Hollow Knight: Silksong has revived an annoying line of discourse about “Artificial Difficulty”. Artificial Difficulty is ostensibly things that make a game appear more difficult, without actually engaging player skill. However in practice, most people claiming that a game has “Artificial Difficulty” are just complaining that the game is too hard for them, and this isn’t their fault, but the game’s fault. It did difficulty “wrong” in some way.

If we were to take the language of Artificial Difficulty at its face, then we’d consider whether or not a game is engaging in a fair test of skill with you. And in this way, some obstacles in Silksong aren’t fair actually, such as the bench in Hunter’s March that is rigged with a trap, which will damage you when you try to sit on it (I fell for this one). There is a very short tell, the bench depressing like the pressure plate traps in the prior section, giving you a brief opportunity to get off the bench and dash away. Disabling the bench trap requires going through a hidden tunnel and pressing a hidden switch. Silksong has a number of moments like this, which I believe were intended to be funny, because I found them funny and I know other people did too.

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