I finished Silksong despite my raging illness !!!!

Or, alternatively: The 5+1 ways I queercripped my gaming practice to play the sequel to my favourite game

This post contains minor spoilers for Silksong Acts 1 & 2, but it's super vague apart from some discussion of the Crests and tools you can discover.

Last night I beat the final boss in the video game Hollow Knight: Silksong!!!

This is a mammoth achievement for me. When I started playing this game on its release date back in September last year (2025) I genuinely did not think I would get very far into it - in fact, I flagged this rather declaratively in the opening post to my livetweet thread on bluesky:

100%ing Silksong is no easy task even for the average abled un-sick player. Hollow Knight (Silksong's predecessor) was already known for being what we call in the gaming world as "Souls-like" - a relentlessly hard game. Silksong basically picks up where Hollow Knight left off in terms of difficulty. The opening areas are maybe the equivalent difficulty of 70% of the way through a 100% completion run of Hollow Knight? And you don't have to go very far into Silksong before the difficult far outweighs even the toughest area/bosses from the original game.

So, yeah. Difficult!!

But for me, the high difficulty was never something I imagined being a problem for me - until I got covid lol. Back before my disabling covid infection, I was speedrunning the original Hollow Knight and could beat the game in under 3 hours (any%). I could fight through almost every single boss in the game, buffed, back to back. I revelled in getting really fucking good at this game, and practiced for hours honing my skills with glee.

So I whilst I was looking forward to Silksong's expected difficulty, I never imagined that it would be a barrier to me playing - that was, until I found myself living in a dark room 22hrs a day being barely able to look at a computer screen without triggering extreme exhaustion and pain.^[1]

Thanks to developing M.E. from my covid infection ^[2], I had a combination of sensory hypersensitivity, screen intolerance, motion sickness, concentration issues and extremely delayed reaction times that rendered me completely unable to play video games. I remember booting up Hollow Knight a few months into my illness to see if, perhaps, the fact that I was previously so good at this game meant that I could still play it - nope. Screen = evil. Moving, bigger-than-phone screen = EXTRA evil.

Over the following years though, as my symptoms slowly improved as a result of work and - crucially, for no amount of work can help you if luck isn't on your side - luck, I was slowly able to play some video games.

The first game I played, maybe 9 months after getting sick, was Stray Gods - a story-based "choose from these four simple options about what to do next" game with a very simple hand-drawn art style and the option to turn off all time-sensitive input.

Some 9 months after that, I got into Stardew Valley, which was definitely a step up in terms of brainpower and sensory requirements, but the simple and controllable top-down 2D pixel art visuals and ability to set my own goals in the game and thus work at my own pace made it accessible for me.

Then came 2025, and my almost year-long Baldur's Gate 3 hyperfixation. This game kind of revolutionised my quality of life.

The game's turn-based combat - as well as the ability to turn on turn-based mode at any point during the game when exploring the world - meant that for the first time since becoming disabled I was able to persue my beloved hobby of getting really fucking good at a video game without needing to be awesome at reaction times or fast memory recall or intricate and speedy hand inputs! I could be as slow as I wanted in working out my next move because there was no turn time limit, and I could save and quit the game at any point that I chose. This was a game that embraced my slowness, rather than one that punished me for it.

Truly, what a blessing of a game.

So, now we come to Silksong, just over 2 years after I caught covid. Whilst I had clocked in over 250 hours of BG3 at this point, I was nonetheless hesitant. I had yet to play a game that required realm time reactions and fine motor skill hand movements, let alone what was shaping up to be one of the hardest mainstream games of the 2020s.

But, there's a lot more to a Hollow Knight game than just the combat, so I was hoping at the very least I could be able to get past the tutorial and have a wander around in the world.

What followed was an 86 hour journey over the course of 8 months, that led to me almost entirely re-learning how to play a game like Silksong, and eventually resulted in me beating the final boss of the game with 100% completion.

The fact that I was able to not only play, but master, this game was a testament not only to the incredible luck and privilege I've had in the work I've done to improve my illness symptoms actually paying off, but to the myriad ways in which I adapted how I approached playing this game in order to make it accessible for me.

