Triple Play: Hollow Knight: Silksong

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk finally crack into the long-awaited Silksong, the sequel to Hollow Knight that was seven years in the making. They talk about how Silksong compares to its predecessor, the classic origin of its musical motif, and of course, why Hornet is such a badass.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Hollow Knight's Silk Song is finally out and the takes are coming in hot and fast. Here's a take for you: "Hornet is cool and I want to be her best friend." Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, of course, we're talking about Silk Song, our impressions of the game, the changes it makes from Hollow Knight, and the sometimes mean pranks that it plays on the player. What a thing, that we finally get to talk about Silk Song.

• 0:30Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:33Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello. Hello.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  Man, it was very difficult to stop playing a video game so we could record this podcast, I've gotta say.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  We could be playing Silk Song right now, but instead, we're recording a show.

• 0:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Ah, fuck, no, no! Oh, sorry, I am playing Silk Song.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Do we know that all three of us aren't playing it?

• 0:55Kirk Hamilton?

  That is what I sound like when I play Silk Song.

• 0:57Jason Schreier?

  I had my window open this afternoon and I was playing and I kept worrying that someone outside was gonna think I was a murderer or something, someone's just dying in my house.

• 1:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Shit! Die!

• 1:07Speaker 01

  You sound like Hornet's barks, like her little efforts. Yeah. Ah! They're great.

• 1:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, we are, in fact, a video game podcast. We're not just three people who play video games for fun all week and never make a podcast. The podcast is still the prime thing that we work on. And we're able to put in the work to make this show for all of you because of the support of our lovely Maximum Fun members. We're totally listener-supported. We don't sell ads. We don't have to worry about any of that nonsense, which is very, very nice. It's a great way to make a show, and that is only possible because enough of you chip in to support us. So, if you would like to support Triple Click, go to maximumfun.org/join. You will support our network, Maximum Fun. Which we love being a part of, and you will gain access to a whole bunch of

• 1:56Kirk Hamilton?

  exclusive bonus episodes for members only. The most recent one just came out last week is our spoiler cast on the second, two thirds maybe, of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was a very fun conversation about a wonderful game. And yeah, that's in the bonus feed along with a bunch of other stuff. And at the end of this month, we are going to record a Beans Cast, a spoiler cast about the game that we're talking about today, Hollow Knight: Silk Song.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yay!

• 2:24Kirk Hamilton?

  There's a ton of spoilery stuff to talk about with this game, and so we'll be trying to finish it by the end of the month, and we will do a Beans Cast about that. Anyways, maximumfun.org/join, you get a ton of bonus episodes, you support the show. What are you doing? Go join, go become a member. All right. With that out of the way, it's time, it is time, y'all, to talk about Hollow Knight: Silk Song.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Did you prepare a statement? I can tell. I can just tell your face when you're about to read something.

• 2:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Hollow Knight: Silk Song is Team Cherry's long-awaited follow-up to 2017's Hollow Knight.

• 3:04Kirk Hamilton?

  It is a 2D platformer set in a mystical world of bugs and other creepy crawlies with a focus on intense acrobatic fights and daunting platforming challenges. Players can expect a stiff and escalating challenge as they gradually unlock new combat and traversal abilities, all while exploring a sprawling and secret-filled map. Silk Song tells the story of Shurma, a humble and devout bug who sets off on a pilgrimage to the Kingdom of Farloom, where a once mighty theocracy ruled from on high in their shining citadel. Farloom has since fallen into ruin and is haunted by its zombie-like inhabitants, who have been infected and corrupted by strands of mysterious silk. It's a dangerous road, but Shurma walks with her faith to guide her. On her journey, she meets a lone warrior harpist named Hornet,

• 3:49Kirk Hamilton?

  who is on a mission of revenge against those in Farloom who have wronged her. Shurma explains to Hornet that all will be well, that their faith will carry them forward. Hornet is unconvinced and chooses violence at every turn. Part buddy cop movie, part revenge story, Silksong explores this unlikely friendship in a variety of ways. Who brought Hornet to Farloom and why? What has become of those who rule the Citadel? And will Shurma ever convince Hornet to just kick back, relax, and sing a song together? Those questions and many more lie at the heart of Hollow Knight Silksong. Which Hollow Knight Silksong? It's finally out. We're finally playing it. This game is real. And I mean, not to give too much away, but it's pretty freaking good.

• 4:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Jason, what do you think? How are you feeling?

• 4:48Jason Schreier?

  I think Shurma is a good example of that parable of like, the man is stuck in the middle of the water. And he's like, God will send help. God will save me. And then helicopter comes and he's like, no, I'm waiting for God. That's Shurma in a nutshell.

• 5:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Lady, I sent three boats.

• 5:06Jason Schreier?

  This game is everything I wanted. It is phenomenal. I love it to death. It is more Hollow Knight, which I think is an important thing, because I think a lot of people got sucked into the hype, expecting it to maybe not be more Hollow Knight. But it is more Hollow Knight, except it's got a lot of little tweaks and improvements and kind of new features that I think you'll appreciate even more if you are obsessed with Hollow Knight like we were back in the day. For example, I mean, one of the kind of big structural things with Silksong that I think makes it better than Hollow Knight is that there's a lot more guidance from the get go.

• 5:47Jason Schreier?

  One of Hollow Knight's, I think, flaws is that at the very beginning, it can be impenetrable. A lot of people bounce off of it going. Going in, especially before all of the hype built up surrounding that game. It was very easy to get lost in a new region without finding the mapmaker and without being able to get the map. It was easy to not know. There were parts where you wouldn't know what you had to do and there was no clear mission or anything like that. Silksong remedies this by giving you very clear missions. It gives you quests. It gives you a lot more guidance. Even the mapmakers, it feels like the zones are better designed in a way where it's a lot.

• 6:28Jason Schreier?

  You're a lot less likely to get through an entire zone without seeing those little chakras from Miss Chakra, everybody's favorite singing mapmaker. Even the singing.

• 6:37Kirk Hamilton?

  You mean Shakira.

• 6:38Jason Schreier?

  Shakira, yes, Shakira, because.

• 6:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Her maps don't lie.

• 6:41Jason Schreier?

  Your maps don't lie. Yeah, perfect there. Man, we should end it. All right. That's it for this episode.

• 6:54Jason Schreier?

  Chakras, singing is even better than Cornifers with all, no, no real shade on Cornifer, but Chakra singing is beautiful. Anyway, I think it's just like new and improved Hollow Knight, better than Hollow Knight in a lot of ways, more Hollow Knight in a lot of ways. It's just perfect. I love it to death.

• 7:07Kirk Hamilton?

  And you have played a ton, right? Just so listeners know where you're coming from.

• 7:11Jason Schreier?

  I am, I am well into the thick of the second act of the game. I don't know if it's two or three acts in the game, but I think I'm nearing, just based on where the story is and what I'm structurally doing. Think I'm nearing the finish line, but I've also done a ton of side stuff. I've seen quite a lot of what this game has to offer and there is a lot of it. It is a monstrous game.

• 7:36Kirk Hamilton?

  It's pretty big.

• 7:37Jason Schreier?

  Again, more Hollow Knight. It's Hollow Knight, but bigger and better. Like, think about that sales pitch. I mean, Hollow Knight is one of our, it's been one of our triple click picks forever. It's like one of our favorite, it's a game that we all laud. It's one of our favorite games, one of the best games ever made. And this is just a sequel that takes all of the things that we loved about it and just adds more and improves a few things too. I mean, what, what more could you ask for from a video game other than weird little guys in bugs?

• 8:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Weird little guys with surprisingly beautiful singing voices. Maddie, you're playing this as well. Jason says we, but I know you're not quite as much of a Hollow Knight super freak as the two of us are, but I'm curious what you're thinking.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  I do like it.

