So, silksong is weird. The game has great exploration, writing, music, art, atmosphere, and combat. But the bosses are - painfully - frustrating. Nono of them have taken more than 15-20 tries except one of the Act 3 fights, and the true final boss, in the 20-30 range. Compared to Bloodborne's Orphan of Kos that took me a full week to beat, that doesn't sound so bad. But Orphan was fun and almost none of these fights are. So what's the difference?I feel genuine dread at the prospect of losing a fight in Silksong. Hollow Knight could also be frustrating when your checkpoint was too far from a boss or something, and Silksong has that too, but I think Silksong has a lot more luggage thrown on the camels back.

A lot of fights have waves of enemies to clear before you get to fight the boss, and you have to fight them every time you retry. And that sucks.

A lot of enemies can deal 2 HP of damage, and bosses almost exclusively deal 2 HP hits, which makes your health pool kind of abysmal. Its also a pain to upgrade because the materials to upgrade are hard to find. And then when you finally get enough, if you're upgrading from an odd number to an even number, you effectively haven't upgraded anything for a boss fight. And that sucks.

Then there's the tools they added for combat. Literal tools, you can throw them and they hurt the baddies. Replenishing the ammo for tools takes a resource that you have to grind to get more of. So every failed attempt is grinding away at your resources and might force you away to go kill enemies somewhere for a half hour if it goes on long enough. Bloodborne did something similar with its health items, but I think there's a reason FromSoft tried that idea and hasn't gone back to it. Even then,you can hold 600 of those, and you only use one at a time. In Silksong you can hold 800 crafting items, but crafting one tool can cost between 3 and 10 units, so if you're unloading your tools into a boss at the end and still die, you might be losing 100-200 units. And that sucks.

Of course, you could just do every fight with your regular sword and skip using the tools, but the fights are balanced around tools that deal a lot of damage very quickly, and that can hit a boss when there's no opening for a sword attack. So skipping tools means the fights will drag on for ages because you're just missing damage. Add to that that the bosses effectively cut your HP in half by dealing double damage, and any mistake feels huge compared to the tiny, infrequent hits you get to deal. And that sucks.