome and ways that are also frustrating sometimes. So Hornet is just more agile, as you know, from fighting Hornet in the first game, can leap around, can move more quickly, but also has this signature diagonal downward attack, which I referenced earlier.

That's the default direction, whereas Hollow Knight had the vertical up and down Pogo attack, so you're just basically bouncing on enemies or off of things. Hornet slices downward and to the side. And that's all well and good when you're in combat. But when you're platforming with that, I found that at times as rage quit inducing as maddening as the runbacks and the bosses because I just couldn't get used to it.

And maybe this was user error and skill issue and get good, but I'm just unused to having to, you know, there are these things suspended in the air that you have to bounce off of to get up on places. And when those things are not directly below you when you have to do your downward slash, that requires a real mental adjustment. And when you have to do several of those slashes in sequence, boy, that's a bear. Yeah. And I think that holding down and it going to a diagonal is a hard thing. to reprogram in your brain. Yes. Luckily, that diagonal downward attack

is the default attack on the crest that you start out with. And we've mentioned crests here. You unlock a different crest, they have different movesets. And thankfully, in some of the other crests, when you hold down and press the attack, it will go down and not to the side. I can definitely see how the diagonal downward attack

can be beneficial in combat when you're fighting a boss because you don't have to get fully above them in order to attack them. So that is a benefit in combat. But again, in platforming, if you're not used to that, yeah, it sucks. I changed away from that as soon as possible.

And I have not gone back. And luckily, the crest that I'm using, the standard attack on it has a good amount of reach on it. Some of them don't go as far. Maybe they'll be faster with less of a reach. It's kind of a balance. that you have to find where you're comfortable with. But yeah, that diagonal was a non-starter for me.

And I just won't use a crest that has the diagonal because I can't. I can't reprogram my brain to that degree. It's hard enough to hit those platforming sections with the timing in a lot of areas just going up and down. So that diagonal, don't worry. You won't have to deal with it for too long if you're playing the game. And you're like, yeah.

Although it is possible to, play through and not encounter those optional crests that you can pick up. It's not like the game necessarily signposts or signals that. I mean, Hollow Knight doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do a lot of the time. It's just head for the Citadel. And then there are some context clues, but it's not directing you down a path, which is good.

That's why there's such a sense of exploitation and discovery. But I switch to this Reaper crest and build myself as soon as I got it. But you could just miss it and not get it. not know that it was there, not know that there was an alternative. There's also one called the Wanderers Crest, which is essentially just bringing it back to OG Polonite more or less. And I felt like a failure switching to this in a sense because this is a sequel, it's supposed to be something new.

And I'm thinking, am I not playing through the game as it was intended? Obviously, they allowed for the possibility to play it in the Reaper build or with the original way that you're used to. but something about that to me, it felt like, well, this is what they wanted me to play this game. Like, maybe I should just stick with it and see if eventually it clicks for me. No.

No. No, it's hard enough. It's hard enough. They restrict you enough in so many things. If they didn't want you to feel your most comfortable playing the game, they wouldn't have these things. And they wouldn't put them in easy-to-reach places, right? You can get rid of the diagonal down attack,

and they don't make you wait until deep into the game to do that. It's, in the grand scheme of things, pretty early into the game, you have the option to pivot off of that. If that was something they hid late, maybe I would kind of feel the way you do, but it's practically right in your path early in the game. So I don't think that you have to feel like you're cheapening the experience for yourself.

As you get even deeper and deeper into the game, the game and you have more traversal options as the character laid into Act II if you've been exploring a lot. You've really started to see how well designed this game is, how they've designed all of these sections that play differently depending on what upgrades you have and what upgrades you don't have. And it's only when I got that deep into Act 2 that I started really realizing how many of the decisions in this game were very mindful. And that, I think, is a good example. Yeah.

And there's more variety, I think, in the terrain and the look of the levels than there was in Hollow Night, which was sort of more consistently dark or grim dark, I would say, even though it had a ton of character. And there's just a lot of new looks to this place, even if the game itself doesn't feel that different. And that's one of the reasons why I was hesitant to switch to those different crests, even though I did, because there's not that much that sets this game apart. It is on some level, just fundamentally more holonite, which is not a bad thing. There are refinements.

There are additions. Maybe there are ways in which it goes backward. But it's a lot of the same. And it's Christopher Larkin's great, excellent score and all the little touches. That's what. Yeah. Just like being able to hear characters or enemies before you come to them when you're still a room or two away, you get a sense, oh, I'm nearing a boss, perhaps, or I'm nearing some interesting NPC encounter. Because there are so many things that you stumble across in this game that you might have this experience and someone else might not.

