I don't think that's necessary. Hollow Knight is a game whose appeal comes from exploring a massive, beautiful world and and discovering its secrets -- using a guide would take away a lot of the fun, at least for me.

Yeah, HK is a huge game and Silksong is probably bigger; it'll take a while to play through both. But that's a good thing. Play these games for the experience of playing them, no need to rush through them just to check them off a list.

Lots of us have work and families and don’t have time to organically figure out the insane steps to go down some of the late stage paths.

Of course. I usually don't 100% metroidvanias for this reason. But I also don't usually look up a guide (unless I really want to find a specific boss or secret or something). I just put the game down and come back to it later if I want to keep exploring it.

There's nothing wrong with using a guide if that's how you have the most fun. But I think most people would have more fun playing Hollow Knight without one, which is why I don't think "if you [play Hollow Knight], use a guide or something" is good advice as an unqualified statement. I enjoy the experience of playing a game far more than the accomplishment of having completed it, so I'd rather enjoy a game fully and leave it unfinished than halfheartedly rush through it with a guide.

And for the same reason, you don't _have_ to do Path of Pain, or Pantheon.

I did about 102% of Hollow Knight, mostly without a guide and loved it.

So, yes, I probably should have qualified my statement.

I meant this more if my parent wanted to get through Hollow Knight quickly, as a gateway for Silksong.

I say this because just thinking about playing Silksong immediately after finishing HK made me feel exhausted.

I wouldn't recommend playing HK in this manner though; it's more fun to explore, and use a guide only if you really hit a wall.

So, yeah in hindsight probably bad advice even after qualification.

The whole point of the game and genre is the exploration. A guide kinda defeats that.

If you don't like the backtracking (I hated it), then the game is probably not for you.

I mostly agree, and would say you should just play it blind. If you care about getting 100% (112% after the DLC) there are probably a couple of things where looking them up would be useful. It is also a very big world, so trying to do cleanup once you have all exploration tools can be quite involved

What a weird comment. The whole point of any game is to have fun.

If someone enjoys playing a game with a guide, what's the problem exactly ?

How do you know if you enjoy playing the game without a guide if you don't do it? Looking something up to unstuck yourself is one thing, but following a guide from beginning to end is robbing yourself of the opportunity to enjoy the game as presented.

"beating the game as quickly as possible" is such an obviously flawed reason to use a guide that I won't even respond to it. If you don't have the time to play the game, don't.

It's the thing about type I fun and type II fun, where type I is "fun while it's happening" and type II is "not fun while it's happening but fun in retrospect": if you don't use a guide, the type II fun that results may be greater in quality and impact than the type I fun you'd get using a guide