Betshet
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betshet.bsky.social
Betshet
@betshet.bsky.social
87 followers 130 following 440 posts
Game programmer & designer
Manga & art enthusiast
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betshet.bsky.social
Conclusion
Conclusion Silksong is not for everyone, and I think that it’s the point it’s trying to make. In order to experience beauty, warmth, and connections, you have to persevere, you have to work, you have to suffer. For me, it is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and I consider it a masterpiece. In a world filled with open-world slop, soulless gacha, and dark patterns, it feels miraculous that art like Silksong can not only exist, but be nominated for Game of the Year. Thank you for reading.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
8. My experience
8. My experience. I love Silksong. I love what it says, I love playing it, I love its music, its bosses, I love its backgrounds and the majesty of it, I love its poison and its spite, I love its gauntlets and I love its harshness. I had an absolute blast playing through it, even in the hardest and most unfair moments. I spent three days grinding through the High Halls gauntlet and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I wanted to spend more time dancing with the Pinstress, Widow, the First Sinner, and all the bosses. I can’t imagine any other game making me feel like I did climbing back from the Abyss. Silksong took seven years to make and despite keeping that in mind when I launched the game it’s still so impressive that this game exists at all, it’s a masterpiece through and through. I don’t think I talked about every single thing I could in this review, but I really wanted to at least get this out. I finished the game almost two months ago now, and this review has been swirling in my head the entire time, so it feels good to finally let it out. In the spirit of being thorough, here’s a list of gripes I had with the game : - Like I already talked about, I wasn’t a fan of the shard system. I feel like the game wouldn’t lose much by allowing you to restock weapon ammo freely. As it stands, I had to spend a couple hours of farm in the Citadel to buy some shards, and I don’t know if that was totally necessary for me to go through. - In the same way, I didn’t feel incentivized to switch crests or weapons very often. I found a crest I liked and two all-purpose weapons, and stuck with those for a majority of the game. The few times I did feel it necessary to switch were pretty refreshing, so I would have liked to see more of that (but maybe that’s just my fault). - The game felt a little long. By the end of the third act I was starting to feel exhausted, and I had to force myself to go through the last few bosses. Maybe it would have been a better experience if I didn’t try to 100% the game, but there were a few optional bosses and areas that I really didn’t feel like they added much to the game besides playtime. - Last boss felt maybe a little easy? I would have liked a third phase to the battle.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
7. Bilewater
7. Bilewater Silksong is constantly giving the player a way to make the climb faster. If you’re in a hurry, you can skip the NPCs, ignore the quests, get the critical upgrades, grind through the bosses, and go past optional areas. The most hellish area of the game, Bilewater, is 100% optional. If you do, you’ll get an ending. I won’t spoil it here, but needless to say that it’s not exactly a happy one. To get the true ending, you’ll have to suffer. You’ll have explore the further reaches of the kingdom, fulfill the wishes of its inhabitants, see the good, the bad, and the ugly of what Pharloom has to offer. You’ll need to go through Bilewater, its traps, its parasites, its citizens, its poison, its spite, its resentment and its hate. You’ll need to experience it all in order to come out the other side and see the true ending. For many, this is a breaking point. Out of all the areas, this one feels the most miserable. It’s massive, labyrinthine, and filled with traps, the monsters hide in the poisoned water and vomit acid at you, and the only bench in the area is hidden and unpractical. All of this also serves a narrative purpose. Bilewater shows how inhospitable the world outside the Citadel has become, how the shining beacon of faith and civilization has polluted the part of the kingdom who refused to submit to its rule. But beyond that, Bilewater rewards perseverance. The entire game, really, but Bilewater is the game’s attempt at pushing the player past their breaking point. If you are used to the language and tropes of video games, it’s easy to just do quests and find secret areas, but traversing Bilewater, that takes patience and an iron will. Silksong wants you to suffer in order to reveal its secrets, it wants you to be miserable and to accept being miserable. And only once you’ve shown what you’re willing to go through does it give the key to the other ending. Does this area work if it’s easier? Does it carry the same weight, the same reward? If Bilewater is not made hard, does it serve any purpose? Silksong is about faith, and about perseverance. It’s about connections, and about patience. It’s about exploitation, and about suffering. And I don’t think it works if it’s easy. I think making people say “this is too hard” IS what Silksong is about. The game NEEDS people to give up on it, just like it needs people to persevere. Because without it, you can’t feel the beating heart underneath.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
6. The Citadel
6. The Citadel I won’t do into too much depth about the Citadel, mainly because I recommend you watch Jacob Geller’s video on Silksong instead (“Silksong and the Biblical Apocalypse”). It’s also the area with the most obvious environmental storytelling. The Slab, the prison for political and religious deviants, who pay for their “crimes” with endless emprisonment, as much a physical one as it is a mental one. Whiteward, filled with remnants of the experiments that injected bugs with silk. The gilded halls of the Choral Chambers, and its singing bugs that roam with no purpose, promised a life of luxury in servitude to the faith, but having long been replaced by automatons. And of course, the Underworks you’re forced to slog through, paying for everything from transport to benches with the symbols of Pharloom’s faith, the rosary beads, which the workers earn by working themselves to death. It’s the Underworks, I think, that best showcase what Silksong is trying to say. It shows, through the gameplay, what it is like being a pilgrim in Pharloom. It’s another difficulty spike, where the environment brutalizes you, the rooms become narrow and claustrophobic, the maze-like tunnels try to choke you, and as you try and climb back up to the grandiose and majestic upper Citadel, you get squeezed for every single one of your beads, just to rest for a minute. This area makes you miserable, it makes you feel like shit, and it’s on purpose. This isn’t to everyone’s taste. Should a game be fun to play? Is a game that isn’t fun a bad game? I don’t think the themes Silksong explores would have been as strongly felt if this area had been easier, but I speak from the perspective of someone who has played games my whole life, and is willing to spend 200 hours in two weeks on a single game. My perspective might be skewed. From the point of view of someone struggling with reflexes, motor control, or just someone new at games, or someone with less patience, this difficulty feels alienating. Why is this game so hard? I want to like it, it’s gorgeous, but I just can’t experience it! From the perspective of the player locked behind bars, there is a whole world that they cannot experience. Should a game be playable? If you hack the game to open the cell, if you download mods to make the game easier, are you ruining the narrative that the game wants to tell?