And you never know what's around the next corner or in some hidden passageway. there's going to be some cool character you meet who will not even necessarily help you or play a part in your journey. Sometimes they will. Sometimes they'll give you a side quest, but sometimes they're just there for flavor. Yeah, it's for the vibes.

Yeah. And like there's one of these early boss fights where you can team up with an NPC or an NPC combo, these characters Garmin and Zaza, and you can recruit them if you happen across them and talk to them. And then they'll join you for a boss. fight, which is fun, but also completely optional. Someone else just might not have that experience.

And just lots of little touches, the interactivity of the world. The animation is so endearing. I love the look and design of Hornet, but just the little touches, like when you equip the cloak that lets you float and you can descend slowly, you can just see the drifter's cloak. It's like Hornet's little stick insect legs are just kind of swaying back and forth in this. in the wind as you descend. And that kind of like, it makes me giggle a little bit as I'm watching this, even if I'm in the thick of battle or something, which is sometimes distracting.

But there's just so much care and time, obviously, that went into perfecting and polishing these things. And, you know, there are balance changes that I think should be made and will be made, but it never feels like anything less than a labor of love or like they skimped on any portion of the game, which you would expect. expect after how long it was in development. And there are areas that you'll revisit in the game where upon revisiting a second, third, fourth time,

there are new things happening there, sometimes very surprising things. So in a lot of games, you know, you walk through a section, you do what you have to do, you move on. So much of this game is designed to be revisited and rewards you for checking in on, characters, seeing how they're doing, and you'll end up finding them in completely different places of the map, doing things that make sense for them to be doing based on what you know.

It's a level above like every other Metroidvania's storytelling through exploration. It's really wonderful. Yeah. So this is not our last word, our final verdict. We will circle back to this on our next episode and perhaps in. end of year discussions, but for now, maybe we can close on this note. Does it live up to the hype? Could it possibly have? Could anything have? Are you underwhelmed, overwhelmed, or welled? Answering that question has been a real journey for me. And early into Act 1, I had one

opinion laid into Act 1. I had another. At that boss, I certainly had another. Where I'm at right, now deep, deep, deep into Act 2, yes, it entirely lives up to the hype for me. It took me a long time to get to this point, or I can say that, many ups and downs. But where I'm at right now, yes, the hype, it completely lived up to it, which is astounding. And it's refreshing to see all of this hype around a Metroidvania. It's my favorite genre of games if I had to pick one. It's exciting that everyone is playing Metroidvania's right now. And my only lament about it is that this hype didn't hit before Prince of Persia Lost

Crown was released, the game that was and continues to be wildly slept on, which is one of the best Metroidvania's ever created top five, closer to one than five. I hope that when people play this game and get into it, and maybe even if they bounce off because it's too hard. Like, Prince of Persia the Lost Crown deserves to get a bunch of traffic from this moment

because that is a perfect example. We've talked about quality of life a lot in Silk Song. Prince of Persia lost crown is a modern Metroidvania that constantly keeps that quality in life in mind. It does not have those frustrations

where you feel like, oh, this runback is unfair. It has some difficult boss fights. It's none that are that bad, to be honest. The platforming sections in Prince of Persia are crazy, challenging. So that's my only lament about it. There are so many great Metroidvanias, the new Ender Lillies that came out, I think this year,

is also fantastic Metroidvania. So I hope that Soxong is going to kind of boost the profile of all of these incredible, incredible Metroidvanias that I guess a lot of the public hasn't really had their eyes on that I really deserve some eyes on them. Agreed. And Prince of Persia benefited from being preceded by Silk Song, because when I was playing Prince of Persia, my wife was watching and she spent, I don't know, how many hours playing

Hollow Night, and I fear how many hours she will sink into Silk Song. But she was constantly saying every time I came across an enemy in Prince of Persia, basically like the Simpsons did it first meme. Oh, I did it first. Hollinite did it first. Oh, that's from Holo Night. That looks like this thing from Holo Night. But there were improvements and refinements.

And I'd also say, not to say that one is better or worse necessarily, but a different feel to it where the platforming in Prince of Persia, there's a flow state to that game and the controls of it that I don't get so much from HoloNight or Sok-Sung, which I find to be more sort of surgical. You know, you're kind of waiting for your moment and then you're rushing in and getting a stab and running away. You don't feel like you're just moving in sync with the character as much. Like there were frustrations with the controls. You know, I said this to you offline.

