If you’ve been playing Hollow Knight: Silksong this past week (it seems everybody is) or at least paying attention to the discourse around it, you’ve probably noticed that it’s very difficult. This is par for the course – the first game was fair, but still challenging – but many people have said that Silksong feels especially punishing thanks to long, dangerous runbacks, overpowered bosses, and a stingy currency economy.

Team Cherry Is Balancing Hollow Knight: Silksong In Its First Patch

There’s good news for people who’ve been struggling with the early game. Developer Team Cherry has announced that Silksong’s first patch will be making some balance adjustments for the Moorwing and Sister Splinter bosses, and Sandcarvers will deal less damage. The Bellway and Bell Bench will also cost less to unlock, relics and psalm cylinders will give more rosaries, and courier deliveries will also reward players with more rosaries.

None of these words mean anything to me, because I’m still grinding my way through the first Hollow Knight. That’s turning out to be a good thing for me, though, especially since the difficulty of the game is putting me off a little bit.

These are fairly conservative changes to the difficulty of the game, and it’s unclear if Team Cherry will continue to rebalance the game in response to the community’s complaints and feedback. Considering that there have been quite a few mods created by players to ease the game’s difficulty already, it seems that this isn’t just a case of a few unskilled players struggling.

These early game tweaks might be enough to solve the problem of the game’s difficulty spikes, but I’m interested to see if Team Cherry changes more over the coming weeks. If it does, it might be an indicator that the game was made more difficult than intended, and Team Cherry is trying to bring it more in alignment with the average player’s skill levels.

Maybe Silksong Would Have Benefitted From Early Access

It’s always interesting to me when developers do balance patches, especially in single-player games where the meta isn’t ever changing like it is in live-service games. It feels almost like Silksong is in a pseudo Early Access mode of sorts, where it’s having to take player feedback into consideration in order to tailor the gameplay experience to its audience and its preferences.

Silksong had a notoriously isolated development cycle. Team Cherry went pretty much off the grid when developing the sequel, only resurfacing publicly to say the game was still in development. There was no early critical feedback, since reviewers weren’t given codes before the game was launched. There was no public beta where the team could aggregate common complaints from players before launch.

I’ve gone on the record as saying that more games should have Early Access phases, and Silksong is a game that would have benefited from that. Then again, the complete silence throughout its development cycle was a huge factor in making the game as popular as it is. Still, I can’t help but imagine if it had a process more like Hades 2’s, a game that is much like Silksong in that it’s the highly anticipated sequel to a wildly popular indie.

Hades 2 is being created largely in collaboration with its loyal player base, because it has had a lengthy Early Access period in which balance changes are being made, mechanics added, and quality of life features improved. Early Access is a boon to games where balance is crucial, something Hades 2 and Silksong have in common.

Team Cherry may or may not continue to make changes to Silksong as time goes by, but I’m glad that I’ve decided to wait it out till the game aligns more with the developers’ vision. It might not technically be in Early Access, but it kind of feels like I’m waiting for a full launch anyway.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong

Metroidvania Action Adventure Soulslike Systems 9.8/10 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 92/100 Critics Rec: 97% Released September 4, 2025 ESRB E10+ For Everyone 10+ // Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood Developer(s) Team Cherry Publisher(s) Team Cherry Engine Unity
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