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
5. Narration through design
All of this creates a very interesting narrative through game design. The world of Pharloom is hostile, unwelcoming and harsh, difficult to navigate and traverse. In contrast, Hornest is fast, agile, and deadly. She has an arsenal of weapons, she bounces from enemy to enemy while scaling walls, goes from one end of the screen to another in a flash, and by the end of the game can expertly weave through the world like a fish through water. Even further, while the environment is hostile and full of enemies, there is an ember defiantly burning at the heart of Pharloom, in the welcome that its inhabitants offer Hornet. The pilgrims accept you at their hearth and share stories, the shopkeepers warn you about dangers, the barman of Greymoor still keeps his tavern open and offers a bench to rest on for free, even while being harassed by Crawbugs. When I say that difficulty can be a narrative tool, this is one part of it. While Sinner’s Road is punishing and unfair, it’s also the home of two of the best NPCs in the game, Crull and Benjin, who despite being scared of Hornet and famished, show no sign of hostility towards her at any point. They joke around with her, talk to her about what the region used to be like, and request some aid to improve their living conditions somewhat. NPCs like Crull and Benjin can be found everywhere in the kingdom, trying their best to keep on living, but never at the cost of harming another conscious being. Together, they form the beating heart of Pharloom, and every last one of them is a respite from the terrible wasteland their land has become. Would Bellheart have the same indomitable presence if it wasn’t right after the colorless Greymoor and right before the unforgiving climb through the Blasted Steps? Its warmth and joyful citizens are a real delight to come back to everytime you pass though on your journey to the top of the kingdom, and I don’t think it would have the same impact if the game was easier. In the same way, I don’t think the Citadel’s Grand Hall would feel so majestic and imposing if not for the Last Judge and its hellish runback. Going through the sandstorm every time, dodging the Judge’s bell and persevering through, even after potentially dying to its last surprise explosion, it makes the entry into the second act that much more powerful. In Silksong, difficulty is used as a narrative tool to explore themes of faith, perseverance, corruption, exploitation, and more. And nowhere is that more evident than in :
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
4. Giving power
4. Giving power While Silksong is difficult, it also gives a lot of power to the player, through different systems. I already touched a little on branching paths, and most of the areas I mentioned when talking about difficulty spikes are completely optional. In addition to that, Hornet is given a staggering quantity of gear, upgrades and possible playstyles to help the player traverse Pharloom. You have at your disposition an arsenal of various weapons, charms, and crests that you can swap at will to help you match your current situation. Struggling with the very quick diagonal pogo? Your very first crest unlocks a moveset with a slow and measured downward slash. Lost? Here’s a compass. Can’t get beads? Here’s a magnet to help you. Can’t stop falling into lava? Here’s a fire resistance charm. Flying enemies giving you trouble? Here’s a deadly trap you can throw in the air. The catch, of course, and your first hint at Silksong’s way of baking narrative into game design, is the to get the money and unlocks to buy and equip these upgrades, you will need to engage with the quests and the secrets of Parloom. This isn’t a brand new way of doing things, games have been hiding upgrades in secret rooms forever to get players to engage with exploration, same with character quests. But we’ll touch on what Silsong is building narratively later. I really like the weapon system of Silksong, and early on, the availability of shards, the material needed to reload your weapons, makes experimenting with new weapons easy. I have gripes with the shard system in the late game though, where I often stopped using weapons altogether because of the cost of ammo. Your weapons can come in very handy during bossfights, but if you die a lot you’ll run out of shards very quickly, which discourages their use. This was a frustration point for me, I really like how the game gives the player a lot of power to counterbalance the difficulty, but stifling that power via a resource system doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Another way the player feels empowered is through the movement unlocks. Again, nothing new under the sun in the land of metroidvanias, but it is still worth talking about, just because of how great the movement in Silksong is. Each upgrade unlock a whole new dimension to fights, and by the mid-game you start to really feel like the nimble and deadly threat that Hornet was in Hollow Knight. Weaving and jumping and bouncing and ziplining though hordes of enemies is a feeling I rarely experienced to this degree in a game, and mastering Hornet’s moveset was an absolute joy.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
3. On difficulty in games
3. On difficulty in games There’s a very steep difficulty spike in Silksong around the point where you enter Deep Docks, and even more if, like me, you instead went through Hunter’s March. This is only the first of many such spikes in the game, and the starting point of the discourse around the difficulty of Silksong. A question that constantly comes to my mind when I think about video games is: “should a game always be playable?” The instinctive answer, is, of course, yes. Because... well, because a game that you can’t play isn’t a game, right? But is that correct? Imagine a game that locks you up in a jail cell and prevents you from experiencing the rest of it. Like, the game is there, it exists, if you weren’t in a cell you could play it to your heart’s content, but you can only move around in a small area behind your bars. In a way, the game is playable, because your inputs are interpreted by the game correctly and allow you to move. Should this be considered a game, though? Silksong is not just hard, at points it seems to actively try to reject you as a player. The game goes to great lengths to make some areas as miserable to play through as possible, from the broken bench of Sinner’s Road, the traps in the Mist, the vine creatures in the Ducts, the fire wisps in the Thicket, and more, to the entirety of Bilewater and its parasite-infested waters. I’ve seen a lot of people quit the game because they felt that it was actively rejecting them, and it is understandable. It’s hard not to feel dejected when bashing your head against the same wall again and again and again, and to feel baffled as to why this otherwise incredible game is rejecting you like this. MarcoMeatball, a youtuber, streamer, and former opera singer, had to stop his Youtube series on Silksong after getting to the Citadel, and made a really heartfelt video about why he was quitting. In it, he explains that he feels his time being disrespected, he shares how the game is oppressive and at times even spiteful, and talks about needing to add mods that shorten runbacks and lower boss damage to have a more pleasant experience. Now, let’s talk a little about what games are, and what difficulty brings to a game. Games are, at their most fundamental level, patterns to solve. When you approach a new pattern, your brain immediately starts working on it and tries to master it, in order to file it under “things I understand”. When your brain feels like the pattern is too easy, you