Silksong and how game journalists affect gaming

Art by Simone Modina

When Hollow Knight: Silksong hit the scene this September, it was one of the most hyped video game releases in History. While tens of thousands immediately began playing it, some of the first people to share their opinions on the game online were game journalists. Infamous in some more chronically-online circles, game journalism is how a large demographic of people hear about new games. When they speak, people listen, and they say that the game is too difficult. Reviewers complained that the bosses were too hard, and that the movement was too complicated. But was it really? In this article I will investigate the ethics of game journalism, and explore the effect that journalism has on the gaming industry.

I bought my copy a few weeks ago, and was worried about the difficulty. I don’t play a lot of super hard games, and the original Hollow Knight had already taken me a long time to beat. Would Silksong be much harder? Once I finally started playing, I was confused. The game was not nearly as hard as I had heard. Definitely difficult, but no boss took me more than 50 attempts, about the same as the base game of Hollow Knight. Although it’s longer than the original, the developers solved this by stretching the difficulty curve to cover more playtime. So what gives? Are game journalists lying to us, or is it all a misunderstanding?

I think that the true root cause of this issue is that video game journalists do not represent the main demographic of people playing the games that they review. Someone working full time as a journalist may not have much time to play the game they are writing about, so a hard game will seem immeasurably challenging to them. With only a few hours of play time, someone could only scratch the surface of such a massive world. This is why it is better to use game journalism as a tool of discovery rather than a complete map of the industry. Remember that you will often have different opinions on a game than a journalist, so pay more attention to the details of the game rather than their judgement on it. With this strategy, you can use video game journalism in a more healthy and effective way.