Caltrops - Hollow Knight





	[quote name="Rafiki"]It is currently my GOTY, although I've played like 4 games that released in 2025. All of the flaws still apply, it's just that's how strong of a game it turned out to be. They spent 7 years making it, but rather than it feeling like an unfocused mess it feels like they spent 7 years cramming absolutely every single idea they had into it and then ran out of time to balance the difficulty. <b>Donkey Kong vs Silksong</b> Both have great controls. Donkey Kong goes for instantaneous accessibility and succeeds. It is immediately viscerally fun to punch the everloving shit out of everything. However, the game's open-endedness makes it feel unfocused and undermines any real sense of challenge. They really lean into the whole collectathon idea to the point where I don't think you even need to collect bananas to get to the end. They're just for completely unnecessary skill upgrades. You can collect fossils, but they're for cosmetics (ok, the cosmetics have defensive/skill modifiers but those are also unnecessary). It's just supposed to be fun to collect for the sake of collecting. If you skip collecting anything, the game just amounts to finding the pit to jump down to the next level and a series of forgettable boss fights. What's sad is that it's not until the very end where they tease what could have been. You have various super-saiyan Kong forms with different special abilities and it's not until literally before the last boss fight where you have to navigate through a level and switch between forms to successfully reach the end. They could have been building challenges around that for 10 hours! A lot of wasted potential. In contrast, Silksong slowly adds to your move set to make you faster and more agile and steadily builds bigger and more difficult challenges around that<sup>1</sup>. It goes for slow mastery over accessibility and it works great. By the very end, there's a jumping puzzle gauntlet that - and I can't believe I'm saying this - actually makes pretty clever use of your abilities. They're multiple memorable boss fights, and the various options for skills and abilities feel valuable and useful. <sup>1 The unbalanced difficulty is mostly combat related</sup> <b>Silksong vs Clair Obscur</b> I felt more about a bunch of stupid bugs than I did about anything in Clair Obscur because Silksong managed to tell a focused, consistent story the whole way through. Like, it's not Great Art or full of Deep Meaning, but it kept my attention. Even had a few poignant moments.<sup>2</sup> Buncha bugs just trying to find hope in a world of crumbling despair. Hornet had the emotionally detached protagonist thing going on, but rather than sociopathically shrugging and letting everyone fuck off and die she treated people with respect and dignity, had a sense of honor in that she didn't just pointlessly kill people because they scuffed her shoe or looked at her cross-eyed, and a sense of duty in that if she fucked someone's shit up then she tried to make it right. Clair Obscur was like a Rian Johnson story about family that tried too hard to subvert your expectations. <sup>2 like if the Lost Garmond storyline maed u cry</sup>[/quote]