get bored, if the pattern is too hard, you want to give up. Difficulty is the art of balancing the complexity of your patterns in a way that keeps the player engaged in solving them. This is almost always a losing battle, and the reason why most games have a finite amount of content, because at some point your brain will finish fully decrypting the patterns, or give up trying. However, this is also a reductive definition, because difficulty in games serves a lot of other purposes. Difficulty can trace a path through a game, by showing the player where they should go. Mother 1, Octopath Traveller and Dark Souls 3, for example, block paths leading to end-game areas by placing high-level enemies in front of them. You can still try to beat them, and you often get access to high-level loot if you manage it, but the goal of the difficulty is to warn the player that this path is best travelled later on. You can also use difficulty to manage tension. Hightening the difficulty in a horror game makes the player a lot more careful and paranoïd, but lowering it calms them down, and a careful balance of the two is necessary to offer the best scares. And finally, difficulty can be a narrative tool.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
2. Silksong
2. Silksong Almost immediately upon taking control of Hornet, you can tell why the game took so long to come out. There is a significant upgrade in the quality of the animations, backgrounds, visual effects, feedback, and controls that’s visible as soon as you start climbing ledges and hitting enemies. Hornet feels great to play, and the environments are gorgeous right from the start. Another way the game grips you straight from the beginning is that Hornet talks. She talks, and she means business, she goes straight to the point and doesn’t take shit from anyone. One of the ways people feel disconnected from Hollow Knight is that the game is kinda hard to parse from a story perspective. The Knight is a silent protagonist, the story isn’t clear, your long-term objective intentionally obscured from you, which in one way creates intrigue and mystery, but on the other it does mean that for a long time, you’re just shuffling from area to area without much of an idea as to what you’re supposed to be doing. Silksong keeps the mystery aspect of HK by plunging Hornet into a mysterious new land, inhabited by a ruler with an apparent but unknown interest in her. There are puzzles to unravel, but at the same time, Hornet makes her personal objective very clear, and has a refreshing singular focus on that goal. The world design helps a lot with that too. Where HK lacked an obvious focal point to go towards, Silksong sets up an immediate direction that you should aim for : the Citadel. While there are diverging paths and side areas to visit on your way there, you are constantly spurred on upwards, both by the dialogue, the character quests, and the level design. It speaks a lot more to the human brain, I think, than the downwards path you follow in HK, and gives the player some comfort in the first area beyond the tutorial. Are you hurt? Don’t worry, just let yourself fall down, and you’ll be right next to the cozy little camp at the start of the game. Silksong almost cradles you, in those first hours of play. You exit a verdant cavern full of weak enemies and an easy boss to meet welcoming characters, befriend a tall and strong map-maker, tame a massive beast, collect a good amount of beads, and progress without difficulty in a level design that isn’t too confusing. The Marrow certainly isn’t a walk in the park, but you’ve played Hollow Knight, you know what you’re doing, and Hornet just feels very good to control and move around with. But of course, if you’ve played Silksong, you know exactly what’s coming next.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
1. Expectations
I feel like I want to be more thorough with this than usual, so let’s begin with a brief summary of my thoughts on Hollow Knight. I played Hollow Knight in 2021, and have 80 hours logged on it on Steam. I liked the game fine, but it wasn’t the life-changing experience some people seem to have had with it. I loved the level design and the combat, for sure, but I didn’t obsess over it either. What was a lot more interesting to me was the phenomenon that followed, and the absolute craze that was the wait for Silksong. The combination of the Kickstarter campaign shattering every goal and the seven year-long period that came after with almost no news created a fascinating rise of expectations placed on the game, which I’m sure everyone reading this is at least partially aware of. You might not realize the full extent of it though. For years, people were spamming “where Silksong?” in EVERY major gaming event livestream. The wait for the game was almost a bigger contributor to the fame of Silksong than Hollow Knight ever was. Would HK be as popular as it is today without the years of memes and discussion about its sequel? Folding Ideas Presents: Silkposting a Culture of Trolling | PAX East 2025 When the release date dropped, I talked a little about what it would be like to play a game with seven years worth of expectations weighing on it. How do you judge a game fairly in those conditions? When talking about the quality of a game, do you need to talk about it in the context in which it was released? Can you judge art based solely on its own merit, or do you have a responsibility to talk about its price tag, or the way it was brought into existence? Joseph Anderson talks about this in his review of HK, because as a piece of art, the game is great but flawed, but as a product with a price of 15$, then it becomes a massive game, with a truly incredible depth of content and a staggering level of quality. In the opposite way, can you judge Silksong fairly if you take into account the fact that the game took seven years to come out? When you’re fighting a boss that’s slightly subpar, or going through an area that feels less polished, should you listen to the voice in your head that whispers “man, they really worked for seven years on this?” It was with these thoughts in my head that I launched Silksong for the first time.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
Introduction
Introduction A little while ago, I finished Hollow Knight : Silksong with 100% completion, after more than 200 hours of play. I have some thoughts about it, and it took a while for me to take the time to sit down and organize them into something coherent. This is going to be both a review of what playing the game was like, as well as a discussion about topics like expectations and difficulty. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about Silksong, both before and after its release, and especially now with the Game Awards right around the corner. This meme in particular has gained some traction recently, and I’ve seen that same sentiment echo on twitter for a while. I won’t pretend to have some groundbreaking take on the matter, or even to change your mind if you have a different opinion. My “hot take” is that how you feel when playing a game is valid, and the truth is that I have a very different relationship to games compared to most people, so my opinion certainly isn’t gospel. I really just want to get my thoughts in writing more than I want people to read them, but if you do and like what I write, thanks! Let’s get on with the review.
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
Here's my Silksong review in thread form.
A review of Hollow Knight: Silksong and a discussion about difficulty in games By Betshet
December 7, 2025 at 7:17 PM
betshet.bsky.social
There's one thing I forgot to mention in this review, and that's how alive Riven felt.
Myst was grand and imposing, but also really empty and desolate. Riven, in contrast, almost immediately assaults you with life, animals and culture.

