My experience so far with Silksong is that it's Hollow Knight with changes running the spectrum of neat to gimmicky.
I'm enjoying it for the most part but here's 3 things that feel like have changed for the worse since HK:
+1 to "down attack should be down". In Silksong, down really means 45 degrees to the side. Enemies rarely accomodate this peculiarity, and platforming only exacerbates just how unintuitive this feels. There was some jank to HK's pogo but I swear the hitboxes on the things you're supposed to down-attack are on another level. Although, spoilers: you do eventually unlock a traditional downward attack.
The economy feels a bit off too. Now you're dealing with two currencies, shells and rosaries. All enemies drop shells but only a few drop rosaries as well. Shells function basically as fuel that replenishes your alt's ammo when you hit a bench, whereas rosaries are the legal tender at stores and tollbooths, buying everything from maps and charms to save spots and fast travel stations. And man, there's just never enough rosary beads. I have yet to lose a single bead to a corpse run and still there's never enough. Activating a bench costs money, banking your money costs money, sometimes the mere act of walking into a shop costs money. Some of these prices are exorbitant too. I've had to farm plenty. Now that I think about it, the bosses don't even drop anything upon defeat, in contrast to the coin bonanza that ended every duel in HK.
My last pet peeve would be that so many enemies do double damage. I think most bosses as well as quite a few regular enemies, which should be a World 8 gimmick, not a World 1 standard. See you start off with 5 HP, and even if you go through the lengthy motions of collecting 4 mask shards to get to 6 HP, that still makes you a 3 hit wonder in most boss battles and combat rooms (and there are a lot of combat rooms). As if to compensate, you heal 3 HP instead of HK's 1 HP, and faster, too. But in practice this means you're often waiting to tank a third hit in order to make the most out of a heal, and most of the time you'll be vulnerable to a single fuckup.
TL;DR: Cumbersome down attack, late-stage capitalism, you're made of papier mâché .
Oh and there's an annoying tendency in enemies to recoil just out of reach when you lunge at them, but chase after you as soon as you try make space. There's usually a trick to each individual enemy that's easy enough to apply 1 v 1 but all bets are off in combat rooms, and like I said, looks like the devs blew their money on them.
