When Eminem raps, “His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy,” in the opening of “Lose Yourself,” he’s describing what his semi-autobiographical character in 8 Mile is feeling during a rap battle. Though, really, he’s describing me during a tough boss fight in Hollow Knight: Silksong (minus the “vomit on his sweater already” part).
Boss fights are often the most tension-filled moments in action games, and there are plenty of them in Silksong. They range from tough one-on-one duels to somewhat gimmicky fights where the floor is literally lava. Something they all share? Difficulty — Silksong’s boss fights are tough as shit, y’all. But that toughness doesn’t translate to excitement for me as much as it does in other games with challenging boss fights due in part to the lack of enemy health bars.
I can quickly learn how many whacks with Hornet’s needle are needed to take down a regular foe while exploring Silksong’s winding levels. For boss fights, however, the enemy health pools are so large that I can spend minutes whacking away with seemingly little indication of how much damage I’ve dealt. Some bosses have phases that indicate how much progress I’ve made in a fight, but that doesn’t have the same effect as a red health bar at the bottom of the screen tracking how much (or how little) progress I’ve made toward vanquishing a foe.
The original Hollow Knight didn’t have health bars either, so it’s obvious there’s intent behind developer Team Cherry’s decision not to include them. Just like how there’s surely intent behind design decisions like long walkbacks to bosses and losing all of Hornet’s rosary beads upon death. Those designs are clearly trying to elicit a specific experience for the player.
But I’d argue that adding health indicators for bosses would actually benefit Team Cherry’s intended player experience. Silksong is a tough game, though it often doesn’t balance the fun with its tedious frustrations (case in point: those damn corpse runs). Tracking progress in a boss fight could flip them from being frustrating toward being fun, as there’s nothing quite as perversely enjoyable as the white-knuckled, sweaty-palmed feeling of getting this close against a tough boss — and dying.
This is something boss fights in Soulslikes excel at. I can’t tell you how many times my heart rate has spiked in Elden Ring or Lies of P as a dwindling health bar amps up the pressure — and the nerves — as I close in on victory. I often get more aggressive at the end of fights in an attempt to win quickly, which is either a great strategy or a foolish endeavor, depending on if I come out victorious.
In Silksong, boss fights instead end with something of a whimper. I don’t find myself aggressively rushing toward a climatic conclusion. Instead, when I beat a boss, I’m left with a feeling of, “Oh! Guess I won.” It doesn’t hit the same.
Hollow Knight: Silksong doesn’t even need strict red, rectangular health bars to elicit that same rush of adrenaline as a fight nears its finish. A game like Death’s Door, Acid Nerve’s 2021 action-adventure game, understood this, swapping classic health bars for a system where purple cracks appeared on enemies the more damage they took. Fighting through Death’s Door as a crow with a big sword, I never knew quite how close I was to finishing a boss or regular enemy off, yet seeing my foe crack further and further still gave me that “oh shit it’s almost dead” feeling.
A similar system would work well in Silksong. It wouldn’t affect the perceived difficulty at all — I love a good challenge! — but would rather enhance those difficult encounters. I want my palms to be sweatier, knees weaker, and arms heavier when going up against Silksong’s Last Judge. Silksong is intended to be an intense, adrenaline-pumping experience, so why not dial that intensity all the way up?
Of course, Team Cherry spent years developing this game, and going by how its second patch ignores the conversation surrounding Silksong’s difficulty (and instead focuses on bug fixes), it seems pretty clear the developers made the game they intended to. I’m not expecting any major overhauls in the coming months or years to change that. Though, I think adding a health indicator would be a minor change that’d go a long way in enhancing an already great game.