• 8:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yeah, I know.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  And I really love Silk Song. Jason, I agree with every single thing you said about the things that are better about it. But for me, it's like, add a plus one modifier to all of those, to the extent to which I'm enjoying Silk Song more than Hollow Knight. It's not to say I didn't like Hollow Knight. I'm not here to say that. I'm just really, really enjoying Silk Song. For pretty much all the reasons Jason said, it's clearer where to go. It's usually Chakra's almost immediately available in a given area. You just run into her by seeming happenstance. That's just good area environmental design. And you can get a map pretty easily. It's not too onerous to collect the rosaries, which are like the in-game currency that

• 8:59Speaker 01

  certain enemies drop to get a map. It's not too expensive. Like, it just feels like you can unlock the maps pretty easily in this game. And I remember in Hollow Knight, I've talked about getting lost in games before. I get lost a lot and often just be like, I don't even know where Cornerford is right now. And like, when am I ever gonna find him again? And like, this game, I've never felt that way, which is great. I am only 12 hours in or so. I'm past the fourth boss and I'm, if we're allowed to say area names, I'm in Graymore right now. And I am digging it so, so much. And another thing that I'm sure we're going to talk about is that I really love Hornet as a character. And she's such a big personality in this game. And I'm just really enjoying having a character who talks and kind of

• 9:41Speaker 01

  bounces off the world in ways that the Hollow Knight just is never gonna do. Cause they're like a silent protagonist and they're like receptacle and that's part of what that game's vibe is. And that's fine. But playing as a character who speaks and also like sometimes kind of rebuffs people or just has her own reactions to all of the kind of intense religious faith around her and like kind of comments on the world. Like, it just adds such another layer to the game for me that I'm really, really enjoying. I know I talked last week about feeling like Uh, like, there's this story in Hollow Knight, it's cool, I really like it, but like, I'm just kinda soaking in the vibes. This is the game that made me be like, I actually really wanna understand what's going on.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  And I've gotten super into like, watching Hollow Knight 1 lore videos that previously I never went back and watched, because I'm like, I wanna understand this. I've been really enjoying learning more about the lore this time and having a protagonist who is a big part of the world around her and reacting to it and talking. It's great.

• 10:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it, um, it really is remarkable how, how big of a difference those narrative changes make. Um, I mean, I'm loving the game as well. I don't really need to go on and on about a million different things. I'm sure we'll talk about them. So let's just talk about that, about Hornet and the world and the narrative setup, because that's an immediate difference, I think, that players will notice right off the bat. Hollow Knight told its story in a kind of passive way. The Knight is a very mysterious character, and while there are character-full NPCs around, the Knight has essentially no personality, and that's for a reason that is explained in the narrative. They are essentially an empty vessel, and Hornet keeps turning up, being this, you know, really cool flashy ninja lady

• 11:26Kirk Hamilton?

  in, in this red cloak and, and just seems like she has a whole personality and a whole story going on. We talked about this last week. So to play a game from Hornet's perspective, suddenly you're occupying this character. Also, Hornet has a clear motivation. She was captured by someone and taken to Farloom against her will, and then escaped under somewhat mysterious circumstances in the opening cutscene. And now she's basically on a mission of revenge. Like, she wants to know who tried to take her. She knows that if she just leaves, they'll come back. There's actually, you can get to the edge of the map, and instead of just getting blown back by the wind like you were in Hollow Knight, she actually stops and says, "If I leave, they're just gonna come after me again. I need to stay here until this is finished."

• 12:09Kirk Hamilton?

  So she's actually got a character motivation that is stated. And then also, this kingdom, Farloom, is fascinating. It's this theocratic, I don't know, totalitarian regime that has fallen into total shambles and yet also-

• 12:25Kirk Hamilton?

  It like keeps echoing, the echoes of what it used to be keep ringing out in all of these really interesting ways. And you have this feeling of this oppressive force on high, who's forcing everybody into just, you know, awful conditions and awful, like they have to work these terrible jobs. If you read the Hunter's Guide that Hornet carries to describe a lot of the monsters and enemies that you fight, a lot of them are creatures that were designed to like punish people for leaving their jobs or hold them in place. There are multiple prisons. There are kind of prisons everywhere because Farloom is the kind of place that just puts people in prison for all kinds of things. So all of that combined with Hornet just being this like arrow through the heart of this entire

• 13:10Kirk Hamilton?

  place, this unstoppable force, man, that's so cool. Like the feeling of cutting through this horrible, corrupt, desiccated place as this character who is so strong and confident, she's so direct with everyone. And actually, I'm watching her kind of grow and as she helps people, she's realizing, you know, I like helping people and I hadn't thought about that in a long time. And her character is kind of growing. Man, I mean, that is a real change from Hollow Knight and it's a huge improvement, in my opinion.

• 13:38Jason Schreier?

  She's also got these great little physical flourishes. I mean, for one, moving around the world as her is so much fun, especially once you get the sprint, which really opens up the game. And I think if you're kind of on the fence about this game or you're not sure about it, play at least until you get the sprint because that really changes things in a big way. But then, once you get the sprint, that's when, I mean, I talked about some of the improvements of our Hollow Knight, moving around the world feels so much better because you're going faster. Hornet is more stylish and fun to watch and fun to just watch animate. Yeah, her animations are incredible. I think they're pretty much the same.

• 14:15Kirk Hamilton?

  That running animation, which she dips her head and she kind of moves low. Man, everything she moves.

• 14:20Jason Schreier?

  Or when she like kind of, yeah, spears up. And then as you get these different, you could get all these different kind of like move sets that change the way she moves in subtle ways. There's a lot of cool stuff. And then there's little animations, little bespoke animations like.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  She like crosses her legs at a bench and she looks. So formal.

• 14:36Jason Schreier?

  Or like, there's a, at one point, you do a quest for someone and they'll just like, try to get close to you and like suck, like taste, taste something on you. And Hornet just smacks the, the little bug that is trying to.

• 14:48Kirk Hamilton?

  There's another bug who wants to give her an endearing nickname. And I can't even remember, like, call her, like, Honey Sweet or something. And she says, "You shall not, you shall call me Hornet or nothing at all." And that is very, that's true to Hornet's communication style.

• 15:01Jason Schreier?

  She's fantastic. What a, what a protagonist. What a great character. I'll, I'll be disappointed if the, if like, future games you don't play as her, because I just want to keep playing as Hornet.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:10Kirk Hamilton?

  And there really are so many other great characters as well. We talked about Chakra, Shakira, who, it's funny, you know, this game has an interesting relationship with pronouns. A lot of the characters in this game have no stated gender. And in the, um, the Hunter's Guide, Hornet refers to characters, even, you know, one boss name has sister in the name, but she refers to them as they. The knight in Hollow Knight was notably genderless. And Hornet actually is described as the gendered child in this one bit of lore in Hollow Knight 1, where it was an unusual thing that Hornet was assigned the, a female identity. And so I kind of think of different characters, different ways. I guess I, I kind of want to throw that out there and just say, like, I think of Chakra as a she, and that may actually be the case.

• 15:53Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm not sure with this character, but it's just an interesting thing about this game and about Hollow Knight 2. But anyways, Chakra is so cool. This also kind of warrior who is touring their way through this kingdom. And I don't know if you've ever done this, there are so many little touches like this, though. If you lure an enemy to within Chakra's reach, she'll just like, destroy them.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 16:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Like, it's nothing. Which, and I wonder if we're ever gonna fight. I kind of hope not, because she looks tough, but, uh, but it, there are just all these little details like that.

• 16:23Jason Schreier?

  Well, based on Hollow Knight, I'm sure there'll be like, an optional crazy fight where you fight it, fight her at the Colosseum or something.

• 16:32Kirk Hamilton?

  At the very least, where you don't kill her, but it's kind of like.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  But she kind of was like, "You can challenge me, and I'll allow it."

• 16:39Kirk Hamilton?

  I want to see what you really, that's how I can really know someone, yeah.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:42Kirk Hamilton?

  But there, um, I played a lot of this game on the Steam. Deck over the weekend because I was traveling and it runs great on the deck and is a really great experience, but playing it on the big screen is much better for me at least because of all those little animations, like the reflection of Hornet in the water, little, the way she moves her legs because her whole body is just black. It's very hard to make that out sometimes on the smaller screen and on the bigger screen, you can just see she moves like a dancer in so many cool ways. And then a million other little animations and details that are just really cool.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's so great.