It feels a lot more like a tangible place, which is neat.
November 29, 2025 at 7:40 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Playing both games back to back FEELS like a big step forward, and I can see the DNA of Riven in a lot of the puzzle games that have come out since (Blue prince, Outer Wilds, Submachine...)

I am a bit apprehensive about the rest of the Myst series though, I know they aren't as well received...
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
I've already talked about the incredible final puzzle and my disappointment w/ how the remake changed it, but aside from that & a few flaws still present in the puzzle design, I can say that Riven is one of the best puzzle games I've played, and I recommand it to anyone with any interest.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Something I noticed in the remake : the character acting and modeling is honestly incredible. The faces show a lot of subtle emotions, and it feels SO fresh compared to the over-the-top "acting" of the two brothers in Myst.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
The times I felt stuck were more because of me than any fault of the game, but there are still issues with hidden levers, passages, and leaps of logic (a LOT less than in Myst)
A flaw of the open world: sometimes you don't know if you can solve what's in front of you or if you should come back later
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Where Myst was about a small family drama, Riven ups the ante and opens the door to a lot of worldbuilding.
The environmental storytelling is still very strong, but what surprised me in both games, is how great the writing is.
Reading the lore books was such a pleasure, which I really didn't expect.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
The decision to switch from small and contained puzzle-worlds to a big open island was certainly risky, and it does cause some problems, but the feeling of freedom it provides makes it worth it.

