Vrin!
I don’t know if that’s how you spell it, but that’s how I’ve seen it most frequently, so “vrin!” it is.
What, you may be wondering, do I mean by “vrin?”
It’s the sound Hornet makes when she heals, in Hollow Knight: Silksong. You can hear it right here. She says it four times in the first two seconds.
Since getting Silksong on the day of its release, vrin is a sound that has lived in my head. In the game, when your character, Hornet, takes damage, she loses a mask. Lose five masks and Hornet dies, sending you back to your last save. Since you heal three masks when Hornet says it, I associate vrin with a feeling of security, the sense that I’ve got a chance after all.
Too bad real life doesn’t work like this—when you get hurt (physically or emotionally) you just shout “Vrin!” and everything is ok. But it doesn’t.
In my most recent column, I talked about how the long wait for Silksong could teach us all something about prioritizing happiness and creativity over deadlines. I thought then and think now that delaying the game was the right decision for reasons that I summed up here:
Is it worth putting ourselves through hell to produce a video game? Probably not, if we’re honest. Gamers might complain online, but they’ve got plenty of other things to do while they wait, and if they demand misery as the price for their game, they probably don’t deserve it anyway. Staying true to what really matters is worth a thousand universally-acclaimed games.
Well, Silksong is now out. On Steam, the game currently has a 91 percent approval, which tracks closely with its older sibling Hollow Knight’s 94 percent. The game is a hit.
That doesn’t mean that people don’t have complaints—a vocal online contingent has taken issue with the game’s difficulty. Indeed, this is not an easy game to play—at least not for me (more on that later). But Hollow Knight itself wasn’t an easy game, so it’s fair to say that this comes with the territory..
The complaints over difficulty demonstrate, I think, that the creators were right to go at their own pace, because people will find something to complain about no matter what.
My personal reaction to Silksong has swung between joy, wonder, frustration, satisfaction, discouragement, and appreciation. Seeing the game world has been a treat. Repeatedly dying to enemies who my hands are too slow to beat, not such a treat.
Sliksong has helped me come to terms with the fact that I am not very good at this game, but that repeated failures just might help me become competent enough to complete it someday. Each new boss battle—so far the big ones for me have been Bell Beast, Lace, and the Fourth Chorus—has felt absolutely impossible at first. It’s only after dying again and again that I was able to figure out the patterns and devise counterstrategies.
Are my struggles with Silksong a metaphor for overcoming obstacles in the real world? I wish that all the tough situations we face were as easy to master as beating a video game boss, but I suspect that they aren’t.
Still, we can gain insights within the magic circle of a game: stripping down a problem to its essentials, in an environment with well-defined rules, can help us build techniques for issues we encounter in less constrained situations.
I have gone into Silksong without reading any guides or watching any walkthroughs, content to play the game at my own pace rather than racing through it to check off achievements. I am almost surely missing out of some really cool parts of the game, and I am no doubt courting far more frustration that I would if I was following a guide, but I am willing to make that trade-off so that I can experience the game through new eyes, having an experience that might not be the most efficient, but is my own.
And I can still enjoy the game, even though it feels like I am terrible at playing it. The characters are fantastic, the game world is enthralling, the sound and music are superb, and the gameplay itself, if it is a bit hard to adjust to at times (looking at you, diagonal pogoing), still feels good.
Video games fascinate me because they are educational tools disguised as entertainment. Think about it: one begins the game knowing nothing about the world or how to play, and through trial and error becomes proficient. That’s what education is supposed to do, but it seems to meet with a lot more resistance than video games.
Of course, we can approach our real-life struggles, from the classroom to the workplace, as game scenarios, thinking hypothetically about potential responses to different situations until we think we’ve got the right approach. I actually recommend “gaming” an upcoming difficult conversation when I coach people on them, since they’ve got one chance at getting it right and will likely be full of emotion. As we tend not to do our best thinking when we’re flooded with adrenaline and whatever else gets dumped into our bloodstream when we are nervous (another thing that I’m not great at but would love to be: anatomy and physiology), if we can think of our responses beforehand, we have a much better chance of staying on course.
Silksong is reminding me of the value in experimentation, in settings where failure is not only an option, but preferable. That’s how we learn. If Starfleet (in the Star Trek universe) tests their cadets with a no-win scenario, maybe we do gain something by seeing how we handle a worst case scenario. My progress through Silksong certainly feels like a worst case scenario for now (12 percent through the game after seven hours) but it’s been a fun ride.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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