• 17:14Jason Schreier?

  So William Gibson, William Pellet and Ari Gibson, the founders of Team Cherry, when I spoke to them a few weeks ago, one of the things they told me is that one of the reasons this game took so long and achieved meme status as a result is because they were just kind of adding all this polish and reactivity to the world. And what you just described, Kirk, about chakra is a good example of that. Other things is like if you play music for people, they'll react to it. If you like, there are all sorts of little kind of animations that you wouldn't expect to happen, but just are delightful when you see them, like characters running in, enemies running into each other and doing silly things. I mean, there's just so many small little touches that I'm sure there will be countless YouTube videos being

• 17:55Jason Schreier?

  like, here are the 1400 little details you missed in Silk Song. But all of that stuff, it really adds up. And first of all, you can see why it took so long. But second of all, I think it really just creates this holistic just experience that just really feels special and bespoke and really just unique.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's awesome. I love it. And I mean, I know we're going to talk about the music. So like, can we go ahead and just loop that in here? Because the sound design of Hollow Knight one is absolutely one of the things that stands out about it. And that continues here. And it's, it's just such, I mean, to agree with Kirk, like playing on the Steam Deck is fine. I've been doing that as well. But playing on the big screen with like my good headphones, incredible. Love the music, but also just the weird little guys effect is so much higher tuned when you can hear their little bug language, which we also kind of alluded to last week and obviously continues here, where we as the player, we get it in our language and we get to understand what the bugs are saying. But in the world

• 18:58Speaker 01

  of the game, they're speaking in this kind of melodic way of just syllables.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  They kind of approximate like, oh, some, the language sounds like this. I don't know. I just really love that combination of world-building concepts where like the bugs have this other bizarre language and that adds so much character to each one of them. And it's part of how you grow to love and also kind of figure some of them who make weirder noises or just like more unrecognizable to you as the game goes on. It's really effective.

• 19:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, so the music and sound design is all Chris Larkin, again, returning. And I think he has taken on an even more pivotal role in this game, in part because so much of the world is built around music. I mean, it's called Silk Song, and that's not just a cool name. Like, this whole world, the world of Farloom, is built around music in these really interesting ways. Like, their system of units and measurements, at least in their religion, is musical nomenclature. That you have to, you know, you, everything is silk, but you have to turn in a certain number of measures or stanzas of silk. You know, an early boss is called the Fourth Chorus, and it's some mech, crazy mech that they made. And everything is like that. And then the further you get, the more that I've

• 20:21Kirk Hamilton?

  played, the more I've like, been amazed at how much music is just running through the whole game. In the gameplay, the world-building, the design, there are bells everywhere. I don't know where Chris got all these bell sounds, like if they actually went and recorded a bunch of different bells.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Well, it goes with like, the religion's symbolism throughout to have bells everywhere. It's perfect.

• 20:42Kirk Hamilton?

  And your fast travel is the wonderful Bell Beast, which is this kind of huge killer panther-bone creature that tunnels through these tunnels of bells through the kingdom. And whenever you ride the Bell Beast, you hear the bells all ringing. There's so much of that. And yeah, the language is really cool. I just ran underneath a fly, and I swear it went, "Jesus!" I'm gonna play a clip of it, so listeners can make up their own mind.

• 21:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Jesus.

• 21:15Kirk Hamilton?

  And there's one other thing about the music that I just wanted to point out that people might think is neat, and that is that a main theme, like one of the big melodic motifs, is this four-note motif, dun dun dun dun, that Larkin wrote into, I mean, the opening menu. Every time you ring one of those big bells, it just rings these four notes.

• 21:42Kirk Hamilton?

  And those four notes are, actually have like a lot of history. It's an old Gregorian chant known as the DS-E-Re.

• 21:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Which, there's a whole episode of the podcast 20,000 Hertz about this that I actually guested on, but you'll hear it everywhere. It's, if you've seen The Nightmare Before Christmas, every single song in The Nightmare Before Christmas, "Making Christmas, making Christmas", that's the DS-E-Re. In K-pop Demon Hunters, there's a song that begins with them, it's called, what's it called? Like, it's the song you're idol. It literally begins with them singing the DS-E-Re. It's not even the melody. They sing like,

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, they literally sing it because they're the idol, religious idol. They play with that in that song.

• 22:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. And like this, and it is a, it is a religious death chant, but it means death anyways. DS-E-Re is always associated with death. In Star Wars, it plays, like when someone has died. It's like constantly turning up to the Shining theme. Anyways, go listen to that whole podcast about it if you want to hear it, but it is like, kind of like a Wilhelm Scream-style musical motif that you'll hear more and more if you know to listen for it. And Larkin is having a lot of fun with it, especially given the religious overtones of the whole story. When you hear the bells, it kind of clangs this incredibly loud DS-E-Re, and you're like, okay, okay, I get it.

• 23:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Someone, I posted that on Blue Sky and someone replied subtlety is for losers, which I thought was pretty funny.

• 23:15Jason Schreier?

  So let's talk about death and the way that Hornet can deal it to enemies. Cause there's a lot of really interesting stuff in this game. So in Hollow Knight, you could equip charms that affected your abilities and your skills in different ways. And then over the course of the game, you get a few magical spells and you had to juggle kind of the, one of the core tensions was trying to decide whether to save up your soul power for healing or to use it to shoot fireballs at enemies or use other kind of more elaborate skills, uh, skills and spells you would get later on. In this, you got a lot more than that. You got a whole tool set that you can use and the tools get increasingly elaborate and funnier and more interesting as you go through the game. But there's some good ones.

• 23:59Jason Schreier?

  Early on, you get this, this kind of spear and then you got a multi spear and yeah, some other cool stuff. And that I think changes the gameplay. It adds a lot more variety to the gameplay and gives you an opportunity to change up your builds in a lot of different ways between bosses. Something, I mean, difficulty of this game has been a big point of discourse and I'm sure we'll get into that, but um, something that I recommend that people do if they are finding this game to be difficult is play around with different builds. I think it's very easy to get stuck in your ways and be like, okay, I'm used to this way of doing things and used to this tool or this crest.

• 24:39Jason Schreier?

  But um, I have found that changing it up can actually help you take on bosses that were otherwise uh, causing difficulty for you. But also, I mean, just the way that it, it makes the game feel over the course of the game, it makes it so some of these bosses uh, and just fights in general, um, just don't feel nearly as repetitive, which I think is a, a smart way of going about it. There's also this really cool currency system built in where um, in addition to rosaries, your main currency, you also have these shards they use to craft tools. And so it kind of limits you and makes you feel like, oh, you can't just use them willy nilly, you do have a limit on how many you can do. But yeah, it's not too limiting because you always will have like a good amount of stone shards that you can craft stuff with. It's, it's got a good balance, I've found.

• 25:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I really like the tools. I do think that the stone shard system, it's a neat idea, but I have to say that I use tools so much in boss fights now that I just, and I have, I can carry so many shards, that it's not really that meaningful of a limit on me. It's more just annoying when I run out of shards. If I'm like at a really tough boss and I'm burning through tools, you know, you use your shards every time you rest and you rebuild tools. It's just a little bit tedious. Like, I just have to go backtrack and farm some shards. It's a little bit like the blood vials in Bloodborne where you're kinda like, alright, wait, I guess I get this being a limitation, but also it's just introducing tedium to the game. For me, that's not such a bad thing because if I'm stuck

• 26:06Kirk Hamilton?

  on a boss, it's only happened once. It was actually a, not a boss, but a challenge room where you fight waves of enemies. And it was hard enough that going back and farming was actually like a nice little mental break because I needed it.

• 26:17Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's why, I assume that's exactly why it's designed. It's designed in a way. There's a lot of subtle design in this game, and I think that's one of them, where like, if you run out of stone shards, that is the game's way of telling you to stop just like running, hitting your head against the wall against the boss. Because I've found that in this game, oftentimes, if you are running into a wall against a boss, you can go back and you'll find so many other things, so many new things to do, and along the way, you'll keep getting stone shards. So, like, that system feels to me like, almost like a safeguard on the player. It's telling you, go do something else for a while.