Riven feels huge, both in terms of exploration, and in story and lore.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Riven, on the other hand, blew me away even by today's standards.
By 1997, devs were becoming more familiar with 3D. SM64 and Quake 2 were out, so the lack of free-roam was becoming outdated, but even then, the open nature of Riven's world feels breathtaking as soon as you open the game.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
There's a lot of backtracking with slow-moving animations, a lot of hidden passages, clues and levers that are hard to see, a few leaps of logic... Myst suffers a lot from 30 years of evolution in puzzle design.

Also need to mention the horrendous acting for all 3 characters in the game.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Myst was ahead of its time, which is both a compliment and a critique. For all its atmosphere and environmental storytelling, there are a lot of quite obvious game design flaws, too.

Which makes sense, devs weren't used to making puzzles work in a 3D environment, even without free-roaming.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
I feel like if I played the original in 1993 it would have been mind-blowing. For context, 1993 was Day of the Tentacle, Doom, and Link's Awakening.

Exploring a full 3D world with that level of realism was unheard of. There is a reason why Myst stayed the best-selling PC game for nearly a decade.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Myst is... I mean for its time it's certainly impressive. The atmosphere of desolate solitude, the player left alone with these machines and these abandonned islands, there's an impressive level of detail put in these worlds.

Reminds me a lot of Submachine, which leaned even more in that direction.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
Finished Riven (2024)

This is going to be kind of a triple review, where I talk a bit about Myst (1993), Riven (1997) and Riven (2024).

I think it's both useful and necessary to talk about older media in their original context, AND in the context of modern times.
November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
betshet.bsky.social
November 24, 2025 at 1:12 AM