Me doing the Courier’s Rasher quest 17 times and getting my ass kicked over and over again by Lace:
Bullshit game, fake difficulty, sadistic devs, pls nerf
Me in act 3 wishing for the quaint challenge of delivering some food for a dude.
Those were the good ole times.
the courier quest is much easier if you just do this
https://www.nexusmods.com/hollowknightsilksong/mods/21 https://www.nexusmods.com/hollowknightsilksong/mods/46 https://www.nexusmods.com/hollowknightsilksong/mods/22
I use these three mods and suddenly I don’t hate the game anymore. I’m yet to get to the courier quests though I really hated the white flower quest in hollow knight I almost ate my controller whole
I bought it for Switch so I could play it on my lunch breaks at work
Only mod I’d install would be an enemy life bar one anyway
I quite enjoy the tension of not knowing the bosses health. I tried that mod in hollow knight and it actually ruined it for me somewhat.
i don’t have an opinion on those mods but it’s annoying that the second one is called “quality of life” that shit is a huge balance change.
I don’t want to complain too much about how other people enjoy single player video games, but it also creates the necessity of the compass always on mod since you’re exploring the map quite a bit less lol
yeah that’s a great example of there being purpose to some game mechanic that somebody might not like and by rounding one edge you (general) make a second-order thing worse for yourself. another part of the checkpoint system and the map exploration is so you can go do something else if you’re banging your head against something for a while, but maybe removing that aspect doesn’t matter for a player who was going to stubbornly try to do one thing at a time.
Yeah you’re spot on!
My general experience with Silksong so far:
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I notice I keep losing earlier and earlier to a boss because I’m stuck in a rut and am actually practicing losing. I need a break. But I can’t make myself stop.
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“I got to his 2nd phase on my 5th try, why can’t I do it again? The runback sucks but I’ll give it just one more run! Maybe if I spam my poison kunai I can brute force through the 2nd phase!” (Spoiler, there’s a third phase I didn’t know about)
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repeat step 2 til I’m out of bug shards
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give up and go farm shards
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quick detour to a vendor to bank the rosaries I got while farming shards, and buy more shard bundles
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oh hey, while backtracking I met NPC who wasn’t there before but has moved here now! Taking a break wasn’t bad, it was good!
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oh snap I accidentally stumbled onto a new area! Taking a break was actually great!
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15 hours of exploration and gameplay later, multiple damage upgrades, new tools and abilities found: “I should try that boss again”
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discover a shortcut yo the boas that makes the run back easier too, which I’d missed before because I was too tunnel-visioned.
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beat them in under 5 tries with my new tools and skills and greater fluency of the game.
maybe removing that aspect doesn’t matter for a player who was going to stubbornly try to do one thing at a time
Yes, but I’m going to say they’re playing the game wrong and if they want to suffer extra then they can pay the price of that. Let them opt in to that. If the devs responded to gripes by making tools/shards/rosaries infinite and putting stakes of Marika everywhere, they’d be encouraging the “beat your head against the wall forever” approach. Which would make sense in a game that’s very linear with a level progression, but would conflict with the design of these kinds of exploration games.
Sometimes walls are there to encourage you to do something different. Sometimes they’re there for pacing. If you brute force the graveyard in Dark Souls 1 right odd the bat you’ll pay for it and that’s part of the game’s charm. It was trying to tell you to explore somewhere else and learn how to handle the graveyard.
In Demon Souls, the run to the boss was basically part of the boss’s design. Putting in stakes of Marika would have been bad.
Cool and fun though it was, I actually feel Elden Ring was a step backward in FromSoft’s game design, lore, and worldbuilding, and I think it’s too bad this was the game that really blew up and did the best of their catalogue.
I feel like Lies of P having adjustable difficulty is one of the better ways to open these difficult action games to broader audiences. I didn’t use it much, but there were a couple of bosses I got tired of slamming my head against the wall for in that one lol
I agree, though I didn’t end up using those features in retrospect I should have. And I think Lies of P is the best soulslike I’ve ever played. (Apparently it’s also easier if you play anything other than the build I chose, oops).
Another Crab’s Treasure does it well too with a lot of different accessibility settings! It also is more linear so you can get really really roadblocked with nowhere else to go and nothing to do except best your head against the wall. I did resort to the Glock accessibility setting in Another Crab’s Treasure for one boss.
(Apparently it’s also easier if you play anything other than the build I chose, oops).
Let me guess - you did a strength build on that little guy
Some of the bosses seem like a huge pain in the ass if you have a slower weaponI struggled with the final boss of the expansion enough to
the difficulty button. There were a handful of the bosses I found annoying enough in NG+ that I did it too lol.I still need to check out Another Crab’s Treasure - it looks super cute.
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I could get lost in a paper bag so I almost always wear the compass unless I need the spare slot for a specific boss fight and have memorized the runback.
I know about the always on compass mod but I choose not to install it anyway because I think of it as a balancing choice. Team Cherry could have put in an always on compass feature and come up with some diegetic explanation for how it worked. That they chose not is a deliberate balancing choice and I choose to respect it by not modding it out.
I agree. Choosing not to use mods is easy for me though, because I’m playing on a console and can’t implement mods even if I want to. Usually that’s a major disappointment for me - some games I won’t play because I think the ability to use mods with them is a major piece of the enjoyment of the game.