• 26:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm not sold, but I, yeah, I get what you're saying, but I don't really feel that way. But at the same time, I think the tool system is super cool. And I gotta say, I mean, if you are having a hard time, the number one tip I would give to anybody who's struggling is use your tools. Because when I was playing this game like it was Hollow Knight at first, where I was just using my needle and doing melee attacks, it was pretty hard. And man, especially once I embraced the sting shard, which is a tool that you can build pretty early. It's actually a weapon that Hornet uses in Hollow Knight. It's the sort of star-based trap that she throws out, and then if someone touches it, it just like blasts out a bunch of spikes and does a bunch of damage. That, plus some upgrades that you can get for your tools that cost- Allows them to do even more damage.

• 27:36Kirk Hamilton?

  That thing is incredible and it has changed like it's made the game so much more manageable for me, especially in those instances where the things that I'm finding the hardest are actually the rooms. You'll go into a room and the doors slam and waves of enemies begin coming at you. This happened in Hollow Knight as well, but it happens a lot in Silk Song. It's a very regular thing. I find that harder to deal with than just a big boss with a bunch of complex patterns that you just have to memorize, where when it's a crowd, it's just so much harder to deal with. But the minute you can just throw a couple of sting shards out there and it just ruins people if they go across it and then you also, you know, eventually you can have two tools equipped. So you can be throwing knives and throwing them out there. It makes a massive difference. One other tip that I will give people, if you're playing this on Steam, you can, and it's,

• 28:21Kirk Hamilton?

  well, if you're playing this on Steam, depending on how you have your controls set up, you can set up custom control configurations. So like when I'm playing on Steam Deck, for example, I set one of the back buttons to be a combination button press of up on the D-pad and right button, because that's how you activate a tool. And I find that a little bit awkward, like doing a double button press to throw tools. But if you're using Steam, you can actually like, you can do the Steam, you can go one layer up in the Steam OS and assign a double button press to a single button. If you have back buttons on your controller or something, it can really make things a lot easier. And that again, will, will take a lot of, a lot of the load off in terms of how much damage you have to do.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm gonna do that.

• 29:03Jason Schreier?

  The other tip that I'll offer is that you should switch up your crests once you start getting a couple of them, because first of all, it's nice to, once I got a crest that let me do a downward pogo, I switched to that and never looked back.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  So much easier. I, as I got that, I was like, those little red flowers, those are fine now.

• 29:23Jason Schreier?

  No problem. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent.

• 29:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I was very worried about the diagonal attack.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Before that, I was like, I'm never gonna learn this. I can't get a handle of this.

• 29:33Jason Schreier?

  It's funny, man, it brought me back because I felt that exact same way when I played the demo at E3 of 2019. I was like, man, this diagonal downward slash, this takes some getting used to. Hope I get used to this in the final game next year. Year when I play it in 2020, but then cut to today and I was like, oh, okay. Thank God you can, cause I'm running into the same problem. Get a downward slash, yeah. But also like, they all have such different rhythms. I mean, the Reaper is the one that I use the most because I really love the perk that it gives you where you can just like, collect extra silk after, after healing, but also there, I won't name them all, but there are a few others that really switch up your gameplay. And I found can be really cool and just like new ways to take on bosses and sometimes make certain bosses easier than others.

• 30:18Jason Schreier?

  Again, a lot of the stuff, um, yeah, man, if you're coming into this game without having played Hollow Knight, you're probably not going to have a great time. But if you see this as kind of a continuation of Hollow, as far as the difficulty goes, that is. But if you see this as a continuation of Hollow Knight, like it feels like, or maybe it'll take you longer to have a good time. I don't know. The other thing that I keep thinking is that as I see people kind of struggling with certain bosses, I think that like,

• 30:46Jason Schreier?

  naturally the instinct is to play this game fast and to move fast and to be aggressive in your attacks. And I found that in some cases that's true, but oftentimes bosses that are, that you're struggling on, the way to get past them is to slow down and watch their patterns because their patterns are always,

• 31:09Jason Schreier?

  always dodgeable or always doable in some way. They're never unfair or random or sporadic. So like, if you're watching, I don't know, Sister Splinter and you're like, man, this, this, uh, this spider thing keeps killing me with its claws and vines and stuff. And then you start to realize that, oh, it'll always go left, right, left. I can always dodge and get a hit on, and then dodge and get a hit on. Like, once you start to see that stuff, Kirk over text was comparing it to music sight reading, which I think is a good, a good way of looking at it.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  I call it dancing in my own head as well, like learning the dance moves with each boss, which I find really rewarding. And I totally agree. And I feel like the comparison that I would make to Dark Souls, which people love to compare these games to Dark Souls. And I don't actually think they feel that similar, except in this one thing I'm about to say, which is, don't get greedy, which is what I always tell myself in a boss fight in Dark Souls or any FromSoft game. It's like, Matty, don't get greedy, don't get greedy, don't try to hit them twice. It's fine, just wait for the next one. And this game is exactly like that. Like, just get one really good hit on during that one specific window that you're waiting for. And that's the part that is dance-like, where it's like, okay, the boss is gonna go left, left, right,

• 32:25Speaker 01

  and I just have to dodge, dodge, and then hit. And then I'm waiting, and they're doing this move. Okay, now I'm gonna go right up, or whatever the next quote-unquote "dance" move is. And by the end, I'm like, doing the YMCA. And oftentimes, when I'm beating a boss, I'm incurring no damage, not because I'm like, crazy good at the game or something, because I definitely don't feel that way, but because I've just memorized every single telegraphed attack. And by the end, I'm just like, okay, I know every single thing they're gonna do, just from that animation that they do a millisecond before. So then I just hit these buttons, and I'm done. And again, the key is to not like, hit twice, just to wait it out. Just wait it out till the next round. Just hit one time, and you're good. And after

• 33:09Speaker 01

  that, I'm like, this is, this is cake to me. This is good.

• 33:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. You eventually learn, like, oh, okay, I can do two hits after this boss does this attack, and then I can do three hits after this, or one, oh.

• 33:18Kirk Hamilton?

  I can do a downward attack, because they run under me, which is a common one for me.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Precisely. Or like, oh, that one's really short. I can really only manage one there, or whatever it may be.

• 33:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, the punish window, as it's referred to, I think, by people writing tips or talking about boss fights in general. There's a punish window, which is the moment when the boss stands still for a second, and you can get in a hit. Yeah, there are some later bosses where in their second phase, they may only have one punish window, or you barely can get in any hits, and most of the time is defensive. But yeah, like you said, Matty. Once you've learned, once I've learned the patterns, I find that it's not that hard to dodge. Man, a really interesting thing that I've found with this game that I started testing out with, with the mantis lords in Hollow Knight, actually, when I was replaying that game last week, was just taking the headphones off and playing with no sound on the bosses. And so I was fighting the mantis lords. I've beaten them several times. This is a Hollow Knight 1 boss.

• 34:13Kirk Hamilton?

  And I fought him a couple of times in this replay and kind of got worked. I was like, just, I know the moves, but I just hadn't played in a long time and I got killed. So then I was like, okay, let's just take the headphones off, no sound. And I beat them without getting touched. I like played it totally perfectly. I responded to every single move exactly as I was supposed to. And this time through, as I play through Silk Song, I'm kind of doing the same thing. And it's been a very interesting experience for me. This is, I'm sure is partly particular to me, to like the way that I get distracted by the music. I think it's also just the way your brain works. This is related to how if you're in a very loud restaurant, your blood pressure spikes and your, your focus really changes. This is just true of everybody. And when you're in a very loud environment, your brain is doing a lot of processing

• 34:56Kirk Hamilton?

  that you don't even feel. You're not aware of it. It's just processing all the noise. And so when the music is really intense and your adrenaline is up and you're really focusing, it can be cool and it can like kind of help. But once I know the fight really well and I know what moves are coming, I don't need audio cues to tell me. I use the visual cues. And I really find with some of these bosses, these one big boss on the screen fights, that I just take the sound away completely and I play like 50% better. It's, it's really interesting.