Sometimes I felt like I couldn't attack up and diagonally. Like there was the downward down diagonal attack, but I kept just jumping into enemies because I could only attack straight up or to the side. And that was frustrating for me. just the kinetic feel of the combat and the platforming in Holo Night. I wouldn't say it's best in class. It's great. It's great. There are games that I value more highly for that, whereas for HoloNate, what that is really

delivering to me is the setting and the atmosphere and the hand-drawn art and just the character of it. And I will say, when you get deeper into Silk Song and have more traversal options, that platforming does improve the feel of it, that flow state that you talk about in Prince of Persia, you will get to that in Silk Song. It does take quite a while to get there. But even still, early on in the game, the platforming, I just played the new Shinobi game, which is excellent, by the way,

incredible combat. But I had a bit of an issue that the platforming sections were a little bit too challenging, given how loose the controls are in that game. It just doesn't feel that precise. It was clearly designed with combat in mind and the platforming sections, like the frustrations I had in some of those,

and I got through them, the frustrations I had in those Shinobi platforming sections were pretty big frustrations. And at least in a hollow night, like the controls feel tight when you're doing those platforming sections. Yes. Even if you can't get enough traversal methods

to get into that flow state until later in the game. So coming off a shenotry, this felt excellent. Yeah. I would say it's hard for anything to live up to that all-encompassing level of hype. I would say it's lived up to my personal level of hype, which is probably more muted than the internet's just in general. Not that I was not looking forward to this game, of course I was.

But I guess my expectations were somewhat held in check by the fact that I felt like this would be more or less in line with Holonite, which is worth getting. getting excited about, but to me it didn't seem like there was that sort of skies the limit's vast potential for this to be something completely new and different. It is more of the same great thing. Whereas with GTA, for instance, there's so much we don't know and it could be anything, right? And it's been so long since the last one, we have no idea with the online will look like we don't really know how it will play and how it will control. We have a vague sense, but we've seen such leaps and bounds between each GTA game,

whereas Hologna to Silk Song, I felt like, okay, this started life as DLC. It's going to be like that, but more fleshed out and a great experience in its own right in a number of ways, but not necessarily something completely paradigm shifting and mold and boundary breaking. And I don't think it is so much. And so that made me anticipate it, but not just refresh my feeling. feeds daily for any tidbit and morsel. I figured when it's done, it's done, and we'll play it. And we have plenty to play in the meantime.

And I'm sure it'll be great. I have no doubts about it being great, which I think is part of the reason why everyone was so psyched is that we just had a lot of faith in Team Cherry not to fumble. And they didn't. They absolutely delivered what our mandate was for them. But I would say it didn't completely blow my mind, really. Or my mind was blown before. and now it's just the same sort of level of being impressed by this thing.

Give it time. Perhaps, yeah, look, maybe it'll continue to grow on me and we will return to it. It is worth the pain, worth the temporary trauma, at least thus far. And maybe I haven't even gotten to the best parts yet, but there's already so much to recommend. And I'm glad that I have taken this journey, even if I had to get through last judge to get there. It's last judge, so you know, you should be good. I don't think they're probably. No more judges, I'm sure.

Any judges. Yeah, unless Aaron judge is your final boss. That would be really tough for you. All right. Thanks to Devin Ronaldo for producing this episode and to Arjuna Ramcapal for his senior podcast management. Look out for continuing coverage of peacemaker and Alien Earth from the Midnight Boys, Poo! And House of Bar and stay tuned to Buttonmash for additional discussion of Silk Song.

And our thoughts on many more big games, including Borderlands 4, Silent Hill F, Ghost of Yote, so many games, so little time. We can't even catch our breaths. I'm trying to almost rush through Soxon without cheapening the experience for myself because we've got a few blockbusters on deck just waiting for us. Codes available in some cases. So it's tough when, I mean, we lost GTA on the release slate, but everything else. else has moved in and made the most of that vacancy. So we have no spare time. Just so many games coming fast and furious.

And you can contact us at RingiverseGaming at gmail.com. Let us know which Silk Song bosses have hurt you. And I'll leave you with a sound that you'll hear many, many times while playing Silk Song. Though not as often as you'd like, friend. Feels like every product claims real protein these days. But Real doesn't start on a lady. It starts at the source. Like Real California Milk from California farm families,

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