The way I played this game looked very different to how I played the original Hollow Knight for the first time some 5 years ago, so I want to describe for you now the whacky, queercrip way that I played my way through this game!

So without further ado, I present to you the 5 (+1) ways I queered my gameplay experience of Silksong.

1. pausing the game - a lot

And by "pausing the game" I don't mean "hitting the pause button at a convenient time to go grab a cup of tea". I mean "pausing a truly massive number of times, constantly, all throughout the game, in the middle of boss fights, in the middle of platforming sequences". Like, imagine pause-buffering speedrun style^[3], but for my brain.

The way most 'normal' players play a video game is by not pausing very much at all, especially doing challenging boss fights or other sequences where tapping into flow state can be crucial to executing a sequence properly.

But for me, my brain needs extra time to process information - especially new information - and I quite literally can't process a high quanitity of information at once for more than a few minutes or so at a time. If things start going too fast, or if I spend too long in unpaused gameplay, my brain stops being able to keep up.

It's truly fascinating how clearly you can witness this change in my mental capacities during a boss fight in Silksong. I will go from being able to dodge most of the attacks, including sneaky ones, to losing track of even some of the most basic attacks and getting hit. There is a palpable, measurable difference in my gameplay performance and how overwhelmed or tired my brain is. Honestly, someone should design a study around this, it'd be so fascinating. I digress.

So, what's my solution to this? Pausing the game. A lot. If I get even the slightest hint that my brain may be moving into overwhelm mode: pause. And in the pause, I'll do anything from have a walk around the room, to updating my bluesky livetweet thread, to just sitting in silence processing the previous gameplay for a moment before continuing. It's my way of slowing things down - where I can - to a pace that my mind is able to work with.

The result is that the actual time it took me to 100% Silksong is likely far longer than the 86 hrs 37 mins and 52 secs that the game reported to me, because that timer stops every time you bring up the pause menu haha.

2. turning off the music

I know, I knooooooooow. A tragedy !!!! How could I do this to Christopher Larkin !!?!?!! But this is one of the main ways I am able to reduce the amount of input my brain has to process whilst I'm playing.

I love game music, and for most of the game I was able to play with it on (hell yeah). But for extra tricky sequences, I cut that shit OUT.

The difference, again, is night and day. I'll go from being a bumbling mess trying to beat a boss with music on to being able to beat it on the first or second try once I turn the music off. Kind of amazing, how clear this representation of how limited my brain's processing power is and what can be done with it when more of it is freed up!

Turning off the music is also one of the small ways I have control over the difficulty of some boss fights. Team Cherry (and many other game designers) love to do this thing where they'll make you THINK you killed a boss successfully, and then you'll get jumpscared 3 seconds later by the boss's return in their final form accompanied by the battle music resuming - but the music is now faster, louder, tenser, and almost always comes with a semitone higher keychange.

This music change isn't just a fun piece of set dressing - it actively makes the fight harder. A faster music tempo makes your brain interpret the boss's movement as being substantially faster than before, even if they are not. Music has a direct effect on our minds and bodies, and players will respond to this music change with at least a minor fight or flight response. The player's heart rate will increase^[4] - which can be good for some players who are able to perform well or better in that mode, but makes it harder for the rest of us who need to be cool calm and collected.

The jacked up boss theme is NOT designed to keep the player in the state of cool calm and collected flow that most of us need to succeed. It's designed to go "BWAAHHHHHH !!!!! BIG SCARY BOSS IS BACK AND MORE SCARY THIS TIME !!!!!!!" and throw us off our game so that we gotta try harder to beat the final phase. Very fun - if you don't have an illness that treats a sudden heartrate increase as if you're literally dying 😭😭

So, if you want to turn the difficulty down to make the game more accessible for you? Turn off the music!!

3. using every in-built accessibility aid offered

This one may seem obvious but it's worth mentioning. Silksong had no specific accessibility settings (boooooo, I'll get to that later), BUT there were definitely different tools and tricks you could choose to use in the game to make it easier.

My fave one of these was a tool you could equip that let you stick to walls, rather than sliding and jumping around constantly. It cannot be overstated how much less painful it made my gameplay experience to straight up cut out one of the major elements of platforming and movement and replace it with "you can just stay where you are".