• 35:25Jason Schreier?

  Wild.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  I, I also do that for those fights because I also find it a lot easier, especially if like I've done it a couple of times. I'm like, I just need to focus on the animations. And then it's way easier, which is too bad because I just complimented the sound design and I do stand by that. But sometimes I'm like, I just want to focus on these specific animations and get to the next part.

• 35:45Kirk Hamilton?

  It's nothing against the music. I, I wish I could do it all, but it just makes it so much easier for me to not have that thing in my ears, you know, kind of elevating.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel that.

• 35:54Jason Schreier?

  Sometimes it can get you on tilt when it's like, oh my God, like the music fades, especially in Hollow Knight.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  How many times can I hear the same thing?

• 36:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, there's a boss who laughs when she kills you early on, too. I've never liked an enemy that laughs at you after they beat you.

• 36:07Jason Schreier?

  But also, when you like, when you get those sound effects showing that you're close to dying, or like when in Hollow Knight, it would be like every time you took damage, it would do this like, kind of crazy like fade out, like, like the screen would freeze for a second.

• 36:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, when I fought Sister Splinter, that boss, who we won't really describe, I suppose, because she's a little bit further in, but man, I did almost the whole fight the time that I beat her with one health. Like, I was down to one, and it got crazy. And I was, I was in the third phase, and I'd never been there before, and I had one hit. And I was just like, I just went to like pure focus mode. And then when I beat her, like when she exploded, I was like, I was actually at my sister's house, and everyone was going to bed, and I was just like, ah, like screaming quietly, like in their living room. It was such a rush. It was totally that, that boss feeling when you finally beat a boss, and you get that huge adrenaline rush, and then don't know what to do with yourself.

• 36:56Jason Schreier?

  So something I've been thinking a lot about, especially reading people's thoughts online, some of which are truly bonkers, I won't name names, but I-

• 37:04Kirk Hamilton?

  You mean about the difficulty?

• 37:06Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, just about the difficulty, and this game in general. I mean, we've seen, we've all seen some insane hot takes.

• 37:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Sure, whatever.

• 37:12Jason Schreier?

  Some of them really misunderstand the nature of the game. I was reading an article that just like, didn't really seem to understand a lot of the, even just the core mechanics, which had me thinking. And I actually think that one of the reasons that the difficulty discourse has become such a thing, and one of the things that I think is really a barrier for people, maybe, is that they don't really understand that this, that Suk Song, just like Hollow Knight, is more of a platformer than an action game. And the bosses, the way to beat them is playing as a platformer. It is a 2D platformer at its core. And there's so much tough platforming in this game, even outside of the bosses. But also the bosses, like, I think if you're thinking of them as like Dark Souls, where you have to kind of like strafe and dodge and like parry and stuff like that,

• 37:56Jason Schreier?

  then you're not really thinking about this game right. The way to play this game is to think of it as like Celeste, or like a bullet hell game, where you are dodging and jumping, and dodging and jumping. And the attack button is almost kind of an extension. Of your jump, but even there you might be doing jump boards like like bounce attacks from from above, which often is the best way to defeat enemies because it puts you out of harms way right afterwards. And I think when you kind of your shift your position and maybe you think, oh, I'm not really good at platformers. I mean, I'm not going to be that good at this game. I think you could be, but but but if you think of it as a platformer, I think you kind of you understand its nature a little bit more. When I was first playing, I kept thinking to myself,

• 38:38Jason Schreier?

  man, this feels tougher than Hollow Knight in a lot of ways. And then I think the further I got into it, the more I thought, actually, it's not that much harder. It's just that like, you really just have to meet it in its own terms and just kind of understand what it's doing. And there's some of the some bosses in this game that are super easy. Once you just understand their mechanics and again, treat them as platformer bosses as if you're playing a 2D Mario or something like that. Celeste might be a really good comparison. And in fact, there's one section of the game that is very reminiscent of Celeste. So yeah, I mean, I think that's the way to think of this. This is at its core, a platformer where you are jumping and avoiding obstacles and doing some precise like dashing around as you get more mobility mechanics and

• 39:23Jason Schreier?

  playing around with different different just kind of move sets there. And that's how you beat everything in this game from actual platforming challenges to the bosses.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally see that. And I really like that reading of it, too. And I think it's actually explaining why I'm digging this game a little more than Hollow Knight. And some of that is Hornets movement speed and just overall agility. She can really turn on a dime and you can kind of cancel out of moves into other moves in a way that I find really satisfying. And maybe that's like the fighting game fan in me. I don't know, but it just the controlling her movement came much more easily to me. Again, I'm not like saying it's all easy by any means, but just specifically getting Hornet to go where I want her to go is an experience that I feel like I have a lot more agency over in especially like platforming difficulties and a

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Fight where, oh, I need to really think about where I'm moving and she just has so many movement options. It's great. Like, we've talked about the dash a lot, but she unlocks more as the game goes on and I'm not as far as you two, so I'm sure there will be more. And that's really cool, because every time I achieve another movement ability, it's really stacking for me. And I'm really seeing like, oh, now I can implement this way of moving into the next fights. And it's so rewarding and just fits perfectly into her arsenal. And I feel that way so much more about the movement than even like her weapon arsenal. I'm like, yeah, that stuff's great, whatever, fine. She like has all the tools and stuff Kirk was talking about. Those are great. But like, I really feel control of her movement and that, that's probably why. Like, I really like that way of thinking about it, Jason, is that it truly is a platformer. And I

• 41:04Speaker 01

  liked Celeste too. So that's kind of explaining why I'm digging in so much.

• 41:08Jason Schreier?

  One more thing in the difficulty real quick is that there's been a lot of complaints about how you lose two masks when you like get hit most of the time, or when you run into a boss, you lose two masks, which is annoying, but it's made up for by the fact that healing in this game is way easier than it is in Hollow Knight.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And faster, right?

• 41:24Jason Schreier?

  Much faster.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:26Jason Schreier?

  You don't have to hold the button. Instead, you just press the button. But the trade off for that is that you heal instead of healing your entire life bar, you heal just three masks as a result of that. But I think, again, thinking of this as a platformer, the key to healing and another kind of tip, another big tip for this game, is that you can do it in the air. And if you do it in the air, that means you can do it out of reach of a lot of bosses, which is a striking contrast. In Hollow Knight, you could really only heal during boss fights when you knock them, you stun them for a second. And there would be all these, like, every boss would get stunned for like a couple of seconds and you could use that to heal as different points throughout.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  But you feel like you're losing out when you do that.

• 42:07Jason Schreier?

  Right, because you don't get to hit them.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Because you want to hit the boss.

• 42:09Jason Schreier?

  And in this game, bosses still get stunned, just like they do in Hollow Knight. But you can heal anytime, pretty much, as long as you get out of the way of a boss. Of course, if they then interrupt you, you lose the heal and you'll take damage. So it's risky, but a lot of the times you can find little crevices, again, little just kind of spaces in the air, because you can do it in midair. And that is another key to just like mastering this game is heal in the air, away from the boss, away from the boss's attacks.

• 42:39Kirk Hamilton?

  So I want to at least. Say that I, I don't think we should just say, yeah, this game isn't actually harder than Hollow Knight and move on. I think that this game is differently difficult.

• 42:49Jason Schreier?

  I don't think I moved on.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  I don't think we're saying that.

• 42:51Jason Schreier?

  I, I don't think I said that either. It's just that my position has kind of changed on thinking it's harder than Hollow Knight as I've played more.

• 42:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. I guess I just, I would like to, I don't know, there are definitely some things about this game's difficulty that are significantly different. It's hard to really say one is harder or easier, but it feels very hard to me as a veteran of Hollow Knight. It's a hard game and there are specific reasons that someone would, I think, fairly say that this game is a lot harder than Hollow Knight. For starters, enemy AI is very different from the start. You're fighting a lot more intelligent enemies who do fallback attacks, which is just something that was not happening in Hollow Knight for the first, like, many levels. It was almost all just brain dead enemies that would kind of run at you and you could manage them really easily.

