Topic: Pure Xbox Community Game Club

@themightyant interestingly enough I totally missed Moorwing in act 1 and just bumped into it quite after. Did not find as hard as many were complaining and now I know why 😅

@Balta666 Yep i'm finding out there are a few ways to skip Moorwing altogether e.g. Find all the Fleas and the Flea troupe is there instead, or if you enter Greymoor through Bellheart, or I think you can do Sinner's Road -> Exhaust Organ to skip this altogether, but that's meant to be harder. There is also a way to cheese him by running back to where you came into the level and hiding behind the barrier. You can hit them but they can't hit you. Team Cherry have added lots of variables!

I found all his moves quite readable but struggled for some reason. A lot of contact damage (2 hearts, which is about 40% health at that time) and doing well then getting hit once, twice, dead. Which happens a lot in this game!

@themightyant I don't know how I skipped it as I passed there at least once but did not trigger (and definitely didn't do exhaust organ as I did it this week 😂). But one reason I did not find hard (before patch) was that I could always go to that area on the left and take a breather/recover health completely free

At the true ending final boss (I guess)! Let's see how long it takes 😅

Done in an extra hour!

Final thoughts:

Hollow Knight has been in my top10 since 2018 although I had a really hard time with it and definitely only did the first credits section. I don't think there is anything in this game I like lesser than HK so right now it is my favourite but I will go back to HK to check again (I am a much better player nowadays as I was coming back to the hobby from a big hiatus and mostly playing k+m)
The main reason I like Silksong a lot (and why I find it not as hard as many) is that you recover a lot of health each time and that you can do it mid jump (absolute game changer).
If I need to give it a fault is that I found the crests quite limiting and the only crest I managed to feel comfortable with was HK move set (pogo is life!)

I guess I found my game of the year 😀 (although I liked Hades a lot I don't think a roguelike will match a metroidvania but we will see when I get my hands on the physical copy in a couple of months)

@Balta666 Well done fella, sharp skills. I also think Silksong is a better overall game than Hollow Knight, mostly down to Hornet's swift movement. I suspect it may be a little hard to go back to the original in a similar way that Doom (2016) was hard to go back to after Doom Eternal, the added mobility just made the first game feel a bit slow... even though it was anything but slow.

My Hollow Knight: Silksong review

Silksong is an absolute masterpiece. I could easily exceed the comment limit many times over talking about the tight gameplay, the movement, the animation, the art, the world building, the music and more, it's all top tier. I won't bore you with a dissertation of gushing praise. But I think what elevates Silksong is the hundred, seemingly incidental, little details that often hit you... it's far deeper than it might seem on the surface.

I previously said that the first Hollow Knight is a game that you get more out of the more you put in and Silksong is the same. There are so many little details that all add up to something greater. The world and all it's characters are so well realised, characters say so much with so little. Actions often speak louder than words. Pharloom is a lovely rabbit hole to disappear into.

A lot has been said about difficulty and I am not a particularly gifted gamer, but I am stubborn, I rarely give up if I am having fun, and I found every boss fight a lot of fun in Silksong. Did I get a little frustrated sometimes? Sure, but I think that is part of it, and then you also feel a sense of accomplishment when you succeed. For what it's worth I actually think the boss balance is just about spot on, there wasn't any boss I couldn't do with a bit of perseverance... and as discussed in this thread, taking a break always solved it. This rotation of challenge, success, then joyful exploration is core to the Hollow Knight experience and adding an easy mode would fundamentally change what Hollow Knight is.

I absolutely understand that this gameplay loop isn't for everyone, some people just want to makes progress and don't want to spend an hour or two fighting the same boss, that is completely valid criticism. But I also think it's fine to say perhaps this isn't a game for you, not every game has to be for everyone, in fact in trying to appease everyone you usually end up with pretty average art. I think Team Cherry likely made the right call here, sticking to their artistic ideals.

That all said I feel more firmly on the side that there SHOULD be accessibility settings that might also might act as difficulty settings. But Team Cherry is a core team of three people, just one programmer, and meaningful accessibility is a separate and complex discipline. Disabilities, handicaps and impairments are so varied that balancing it would be near impossible. Still it would be nice to see them try, even if it was just a few toggles like halving contact damage.

Personally my only major complaint is the tool economy, which actively punishes you for failing. I had similar issues with Bloodborne where you had to sometimes go and farm blood vials (healing items) before going back to fight a boss. This was only an issue infrequently, but it was a bit tiresome when it happened, hitting you again when you were already down. It is the ONE key aspect I would change in the game. I suspect it was added because tools can actually be extremely overpowered, especially with the Architects Crest, and they wanted to try and limit their use. But it doesn't quite work, rebalancing the tools would have been a better option imo.

