Having both played Silksong as well as watched a number of reviews and let's plays, I've come to the conclusion that there might be such a thing as being too skilled for your own good.
A criticism I keep seeing from reviewers is that things like rosaries, tools, quest items, skills, fleas, were too difficult to find and held them back from progressing in the late game. And I can't help but notice, when I look at their playstyle, that they all seem to throw themselves forward at the game and reserve in-depth exploration for when they strictly need it to progress. And if you're really skilled at bosses and platforming, it's certainly possible to play that way. But for players like me, who can't just do all those on five masks and toolless, that's not really an option. Throwing myself at the same boss room over and over was not going to make me beat it. So what I did instead was linger in each area and get as much as I could out of it with my current in-game abilities.
And because of that, a lot of the complaints I hear from these people are things I had zero issues with. I was swimming in rosaries the entire time. I found and paid for all the benches. I unlocked areas like the wormways, the early weavenests and lower deepdocks and got their upgrades. I bought out the merchants. I had a few crests and enough memory lockets to upgrade them. I rung all the bells long before ever finding the last judge.
I went back to early game questboards pretty frequently and so I combined a lot of the quest item gathering with regular exploring. This in particular is something I was pretty surprised to see so many people be so critical of. I do agree that not all the quests were equally interesting, but I didn't share the experience of the people calling them all boring fetch-quests. I found that most of them combined pretty seamlessly with the flow of exploring the areas.
I also found a lot of fleas early on, which means that I didn't have to fight moorwing until much later in the game, and avoided an early bossfight that made a lot of people ragequit.
This even carried over into later parts of the game. I didn't have to pay Vog much money because I had already found most fleas by the time I found her. And because of all my extensive exploring, I had disabled the clawmaidens and enlisted Shakra's help in the high halls gauntlet and once again avoided the rage-quitting experience a lot of players had. I had no issues unlocking act 3, because i had already fulfilled all the requirements before it became an issue.
And that's not to say I was never frustrated, but that frustration was mostly about my own skill, not about feeling like the game itself was holding me back. So in conlcusion, I think that being kind of bad at the game actually made me engage with it more thoroughly in a way that made it more enjoyable as a whole. And I think a lot of people could really benefit from less rushing to the finish line.
