Game Worlds co-curator Jini Maxwell spoke with Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen, with difficulty being a major focus of the conversation.

Admitting Silksong is indeed far more complicated than the original title, Gibson explained how it’s all designed to give players choices.

“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path. So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes.

“Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty – but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”

Say, for instance, you keep banging your head against the wall with one particular boss fight, devs aren’t exactly concerned if you’re struggling for hours on end. “That’s fine,” Gibson said, reminding players “they have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”

If you’ve played both games, you’ll understand how drastically different they are. From Hornet’s unique movement mechanics to upgradeable tools and weapons, not to mention a proper quest system, there’s a great deal in Silksong not present in Hollow Knight.

As such, enemies had to change in order to properly mesh with the other adjustments, the devs explained.

“Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight – so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said.

“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen added.

“The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”

Rather than scaling back Hornet’s powers, Team Cherry’s approach was to instead “bring everyone else up to match [her] level.”