I had less of an issue with runbacks as I ended up enjoying these little speedruns back to the boss, finding the fastest way back and parkouring around the room like a mini ninja, Hornet is such a delight to control. Only a couple were a real ball ache, and one of those was because I had not found a nearer bench... which was very hidden (in Bilewater).

So it's not a perfect game, but then no game is, yet it's not far off in my eyes. And a game doesn't have to be perfect to receive a 10/10. Do these small frustrations stop it being a masterpiece? Not in my eyes. What about other games for comparison? Looking back through my review scores for other games in Game Club the highest I have given is a 9.5 for Death's Door. (I would have also given a 9 / 9.5 to Ori and Dishonored, had I reviewed them here) Is Silksong better than that? Emphatically Yes in my eyes. Therefore for the first time in Game Club...

My score: 10 / 10

Post Script: I said after playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that I hoped it WASN'T my game of the year, because if it wasn't it would mean I had played another game as good this year. While Expedition 33 is likely still my frontrunner - mostly for how it made me feel - this runs it mighty close.

It also made me really question how, and even why, we like to compare everything and rank things. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that.

At the end of the day I am just happy to have had such an experience again this year. That feeling of being entirely consumed by a game - when you aren't playing it you can't wait to get back to it's gameplay, world and characters.

Now I feel a little empty, as you do when you are done with something truly magical. There really needs to be a specific word for that sense of emptiness and loss. What to play next eh?

@themightyant great review! And I have similar feelings regarding Clair obscure (which was until last month my number one) however, and that is how it goes with opinions, the reason I didn't want it to be was because the ending(s) broke me Iin a unsastifying way but that obviously does not completely ruin the marvelous journey to that point. Absolutely looking forward for what these two teams have in their bag next!

I started playing it a few weeks back but I saw a video of some tricky platforming later on in the game, so decided not to continue playing.

Hello everyone,

I will not tag but just want to let you know that AgentCooper has told me that he is going to be away from the forums for the foreseeable future. I am not going to create a new topic but if anyone wants to propose a game in the future we can as a group discuss and decide what to do at that point.

Cheers

Thank you @AgentCooper for all your work on the game club. Much appreciated mate. Hope all is good in your world.

Thanks for the update @Balta666. Anyone got any suggestions for October. (I’m away on business much of this month and swamped with work, not sure I’ll have much time for gaming sadly, let alone game club. But I’ll see what I can do)

@themightyant I have not been very active on Xbox this year now that I unsubscribed to GP (and got a PS5...).

However I am playing Hollow knight 😅 on it (which has been indeed a cake walk in the first 5h or so lol)

Thanks @agentcooper and @balta666. I'm still slowly playing through silksong. Ill probably be playing ninja gaiden 4 when It comes out though. Unless there's a spooky Halloween themed game on gp that i haven't already played, I dont really have any suggestions.

And unfortunately, just like that, im out on the club for now anyway. Not going to pay $30/month. Ill try to finish up silksong before my sub runs out on the 24th. Just canceled

@NintendoByNature very understandable 😞

@Balta666 terrible. I've subbed since I bought my S in december of 2022. Ill figure out a way to keep playing on Xbox though

@NintendoByNature yep, I also subbed for along while since 2021 (firstly on PC and after with Series X). However I also got a big library, mostly of physical games across all 4 generations of Xbox.

@NintendoByNature I just downgraded from Ultimate to Premium and it will save me $5 a month. Yeah I wont get Ubisoft+, but honestly I have all the Ubisoft games that I want already like the AC games. I dont care about Fortnite so I dont need that from Ultimate.

I will end up losing EA Access but after they sold themselves out earlier this week I could care less about them and besides, their games drop prices quick enough and you can find them used for cheap as well so no big lost anyway. I will miss out on day one MS releases but honest I have tons of games in my backlog that I can play till either those games get cheap enough for me to buy or they come to Gamepass for non Ultimate members.

So yeah not bad for $14,99 a month.

@NintendoByNature very understandable. It’s a massive price hike. 50% in the UK.

At the same time I’m still subbed for the next 2-3 years through rewards, i literally haven’t paid Microsoft directly since 2019 and won’t this gen, that was always unsustainable and great while it lasted. But I don’t think I will be paying £275+ annually when the time eventually comes.