Hollow Knight: Silksong is out. Did you know that? You probably pieced that together. After seven years of waiting, Team Cherry’s long-awaited 2D action-platformer is here and kicking people’s asses. But on PC, thousands of players are using mods to help them overcome the challenging game.
Silksong released late last week on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC after nearly a decade of waiting. And first reactions to the sequel are almost entirely positive, with fans loving the small tweaks to the Hollow Knight formula and the larger size of its world. Plus, that $20 price tag is nice in an era when everything is more expensive than ever. And Silksong, like Hollow Knight, isn’t the easiest game in the world. Many players are even claiming that Silksong is harder than the OG. This has led to a lot of discourse on the internet about how hard it is or isn’t, and about game difficulty in general. But if you’re playing on PC, there’s a solution: Just mod Silksong and make it easier.
If we hop over to Silksong’s mods hub over at NexusMods, a popular PC modding site, you can see there are already 60+ mods available for the recently released platformer. And many of the most popular mods available for the game make it much easier to play. The most popular mods for Silksong include one that adds health meters to enemies, another one that stops enemies from doing double damage to the player, and one that shows the player’s position on the map at all times. All of these mods have over 15,000 downloads. An automapping mod has 9,000 downloads. Another free PC mod that increases how much damage players deal to enemies has over 7,000 downloads.
In fact, the only mod more popular than all of these mods that make Silksong easier is the mod needed to run any of these other creations. That mod, “BepInEx 5 with Configuration Manager,” has over 28,000 downloads as of September 8. That’s a lot of downloads for a game that’s barely been out a week. Of course, not all the mods for Silksong are about making it easier. But those mods, like one that adds ultrawide support and a death counter, only have a few hundred downloads or fewer.
It seems that the people coming to NexusMods for Silksong mods mostly have one goal in mind: Make the game less challenging. I expect reactions to this will vary a lot, but personally, I land on the side of “If folks want to make a game easier or harder with mods, and it doesn’t ruin it for other people, then whatever.” But I’ve been on the web long enough to know that ain’t a universal take.