And to be clear - when I say my gameplay experience was made less painful, I do in fact main this literally. When you have an illness where overexertion, whether it be physical, cognitive or emotional, can lead to days (at minimum) of increased physical symptoms (aka PEM or post-exertional malaise), pushing yourself beyond your limits can be straight up dangerous. These limits are not just "oh i did too much physical activity" or "i was very sad about something", they're also positive things like "i laughed too hard at this meme" or "i was enjoying this video game too much that i tried to do too much in it too quickly" - which as you can imagine takes an inhuman level of self control to avoid doing with 100% accuracy.

As such, having a way to reduce the likelihood that getting caught up in my favourite video game would push me over that limit - such as by reducing the mental load required to play it - is something that makes the game safer for me to play.

4. playing to learn, not to 'win'

The other main way I altered the way I approached Silksong as a player to manage my disability was going into the game specifically with the mindset of wanting to learn and experience rather than win - and by "win" I mean things like trying to see how fast I could get through a particular sequence, how epically i could pull off a particular mob pogo, whether i could beat a boss in as few tries as possible.

I dropped this mindset completely. I went slow. Rather than immediately trying to do as much damage to a boss as possible, getting hit a bunch and repeating over and over until I got frustrated and gave up, I would first start by learning to dodge. I would barely even hit the boss, just learn their attack patterns. Only after some practice with that would I start incorporating my own counter attacks.

I built up strategies slowly, methodically. When I found myself trying to do things too quickly too soon, I would actually take advantage of the game's in-built moveset customisation system to swap my character's moveset to the slowest, most easily controlled option.

Once I had practiced a bunch with that moveset and felt like I understood the boss's movement and attack patterns better, then I'd swap to a moveset with higher damage or faster attack speed to put the skills I had gained from going slowly into practice.

I tried to insert a gif of the Wanderer's Crest here but i think they were too big for ghost to load up as i kept getting errors lol so pls imagine a lil guy hitting things very fast and closer to her with a needle

5. taking massive and frequent breaks

This might sound obvious, but I wanted to mention it because of how important it was to my gameplay experience. I only ever played this game when everything else in my life was relatively chill and lowkey.

If you know spoon theory, basically I had to save up a lot of spoons whenever I played this game. On the days I played Silksong, that was like the one main Thing I did apart from resting, eating, going on a little walk around the streets and cuddling one of my partners if I was so lucky to have them visiting.

I would constantly take week-long or more breaks from the game, one time not opening it up for two whole months when I was moving house. It was these breaks that got me through and allowed me to take care of myself whilst attempting something that was at the very upper end of my capacity.

I would also try and avoid playing for more than an hour or so at a time, however I would fuck this one up every so often and end up triggering PEM bc the game was so fun. man. ME sucks.

+1. being really good at the game already and also having a game design degree*

So, the actual final thing I did which made this game playable for me was having already been ridiculously good at it so that me being hella nerfed IRL just sort of plopped me back down to an average player (or maybe a bit above) ability level rather than well, well below average. I don't think I would've been able to do as well or completed this game if I didn't already have extensive video game, and Hollow Knight specific, experience.

The fact that I also have a degree*^[5] in game design, meaning I am able to predict a lot of gameplay and think my way through problems that other players who have thought about gameplay experience design less than me (I've thought about it a LOT) may find harder.

So yeah. shoutout to past me!!! you're cool!! you learned the stuff good !!

IN CONCLUSION

Silksong was awesome. I really enjoyed it (mostly. please see my livetweet thread from about here onwards for my thoughts on and experience of the game's innane unsignposted box-ticking exercises. spoilers for end of Act 2 onwards). I'm so pleased I was able to play it!! It was such a gorgeous game.

I'd love to write another post explaining my criticisms about how the Silksong devs didn't add in any optional accessibility settings beyond the ones they built into the game in the form of tools. There's a lot of chatter about this online and most of it amounts to a bunch of ableism which is really frustrating, but if you can delve past that there is also a worthwhile discussion to be had about how difficulty works as a crucial part of the gameplay experience in action and platforming games. Hopefully I shall delve into this in a future post! but tbh i cannot be bothered rn. i wish to publish this post NOW, and i am tired and have had good chats about this topic with my close besties already!

So, for now - adieu !!

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