• 43:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Like, imagine pretty much any enemy in Green Path compared to those big knights that you find in Green Path who have the shields and how hard those guys are. Every other enemy in Green Path pretty much just like charges right at you and once you know their patterns, they're really easy to deal with. Those knights are, they're kind of the exception in the early hours of Hollow Knight. In this game, super quickly, you're going to be fighting enemies that faint backwards, that throw stuff where their default movement is to bob and weave and pull away from you. And that can be very, very difficult to deal with. Like, it requires much more platforming skill.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  True.

• 44:13Kirk Hamilton?

  I also don't know this for sure, but it feels to me as though the default enemies take several more hits to die than in Hollow Knight. I think that the number of hits required-

• 44:23Jason Schreier?

  Those ants. Oh my god, those fucking ants.

• 44:25Kirk Hamilton?

  But even just like basic bugs that go around take like four or even five hits at first. And that, again, just means you're fighting for longer, you're gonna take more hits. I find that like, even now, when I'm fighting like really basic pilgrims or bugs, it's an even chance that I'll take a hit just because it kind of takes a while. And I have to really actively stay away from them because it just takes like three or four hits. Another difference is that it takes a lot longer, I think, to get your first upgrade for damage. Where in Hollow Knight, you get a damage upgrade after like two or three bosses or something. Having just replayed it, it's pretty striking. You do, yeah, I think it's like two or maybe three bosses. You can start upgrading the sword and, or the nail. And then also you can do several upgrades by like just hunting around the map and finding stuff.

• 45:10Kirk Hamilton?

  In this game, you don't get your first upgrade until like, I don't know, a bunch of bosses, a whole bunch of areas. And you can wind up going through some really hard parts of the game that are technically optional, but with no damage upgrade, they're so much harder. There's an infamous area called Hunter's March fairly early on that I actually missed because I misread there are these red orbs that you can bounce off of, but I thought they required an item when I first saw one and was like, oh, I guess I can't go there yet. And so I just missed it and I kept playing and I went way beyond and I eventually got the first needle upgrade and then I went back and did Hunter's March and it wasn't actually so bad for me. But you can wind up in a lot of very, very difficult areas with no blade upgrade. So like, there are definitely things about this game that are really difficult

• 45:52Kirk Hamilton?

  and that if you're a Hollow Knight veteran, because it's differently difficult and also just frankly difficult. You mentioned that a lot of things do two masks of damage and that is true and it's mitigated somewhat by the changes to healing in combat. But in platforming, it really isn't because it's hard to build up silk when you're platforming. And a lot of the time, if you make a mistake platforming, it does two masks of damage, which just means you have fewer tries on a given platforming challenge. And some of the platforming, especially in like act two where I am, is freaking hard too. Like the game is just hard. And then my last thought is, the other thing that this game is, is occasionally it is mean. And I think it's mean in a loving way, it's mean in a funny way. It's playful, it's something that I actually really like about this game.

• 46:36Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a big part of its particular identity. But there are a lot of times where this game will like put one incredibly annoying enemy between you and a boss just to make you have to deal with it every single time you're going to the boss. Or they'll have, you know, a sign leading to a bench where you can save that doesn't really lead to a bench or like it does, but it's incredibly difficult to get to the bench or the bench. Is broken or something. There are all of these little jokes that the game plays on you that are a little bit cruel and they're, you know, it's that kind of Maso core thing that, you know, that video games have been doing for a while that Dark Souls likes to do as well. But if you couple the sort of difficulty, all those kinds of changes I was just describing with the fact that sometimes the game just kind of like pokes you in the eye for the fun of it.

• 47:19Kirk Hamilton?

  I think that that can just lead people to feeling like the game is more hostile than they remember Hollow Knight being.

• 47:24Jason Schreier?

  So I want to clear up a couple of things. First of all, there is one, the game is, gets even meaner later on. There's a section in the game that I just played through that involves poison swamps. That made me, made me say out loud several times like, okay, William and Ari, you guys must be sociopaths for creating this. Creating these runbacks, creating these gauntlets. I mean, you guys will get there at some point and you'll be like, what the hell is going on? Maybe you'll give up.

• 47:52Jason Schreier?

  This is, this is, I'm not saying this is an easy game by any measure. Second thing is, I don't think it's like, it's certainly not easier than Hollow Knight. Certainly feels like it was originally designed as Hollow Knight DLC. And like I said at the beginning of the show, it feels like a game that is like meant for Hollow Knight players. It feels like you should have some mastery of it, although I'm sure you can pick up on the pattern recognition and the platforming, just picking it up. My point is only that like, as I started to see what it was doing and what it wanted me to do, it started to feel less like, okay, this is so much harder than Hollow Knight. And more like, okay, I have to reframe my thinking a little bit, play a little bit more conservatively than even I did in Hollow Knight.

• 48:32Jason Schreier?

  Play a little bit differently as Hornet, experiment more. In Hollow Knight, I don't think I ever changed my charms since I got a couple of favorite ones. In this, I feel like you pretty much have to, if you want to like optimally take on some of the bosses. So it's more just like reframing my thinking a little bit helped me see it less as like, oh my God, this is such a massive spike from Hollow Knight. And more like, okay, most of this stuff is doable, even if quite a few things in the game do feel mean. Only a couple I've seen so far feel unfair, made me feel like, oh my God, what the fuck is going on here?

• 49:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. And important to And yeah, I'm definitely saying mean, but not unfair.

• 49:10Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. And then there are a few things that are just annoying, which are the boss runbacks, a couple of which in particular just take so long and are so grueling that they don't give you as much of a chance to learn the bosses and their patterns. That said, again, just like I mentioned before, whenever I've run into a wall in this game and be like, this is driving me crazy. Like I'm running out of stone charts from using all my tools. Like this is so stupid. Going back and backtracking and spending a couple of hours doing quests and revisiting old areas and unlocking new stuff and just getting more powerful and getting more familiar with the mechanics always helped. And I always found that after I did that, went back to the boss that I was running into a wall on, maybe it took me three, four, or five tries and then I

• 49:54Jason Schreier?

  would take him out. So that I think is, is one of the keys to getting past the difficulty of this game.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, like just to allude back to what you were saying, Kirk, like the idea of the game being mean. I think some of those things are intended to be in the spirit of poison swamp lovers at From Software, like the way that sometimes those games can be mean in a funny way, but also it's really, really hard to strike that balance. And there are many players who just will never think it's funny. And I understand those people. Like, I feel like I often am very willing to laugh at myself and at the game when like I get to a bench and like I am attacked for sitting down

• 50:39Speaker 01

  or what have you. Like I, I'm okay with that. Like I will laugh in those scenarios, but I also think that's like a weird personality quirk that I have. Like I guess I like Massacre. I don't know.

• 50:51Kirk Hamilton?

  You're not alone.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  I think that's like a certain sense of dark humor almost that like this game is playing on, but that's also like to taste, you know, like it is a certain person is just going to be like, well, that pisses me off. And like, I am going to put the game down now. And I can, I can even understand that even if that's not me. Cause I'm like, well, yeah, that, that stuff doesn't have to be funny to everyone. It is to me.

• 51:19Kirk Hamilton?

  This is something I, I talked to William and Ari about, about Hollow Knight, where there's a banker in Hollow Knight, in Hollow Knight, who you give your money to and she keeps it safe.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:27Kirk Hamilton?

  And then at some point she just vanishes with your money. And then later you can find her and if you just knock her around, you get your money back. And I can't remember if it was William or Ari, but one said that the other was basically like, she should just take your money and you shouldn't get it back.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should never find her again.

• 51:42Kirk Hamilton?

