With Hollow Knight: Silksong’s huge launch in full swing, community debate about its qualities and flaws has gone back and forth, with some players insisting their criticisms about things like the game's difficulty are valid and shouldn’t be instantly dismissed as "hate."
I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.
Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.
I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.
Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.