As a modern society, I thought we were done with mile-long, soul sucking boss runbacks in videogames. We’re evolved. Enlightened! Then Hollow Knight: Silksong came out.
In a world where even FromSoftware—the worst offenders of hellish boss runbacks in the Dark Souls series—all but ditched them in Elden Ring, Silksong is here straight out of the 2010s to remind us of when games just straight up wasted our time.
Clawing your way to a boss in Silksong is merely step one of the trial that awaits you when you inevitably die. Instead of showing you mercy and letting you respawn a few steps away from the fight, it drops you in a different zip code.
What could be a short jog back to the boss is actually an obstacle course of spikes, falling rocks, and flies equipped with sniper rifles. Silksong will kill you with bosses who wipe out half of your health bar with a sneeze and then laugh as you trip and fall on the way back.
It’s so brutal that even fans of the original Hollow Knight, which has its fair share of rough runbacks, can’t believe how bad it is from the start. It doesn’t help that it takes Silksong all of 20 minutes before it starts throwing out enemies and environmental hazards that eat two points of your health when you get hit. Threading the needle to arrive at the boss healthy is a herculean task in its own right, especially when you initially have no access to half of the game’s most evasive tools.
The amount of precision Silksong’s runbacks require rivals the difficulty of the boss fight waiting at the end.
Most people point to the final boss of Act 1 as the worst example of a runback that feels straight up cruel. Team Cherry has you running through a miserable sandstorm where the worst enemies known to man sneak up on you in the haze and threaten to knock you off into your doom. Worms nip at your feet as you barely grab onto each tiny platform while dodging flies and shield-bearing guards just to get set on fire by the boss, cursed to do it all over again. I’ve seen the pitiful amount of Rosaries they drop: These dudes aren’t in it for the pay, they’re out here making this chapter of Silksong a living hell for the love of the game.
“It’s not even the distance of the runback as much as it is the resistance of the runback,” soulslike YouTuber Rusty says about this section in his recent video.
The amount of precision Silksong’s runbacks require rivals the difficulty of the boss fight waiting at the end. It’s as if the developers didn’t want you to make it back, which seems backwards in a game where boss fights serve as skill checks in order to progress through the game. The reward for perfecting a boss fight is never having to do it again, but the reward for perfecting a runback is only the chance at never having to do it again.
Notoriously difficult fights like Elden Ring’s Malenia wouldn’t work if it took 10 minutes to get back to her boss room. An attack that might seem like complete bullshit on your second or third attempt becomes more manageable when you can try the boss enough times in quick succession to learn how to prepare for it. Stretching out the downtime between attempts exacerbates the challenge to the point that you just want it over with—it’s no longer just a skillcheck, but a mental health exercise, compounded by how Silksong is with its currency and the mental blow of losing everything you had in your pockets if you die on the way back to the boss.
When I finally beat Silksong’s final Act 1 boss, I didn’t feel triumphant; I felt relieved from a torment I hope to never experience again.
The only catharsis has been watching everyone else suffer along with me. I’m glad I’m not alone in having enough of that one specific enemy that refused to let me reach the boss unscathed. And while I appreciate the people who try to offer advice on how to make the runbacks easier, nothing is going to make me enjoy this part of the game. It’s simply not fun. I want to fight cool bosses, not learn to speedrun chunks of the map every time I hit a snag. Runbacks were novel in Demon’s Souls, expected in Hollow Knight, but just entirely unpleasant in Silksong.
It’s no surprise that one of the first mods made for Silksong solves this problem by ripping the Stakes of Marika respawn system right out of Elden Ring. FromSoft got it right by providing a checkpoint outside the boss room with the caveat that you can’t change up your build unless you go back to an actual Site of Grace. It’s a welcome compromise from its previous games, and it’s not like limiting backtracking stopped FromSoft from designing boss fights that’ll tear you apart in seconds.
Apart from honing your skills at executing whatever is being asked of you, there’s nothing to be gained from repeating the same section over and over.
I think it’s a valid point that some of the frustration comes from the fact that Silksong is a new game that everyone is racing to squeeze every last drop of enjoyment out of in the first few weeks. It’s not built to be blasted through in a few sittings. But you can’t convince me the boss runbacks are meant to encourage players to take a break when they’re as harsh as they are, and when, at least in the early hours, there’s not much else to do when a boss stands between you and the next area.
For the most part, Silksong is a linear game. Yes, you can choose which areas to explore when within limits. But you can’t grind levels or put together a build to cheese whatever boss you’re stuck on. It’s a straightforward 2D game where you go left or right until a boss stands in your way. Apart from honing your skills at executing whatever is being asked of you, there’s nothing to be gained from repeating the same section over and over—there are rarely even shortcuts for boss runbacks to be found by putting your exploration skills to use.
The boss fights, however, are full of surprises and clever tactics you pick up on as you practice. You might get lucky and have an attempt where the boss doesn’t do its nastiest attack. Or maybe you finally get the timing right on the dodge, giving you all the advantage you needed to get in that last hit. This dance where you’re never quite sure what moves they’re going to pull out is the reason people replay these games for years.
None of that excitement happens on the way there. The platforming and the enemies don’t change, they only get more tolerable as you repeat them enough to perform the runblack blindfolded. The runbacks are dull exercises in memorization and execution that bar you from all the creativity and satisfaction of mastering Silksong’s boss fights.
The runback of THAT boss be like from r/HollowKnight
Thankfully, Act 2 is where the game opens up a lot more and gives you plenty of alternatives when you can’t crack a boss. There are still evil runbacks that test my patience, but it’s less of a pain when I know I’m choosing to ignore all the other stuff I could be doing.
That the runbacks are only less of a pain in Act 2, however, is why I wish they simply didn’t exist at all. In such an imaginative game full of intricately designed levels, a beautiful soundtrack, and evocative worldbuilding, I don’t see the point of doing the same jumps 40 times to earn the right to death grip my controller for another 90 seconds until I can finally move on to experience its best parts. At worst, Silksong’s nightmarish runbacks feel like unnecessary padding, and at best, they feel like a gross misunderstanding of why I’m playing it in the first place.