  It was like, you shouldn't be able to get it back. And then they decided to be able to get it back. But that kind of joke is very much, the joke that's on the player is at the heart of this game. And I agree, I find it funny. I'm sure it's not to everyone's taste. And I think, I'm sure some of the reaction that some players have is just because the hype on this game has been so huge. Everyone's been talking about it for so long. There are doubtless people who have picked this up, not really realizing that it is an exceptionally difficult game, that that's like what Hollow Knight was as well. And that the whole thing of, the whole joy of this game is slowly conquering this elaborate, huge challenge that you just gradually learn and overcome. And not everyone likes that. And, um, and so I think that's also part of it, is that people just went into the game not realizing, oh, this is gonna be hard as hell. Like, you're really gonna, you're really gonna be tested.

• 52:27Jason Schreier?

  Which, yeah, sucks for them. I think that, um, I think that the, the, those pranks that it plays on you, those only work because the game feels so delightful to play on a second by second basis. It feels so good. Running around as Hornet feels so good. Slashing things feels so good. Um, just hearing everything, seeing everything, the aesthetics are so perfect. Everything just works so well that I think that's what kind of works with the, it almost, it creates this joyful little contrast of like, hey, this game that is just such a pleasure on your eyes and feels so good in your hands is gonna fuck with you and you're gonna like it. And you're just gonna suck it up and you're gonna deal with it.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  It's a cruel world. She's navigating a cruel world, okay?

• 53:10Kirk Hamilton?

  What's the worst thing that can happen? You play more Silksong.

• 53:12Jason Schreier?

  Exactly, exactly. So like, yeah, these runbacks are just like, they're not so bad. And when you realize it's just so fun to watch Hornet move and to hold the sprint button and then just dump around and find, find new ways of like skipping parts and just like hitting platform shortcuts to get better at it. Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, it all works so well that even the frustrating moments can be... And then it's all the more satisfying when you finally beat that boss and you're like, man, okay, that was, that was worth it.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  It in the end. Um, man, when you two get to the part that I just did, you're just both gonna be screaming. I mean,

• 53:46Speaker 01

  I'm excited for the poison swamps now, honestly. I, I love a poison swamp.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  I think it's optional, the stuff I was doing, but you never really know with this game.

• 53:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Is any of it optional? I'm gonna 100% this game.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  I mean, hey, I did Hunter's March. I'm willing, I'm willing to do Hunter's March. I'm willing to do anything at this point, right?

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Hunter's March is child's play.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  I'm sure it is.

• 54:07Kirk Hamilton?

  See, this already feels true. So yeah, I can't wait to see what, what horrors are in store. What a game. Uh, what a game. We'll be talking about it more in the future. We'll be doing a Beans Cast. And who knows? Maybe we'll even talk about it on another episode. Uh, for now though, let's, uh, take a break and we'll be back for one more thing.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  You know, we've been doing My Brother, My Brother and Me for 15 years and

• 54:31Speaker 04

  Christ!

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Maybe you stopped listening for a while. Maybe you never listen and you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years. I know where this has ended up. But no, no, you would be wrong. Uh, we're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't even really know how crypto works.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on My Brother, My Brother and Me. We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening. And if not, we just leave it out back until it goes rotten.

• 55:07Speaker 04

  So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  All right, we're over 70 episodes into our show. Let's learn everything. So let's do a quick progress check. Have we learnt about quantum physics? Yes, episode 59. We haven't learned about the history of gossip yet, have we? Yes, we have. Same episode, actually. Have we talked to Tom Scott about his love of roller coasters? Episode sixty-four. So how close are we to learning everything? Bad news, we still haven't learned everything yet. Oh, we're ruined! No, no, no, it's good news as well. There is still a lot to learn. I'm Dr. Ella Hubber.

• 55:45Jason Schreier?

  I'm regular Tom Lum.

• 55:46Speaker 05

  I'm Caroline Roper and on Let's Learn Everything, we learn about science and a bit of everything else too. And although we haven't learned everything yet, I've got a pretty good feeling about this next episode.

• 55:56Jason Schreier?

  Join us every other Thursday on Maximum Fun.

• 55:59Kirk Hamilton?

  And we're back for one more thing. Maddie, what is your one more thing?

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Okay, so as you two know, I have a weekly gamer night with three other friends and the three of them have actually gotten really into Elden Ring: Night Rain, believe it or not. And we talked about this game a little bit when it came out and none of us were super into it. But I have also kind of unwittingly gotten more into it, simply by virtue of the fact that on Thursday nights, when one of us isn't there, because this is a notably three-player video game, it's kind of like Destiny Strikes, but Elden Ring style, I will play some Night Rain. And it's not my favorite, but hanging out with friends is my favorite and playing Elden Ring is my favorite. So we do things like this and I've gotten all right. I've gotten, I've gotten better at kind of adjusting

• 56:48Speaker 01

  to the things about Night Rain that I don't love because I do really like hanging out with my friends. So we have been doing that, just kind of trading off and playing when there's three of us. But most recently, we installed this mod that has been created by Yui, who's on Nexus Mods as Yui. If people want to find her profile, it's spelled Y-U-I, like three letters. And she made a mod where you can play with two people. So for example, if you want to do duos, you can do that. And you can play with up to six players, which sounds wild to me. We have not done that. But we did do the full four-player, the full four-person gamer night cadre.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  And it was pretty awesome, partly because we, so Yui has built in a thing where you can change the amount of damage that enemies do, like you can increase. It slightly, you could also decrease it if you want. If you're playing, for example, with just two players, you want to decrease the damage a little bit. So it's easier to get through the game. But in our case, in theory, we should have increased the damage and instead we just didn't do that. And it was so much fun because once you have four players, I mean, I can't imagine Night Rain with five or even six. Having done it with four, you can just fully surround a guy and just destroy his life.

• 58:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Like a low rank monster hunter where you're just wailing on the monster.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  It is so, so satisfying and fun and like, it was just a really great time. And it was super different from some other Night Rain runs we've had where like, you know, we're all really quiet. And we're like, task, task, task, like only saying what is absolutely necessary. Everybody is fully on the freaking task until we get to that final boss. And like, we're fully focused and also like, kind of stressed out if we lose. You know what I mean? You know, that energy where you're looking at that splash screen where you just lost and you're like, okay. A lot of the, a lot of nights like that. This time though, we were like laughing our way through it and being like, oh my God, this game is so funny with all four of us. So I really, really recommend this mod, especially if you are like me and you have a group of friends that you're like, wouldn't it be nice if Night Rain was four players or even five? I don't know. If you want to get that crazy with it, you can.

• 58:53Speaker 01

  I do think this mod is awesome. It's extremely easy to install. Yui is a great modderer. She made it super simple and I think the mod works really well and it's, it's really, really great. So can't recommend it enough. Makes Night Rain trivially easy if you add one more person. And it's also just a fun, good time with friends. So that's my recommendation of the week.

• 59:14Kirk Hamilton?

  That sounds awesome. Yeah, I would love to check that out. All right, I will go next. My one more thing is a book that I read over the weekend called The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells. I guess I wrote it before the weekend because I mostly just played Silksong over the weekend. But this was last week I read this book. Martha Wells, of course, the author of The Murderbot Diaries, which I loved so much, which were just turned into. An Apple show that was pretty good, that was fine. But she is a prolific writer who's created several different fantasy and sci fi worlds. And The Cloud Roads is one of her series called the, are they the Raxura books? There are seven of them, The Books of the Raxura. From 2011 to 2017, she published these books. And it was really interesting.

• 59:57Kirk Hamilton?

  It was not really what I expected. It's about a world with no humans in it. So it's already very different from the fantasy or sci fi that I typically read. You know, most of these fantasy books, it's human beings, or even sci fi like Miles Verkossigan or whatever, it's all humans. It's not a bunch of really wild, different species, it's just people. Where in The Cloud Roads, it's a world that is sort of ambiguously post-apocalyptic. There was a previous civilization that lived on this planet, but it's not really clear what happened to them. And now, all the different types of people who live on the planet are like different forms of, I don't even know, they're kind of animalistic, but they're sort of, they

• 1:00:41Kirk Hamilton?

  have different like scales on their skin, or like they're beetles, they're like big walking beetles. And the Raxura, who are kind of the central people of this story, are like transforming bird people. So they can look sort of like humans, and then they shape shift into these birds, like they're like kind of almost harpies, they have like huge wings and can fly, some of them anyways. And they have a whole complex-

• 1:01:04Jason Schreier?

