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Team Cherry Defends Silksong’s Brutal Difficulty, Reveals Why Early Patches Made It Even Harder
In the months since Hollow Knight: Silksong finally landed on PC and consoles, a curious pattern has emerged. Players who spent years begging for a release date are now flooding forums with a very different kind of plea: for help. The sequel’s punishing boss fights and labyrinthine zones have sparked heated debates about accessibility, and developer Team Cherry has an unapologetic answer. Hornet is simply better than you.
At Melbourne’s ACMI Game Worlds exhibition, curators shared rare insights from the studio’s design philosophy. A companion book to the event, obtained by Dexerto, laid out why Silksong feels so relentlessly demanding. The text revealed that the team sees steep difficulty not as a bug, but as a feature baked into the very identity of its protagonist. Where the original Knight was a blank vessel, Hornet enters Pharloom as a fully formed warrior — fast, agile, and lethal. For her to face mediocre threats would betray everything players learned about her in Hollow Knight.
“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty,” the book’s entry explains, “but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.” This design ethos means that unlike many metroidvanias, players rarely hit an absolute wall. Boss encounters can be outmaneuvered through exploration, clever charm combinations, or even bypassed entirely if one chooses a different path. In theory, frustration should be a choice.
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