Like sure it's "cool" that I see a bunch of walls decorated with bells where Bellhart is on the other side, but that doesn't really do anything to make me remember where the actual connection to Bellhart is

Someone pointed out to me that these areas look the same because Silksong is made for areas to "bleed" into each other, so you see the design of adjacent areas. Which I think makes sense near the transition points but not as much for random places like this?

Enjoy the CDs!

Except "them" is actually "the AI we used to serve you a bajillion songs"

"Great point. With the proliferation of *checks notes* carefully crafted music on Spotify, our subscription service now provides a limitless feed of content, so we've decided to increase our prices to make sure we-- *cough*...to make sure =your= favorite artists are paid appropriately..."

Video content can endure forever...or until a random Content ID flag hits it

I feel a similar weird very specific pettiness about input lag. Like of course it sucks to feel and for many games it DOES make things more difficult, but for others the handicap is blown WAY out of proportion and it makes me want to get a record speedrun with 8 frames of input lag out of spite.

"annoyingly all the other options suck" is mostly true here too

OK I just got deeper in that Silksong area and lol, they just doubled down I guess lmao

Well all the other issues I mentioned are still there but I'm now playing on brightness 150% and that feels better!

This doesn't help you but this is one of those times when I am feeling glad that I run Server editions of windows -- currently on WS2022 (upgraded from WS2016). WS2022 eol is in 2031...

Most of the time I end up wondering whether it justified the random hassles but now that we're here...

I donno, I mean I'm still enjoying it, I'm still going to continue playing (maybe the areas open up and get brighter as you ascend and this is setting up for some sort of cool payoff lol) but being ~9 hours in and only able to remember the areas mechanically and not viscerally makes me sad.

An area like Deepnest would never work in Silksong because the ENTIRE GAME IS ALREADY THAT DARK BY DEFAULT.

Deepnest is the area in Hollow Knight where you feel really claustrophobic because of how little you can see and yet, it looks the same as Silksong generic area x.

Like seriously, just go watch the two trailers side by side

I'm not saying that Silksong is completely devoid of this, but so far I'm finding that a lot of my memory of it is "dark green rocky place" to "gray red rocky place" to "dark gray place with more jumping".

How many more places am I going to see which are covered with the same gray rocks?

Even in the darker areas or small tunnels you can very easily tell where you are in Hollow Knight. Every inch of the environment is oozing with texture and even without that, the color palette is distinctive.

Now look at these two Silksong screenshots. I kid you not, one of these is in Moss Grotto and the other one is in The Marrow (the first two areas of the game).

And yes, there was some amount of handpicking here, but that's the point -- Hollow Knight doesn't HAVE this problem.