  So this is Subsong DLC?

• 1:01:05Kirk Hamilton?

  So I was about to say, a really interesting thing about it is that it feels very similar, especially to Hollow Knight, actually, where you're learning the intricacies of these complex kind of social and hierarchical structures within these different species that sort of, you know, coexist on this planet. And then they're kind of animalistic, so they're, they move a little bit more according to instinct and like, you know, mating rhythms and like these, it's not really like they're humans, even though they are humans and they speak, and Moon, the main character, is basically a young man who is lost and doesn't know who he is. But there's also just this other like animalistic layer on top of it. And it's really cool, it's a good story. I just found the whole thing to be tonally unusual.

• 1:01:50Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a pretty hard boiled story in a lot of ways because it's a kind of survival of the fittest world and there's a lot of just brutal kind of challenge and struggle and they're really up against it the entire story. There's this other kind of evil, similar species of flying people called the fell who are trying to wipe them out and it's this kind of ongoing war, but it's all very occluded and you find out the way things work sort of in a bit more of a show don't tell way. And there's still a lot about the world that I don't know because I've only read the first book. It was pretty cool. I wasn't like crazy about it the whole time I was reading it, but I really liked it. And by the end, I found the world to just be so distinct and interesting that it was a cool book. I think I'll probably keep reading these.

• 1:02:33Kirk Hamilton?

  I'll read the second one and sort of see where it goes because she's setting up a much bigger story. And of course, the Murderbot books are so great and she's just a good writer, like she has a really good, strong sense of plot and pacing. So I think that the books are all probably pretty good. So anyways, yeah, I liked it. That's The Cloud Roads. It's by Martha Wells, the first of the books of the Roxura. All right, Jason, it's time for your one more thing.

• 1:02:58Jason Schreier?

  Football is back, you guys, much to the dismay of some spouses everywhere. The NFL has returned to take over Sundays of people who are into it. And I'm here with a very specific complaint. So this Sunday, I was watching football and I was watching the evening game, which here in New York starts at about 8:15. Football games are about three hours, maybe three hours and some change. And this evening game on Sunday was Bills versus Ravens, which is two of the best teams in the NFL and the two best quarterbacks in the NFL. So it was going to be a very entertaining game. The Ravens came out and were crushing the Bills and I believe the score was something

• 1:03:41Jason Schreier?

  like 40 to 25 in the third quarter. And I was like, okay, I don't need to watch anymore. It's my bedtime anyway. I typically go to sleep between 10 and 10:30 because my kids will be up by 6:30 and I got stuff to do. So I typically try to go to bed 10, 10:30. And again, NFL games, it starts at 15, it's gonna go to 11, 11:30. Next morning, I wake up, look at my phone, Bills mount remarkable comeback, score like 16 points in four minutes, best game ever, you shouldn't have gone to sleep, oh my god, I can't believe you missed it.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  The headline literally said, Jason, you specifically should not have gone to sleep, why did you do that?

• 1:04:19Jason Schreier?

  I can't believe you missed this, you missed what was gonna be the greatest game of the year, I was like, shit. It lasted till like 11:30, so I would have had, I would have been cutting my sleep, it's way past my bedtime, I'm an old dad. Anyway, cut to Monday night football, okay, this time it's the Chicago Bears against the Minnesota Vikings, and I'm watching the first quarters, and it's like halftime, and the Vikings can't do anything, they have this rookie quarterback who is just like, seems incompetent, and the Bears are crushing them, Bears get a pick six, it's like, something like 16 to 7, I'm like, alright, this game's over, I'm gonna go to sleep. Wake up the next morning, Vikings mount remarkable comeback, you shouldn't have gone to sleep, oh my god, fourth quarter, J.J. McCarthy.

• 1:05:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Jason Schreier fooled me once.

• 1:05:04Jason Schreier?

  For real, and I was just like, come on, you guys.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  But what if you had stayed up and nothing had happened? Like, how, you can't know.

• 1:05:12Jason Schreier?

  So, I think two things, one is, I think games need to start earlier, which I realize might be a problem if you're on the West Coast, because games already start at, these evening games start at like 5 or 5:30 on the West Coast, I think you can move that up an hour, so those of us with small children can watch the entire thing until like 10, instead of having to stay up till 11 or 11:30, which is just crazy town, that's, that's thought number one. Thought number two, this might be a little more controversial, I think that the NFL should say, there is going to be something dramatic in this game, you should say.

• 1:05:47Jason Schreier?

  I don't know if this is doable.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Jason Schreier?

  I would like to know.

• 1:05:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I wasn't sure if it was gonna be this, or you were gonna say, no more comebacks. Because you're not allowed to, you're down by a certain amount, you just call it.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  If the game is going poorly after the first two hours, it's fine. It's gonna end there. So I thought you were gonna say, essentially, football games should be two hours long.

• 1:06:06Jason Schreier?

  That would be nice. Yes, football games should be two hours long. I mean, a lot of that is commercials, anyway.

• 1:06:12Kirk Hamilton?

  You're always saying games are too long.

• 1:06:14Jason Schreier?

  Exactly.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what you actually were talking about. Like, people thought you meant video games when you made that post, but you were talking about football games.

• 1:06:21Jason Schreier?

  Sports games, all games are too long. Just games in general. That's why they came up with pickleball, because tennis is too long. I think that, uh, one of the reasons you watch sports is so you can, like, be there live, watching this unforgettable moment, like, of athleticism, or a crazy comeback. And like, I'll never forget, like, I don't know, the Chiefs, like, um, coming back against the Bills in the playoffs that one year, where like, Mahomes had 13 seconds to score. And like, he somehow managed it. Like, stuff like that you're looking for. And that's one of the reasons in the playoffs, you'll never turn off a game in the middle of it. But like, if there was some way to know if you were gonna see something miraculous, I know which, which kind of defeats the point, right? Because part of it being this miraculous moment is that it comes out of nowhere and surprises you.

• 1:07:02Jason Schreier?

  But still, there's nothing that sucks more than being like, alright, this game's over, going to bed. And then with the Bills game in particular, there were Bills fans who left the stadium because they thought it was over.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:07:13Jason Schreier?

  And so it's, it's all just really, it's, it's really, it shows you a couple of things. One is that you have to just like, stick with the game until the very end, no matter what. You gotta have hope in your team especially. Um, but the second thing is that games need to start earlier, because some of us got bedtimes. Hey, so listen, NFL, Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, if you're listening to this, just start the games a little bit earlier.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Huge, huge triple-click fan. We all know that.

• 1:07:37Jason Schreier?

  I heard he is. And I will say, I mean, if, if I lived in California or Portland, where Kirk lives, I could start, you could start watching football at 10 a.m., which is awesome. And then it's over by like, 8:30 on a Sunday. That sounds amazing to me. I wish I, I could have that experience. But, uh, if I tried to convince my wife to move to the West Coast for that reason, I don't think it would fly.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:08:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that seems like a hard sell.

• 1:08:02Jason Schreier?

  Also, the Jets might have a quarterback, but we'll talk about that another time.

• 1:08:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, we definitely look forward to future NFL updates from Jason Schreier. But for now, that's another episode of Triple Click. I am gonna edit this and then I'm gonna play some more Swoops on.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  We're just gonna go ahead and start playing right now. We have that benefit.

• 1:08:22Kirk Hamilton?

  I've got a big to-do list going in that game.

• 1:08:24Jason Schreier?

  Well, I have to go be with my kids, but then I will play after the kids go to bed.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  I don't have to do anything.

• 1:08:31Jason Schreier?

  I know.

• 1:08:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, this was a fun conversation and yeah, a very fun game to talk about. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening as always, and I will see the two of you next week.

• 1:08:39Jason Schreier?

  See you next week.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:08:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Find us on Twitter at Triple Click Pod, send email to [email protected], and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  directly by you.