Some of the first mods for Hollow Knight: Silksong enabled co-op multiplayer in the challenging platformer, and now there’s a mod to move things in the opposite direction: Skong Boss Doubler by eniac-mod gives most bosses in the game their own Mimic Tear doppelganger to make your life hell.
Does this seem like a fun or even reasonable way to play Silksong? Not at all. The toughest Hollow Knight bosses are finely tuned bullet hell puzzles demanding precise play. Doubling all those projectiles looks like it turns the game into pure chaos.
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Even legendarily tough videogame duo bosses like Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls are balanced with the numbers advantage in mind, all but doing the martial arts movie thing where the goons only go at the hero one at a time. Skong Boss Doubler has no such concessions to fun play, it’s just “There are two Last Judges now. Good luck. Champions adjust.”
But it’s a really, really funny bit, part of the back and forth conversation between players, modders, and memers over this game. Out of the gates, most of the first Silksong mods were for quality of life or making the difficult game easier. In response, we saw projects like the one to make enemy hits deal three masks of damage, a delightful trolling over all the complaints of double damage attacks in Silksong.
I wouldn’t recommend playing Silksong like this, but there are already some great videos of challenge runners taking on the new duos. CrankyTemplar, who’s already no-hit every boss in Silksong, has uploaded three such efforts so far. Two are a little spoilery, but Act 1’s the Last Judge feels like fair game to me this far out from launch. In this case, CrankyTemplar is taking on “Last Judge but also with Second-to-last Judge.”
One of my first questions was whether this mod did anything to pre-existing duo fights, and yep, a screenshot on Skong Boss Doubler’s Nexus page shows Hornet squaring off with four Cogwork Dancers, which really just tickles me.
If, for some reason, you want to try this yourself, you’ll need to install the BepInEx mod framework available on the Silksong Nexus. CrankyTemplar noted in a video description that the Nexus mirror of the Skong Boss Doubler was having issues, but you can also download the mod from GitHub.
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