No Escape

I’m bashing my head against a wall, and in doing so I can feel my blood pressure rising.

A couple weeks after all the most fiery discourse about Team Cherry’s long-awaited sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, died down, I bought the game myself and started playing it at no one’s prompting. I didn’t honestly think I would even write about it, I just wanted to poke at it and see what there was to see.

I found the game everyone has been describing: exceptionally difficult, sometimes frustratingly so, but just as often exceptionally satisfying to solve a puzzle or beat a particularly thorny boss. At least, that’s how it was until I reached the Greymoors.

Now, to set the stage, I understand that the Greymoors – and the four other biomes I’d been to before it – are extremely early days in the context of what is available in the game. I have an intuitive sense that I am barely scratching the surface of what Silksong has to offer, and that if I would just keep playing, if I would just persevere beyond the Greymoors and these fuckingbirds, that I would find new wonders and new sources of frustration in equal measure. But as I play, and as I continue to beat my head against the wall of these fucking birds, a little voice in my head gets louder and louder: ehh. I get it. I get what the game is doing now. I’ve seen it. I gave it a shot. I’m done.

I’m done.

There is a benefit to completing a game. You see the entirety of its story, if it has one. You experience the total breadth of its mechanical complexity. You get to share with others the joys and sorrows of the joyful and sorrowful bits you experienced at once individually and also as part of the gestalt of players who also knuckled down and finished the damn thing. You become part of a cohort that Knows™. We see it with Soulsborne players, with people who finished all of the Kingdom Heartsgames, with people who reached the summit in Baby Steps. And when a game hits, it fucking hits. Maybe it isn’t true that every single video game in existence is someone’s first or favorite, but it’s almost undeniable that for many of the people who have played the aforementioned games to their completion, those games are held in high esteem.

But the prospect of finishing Silksong fills me with stress. It gives me gas. It sends a little itch into my brain that makes me really fucking uncomfortable. Because right now I’m faced with some fuckingbirds that I know I could beat, it’s all about just mastering their movement patterns and not putting myself in the way of their dive attacks or their slashes or their knife-throws. All I have to do is juggle them all at once and I’ll get something cool, or I’ll progress to another area. Either side of the map of Greymoor is full of something I don’t want to encounter and yet I have to do one or the other. Make a fucking decision, move forward.

Every time I lose, I put my Switch to sleep and set the console down gently. I am not an angry gamer. I don’t throw controllers or break televisions and game systems. I’m not made of money, and I would like to keep playing games beyond my spike in frustration, my volcanic hiccup of upset. And the voice grows louder. You’re done. Stop Playing.

If I decided to stop playing Silksong, I wouldn’t be alone. According to a study from 2019, only about two percent of Steam games at the time had more than half of their player bases actually finish the game, and “for about half (51%) of the games measured on Steam, 10% or fewer of players finish the game.”^[1]Bailey, Eric, and Kazunori Miyata. “Improving Video Game Project Scope Decisions with Data: An Analysis of Achievements and Game Completion Rates.” Entertainment Computing, vol. 31, Aug. 2019, p. … Continue reading Games filter players out all the time, and I know I’m not special in that regard.

So why the fuck do I feel guilty about it? Why the fuck did it take me so long to stop playing Destiny 2, to let my Final Fantasy XIV subscription lapse, to stop feeling an obligation to see yet another Call of Duty entry through? I wrote so many years ago, “Video Games Don’t Deserve All Of Your Time,” and yet I’m never applying that critique to myself. There are other games I want to try before the end of the year. There’s other stuff I still want to do. Nobody is holding a gun to my head and demanding that I finish Silksong. The main drawback in not finishing is that I don’t get to join that cohort that Knows™, but that theoretically shouldn’t bother me: the number of games I’ve never played far outstrips the number of games I’ve beaten and it isn’t even close.

I should listen to the little voice.

“O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg’s ‘Bookworm.’”

—Walter Benjamin, defender of the ever-growing backlog, “Unpacking My Library.”