But for games like Silksong, I’m actually kinda glad the option to mod just isn’t there for me because when I get frustrated, I know it would be a temptation. I want to play the game at full difficulty, as intended by the developers, but there are still times when I keep dying to a maddening boss fight where I would be itching to use something to make it easier, so I didn’t have to keep banging my head into a wall. I’m always glad when I finally get through it that I accomplished it without aid though. Like I’m really glad I threw myself at the Sister Splinter boss enough times to beat her before the devs did that update that nerfed her a bit.
I do kinda regret doing the Courier’s Rasher the way I did that was a bit cheesy, but I justify that for myself since the way I did it is part of the game as it was originally made, using the systems put in place by the devs (not someone else altering it as with mods). All of that said, I absolutely don’t begrudge anyone who does use mods and I’m glad mods exist that allow people to play the game as they choose to.
I pre-killed enemies too and it still took me a bunch of tries, lol. I actually thought I would like to more/cheat past that hurdle but decided I’d give it a few more honest tries because it seemed doable, I was just making mistakes. That is, it didn’t feel unfair to me.
I did use cheats 3 times in my replay of the original Hollow Knight I played in preparation for Silksong: one to deal with a bug where if the soul master hits you as you kill him, he wiggles in his death animation forever, and you have to quit and fight him again. That’s a bug they should have fixed buy never did, so I put on infinite health to be able to brute force through fighting him again. The 2nd and third times I cheated weren’t legitimate, but I was just not having fun anymore, had done evwrything else except the final boss and godhome (which I never did because I didn’t care about it) and I wanted to see the lore / dialogue: white flower, and path of pain. I have no regrets about cheating my way through those because I just wouldn’t have seen that content otherwise (I didn’t do them on my first play through).
Me waiting a year from now to play silksong; when team cherry will release 5 patches for free, with coop multiplayer, arena mode, photo gallery mode, and more shaws than you can shake a nail sword at.
Meanwhile I’ll be playing Afterimage which is Chinese anime hollow knight + ender lilies
The only thing that made the flower quest bearable was the lack of timer and that it was completely optional.
I actually did the Courier’s Rasher before I had double jump and even before I had
silkspearclawline, just cling grip and drifter’s cloak (float). I was impressed with myself because after doing it, I looked around and couldn’t find any video of anyone making the run without at least clawline. But… I also did it in way that is probably considered rather cheesy. I’m sure others have realized it too, it seems pretty obvious to me, but after I did it, I searched around to see if any guides or tip posts mentioned it and none did, at least that I could find. It takes a bit of prep, but if anyone reading this is having serious trouble making it to the kitchen in time, but you just want to get that damn timed mission out of the way, here’s a cheesy method that could make it a lot easier for you:spoiler
I’m assuming you already know the quickest route to take. But here’s the thing, you can go through that whole route before hand and kill the enemies that you would encounter along it before even accepting the mission from Tipp and Pill and those enemies will stay dead. Obviously then when you do accept the mission, it’s clear sailing. You just have to worry about sprinting enough and doing the platforming/parkour bits and whatnot, but not having to worry about having to kill or evade the numerous enemies along the way which is really what makes the run so damn hard.
There are some exceptions for pre-killing enemies though. As you probably know, there are basically two categories of regular enemy in Silksong: the enemies that when killed will stay dead when you leave a room or area and return, and those that always respawn immediately upon returning to a room or area. The former ones tend to be the larger ones, like all the pilgrim enemies, and fortunately they are mostly what you encounter on Courier’s Rasher. But the little ones like the little flies- and mice-styled bugs will be there again when you return to a room even if you killed them seconds ago.
So to prepare, you want to go along the route, probably best to start at the finish line and work your way back towards the start at Tipp and Pill, and kill off all the various haunted pilgrims in the Choral Chambers, at the Blasted Steps there are some judges (brass mechanical, shield-bearing guys) you might encounter so it is good to kill them off, more flying pilgrim enemies in the vertical chamber at the end of Shellwood and the pondcatchers (flying spear-throwing pilgrims) along that first long horizontal part of the run in Shellwood. But don’t bother with the pond skippers there where the pondcatchers are, don’t bother with the driznits (the flying bugs that shoot their drill-shaped face at you) at the blasted steps, or with the pharlid towards the end of the run - those ones will be there anyway when you come back through after starting the mission. But the ones that respawn mostly don’t cause any real issue as you’re running through and can mostly be ignored.
The only respawning ones that tend to cause problems are the driznits. If you’ve done the runback for the Last Judge boss, then you’ve probably already figured out how to avoid them for this run too, as it’s the exact same route. All of them can be ignored and ran past so long as you sprint, which you need to do anyway to make the Courier’s Rasher run in time.
If during this preperation, where you’re killing off the enemies before the mission, you take damage and are close to death, just find some of the little enemies that do respawn, whack 'em to build silk and heal as you normally would. If you kill them and are still low on health, just leave the room and come back. I used the pond skippers to make sure I was at full health before starting the mission but after doing the rest of the prep. What you obviously don’t want to do is rest at a bench because that will reset all your prep work.
tl;dr
Kill the enemies along the route before starting the mission, just don’t rest after doing so, then run through the mission without encountering them.
