I recently duked it out with a big ass flying roly poly. I won eventually but not without a collection of Ls. I am sure I will take a while to finish Silksong, and if I want to do a long ass blog about it I will do so long after it’s a hot topic. Perhaps that time has passed already. Oh well. So now you get a shorter than usual from me but not entirely short blog instead. I had a fight with a big bug and now I’m going to talk about it.

Hunter’s March

The ants go marching two by two hurrah, hurrah. This is the area that leads up to the beast, and it’s a beast in its own right. It’s a woodsy setting full of green and red, the brutal undercurrent of the forest. Our protagonist Hornet who isn’t exactly a hornet is marching right into ant territory. Even as a rather large human I would be nervous about fucking with ants too much. It depends on the species but some types can mob your ass and kill you if you’re unprepared. Even the less lethal ones can certainly give you an unpleasant time. But if ants were our size? Yeah that would be a problem for us. And so they are in this game. Or is it that we’re all bug sized? But there’s regular small ants in this area alongside the big ants that fight. So I guess we’re larger than usual insects but not quite human sized. I still wouldn’t want to fuck with these ants they’d break my legs.

There are multiple ant shaped enemies you can encounter here. There’s the normal ass moderately large ant that marches at you aggressively, the flying ant that flies at you aggressively, and then there’s a couple bigger types you duke it out with. There’s the smaller rogue type guy who digs around, does his little stabby stab, and throws claw appendage things at you. Not the worst on their own but they aren’t always alone. Sometimes they double team you, sometimes they’re hanging out with the caveman ants that wear skulls and fight with boney claws. Perhaps you could just call it a bonelike exoskeleton. Either way the caveman guys are the beefy soldiers of the area. They make you work for victory. They got good range with their sword-like bug bones, respectable speed, and a more varied moveset than the upcoming boss. They’re manageable one on one but when the rogue-type ant helps out they’re a real hurdle.

The ants work together to make you go through the gauntlet. Even the toughest ants aren’t THAT tough by themselves, but crossing past all of them collectively is a challenge. Such is the ant way. The map is designed as a forwards march on an unusually linear and horizontal path. Certainly fits the ant motif. I also like the detail where the smaller ants just casually pick up the pieces of any slain enemy. The little guys carry them off and they disappear. Guess I’m thankful the little guys don’t mess with you while you’re alive. They let the big guys create the food and the smaller ones break it down. If the big ants fail, then the big ants become the food instead. Can’t blame them for being resourceful.

Eventually after you make it through the wringer you get to a rest area with a bench. The stop before the last leg of your beastfly slaying journey. One would hope they’d just leave a bench right by the gates, but no, there’s still a bit of a hike. Got to get past an ant hunter guy with a cage trap, some platforming, and ride the air streams to get to the top. The downside of this runback is that it’s kind of tedious, especially fighting the ant hunter guy. I suppose I could’ve just run right past him now that I think about it, but still. The upside is that you have an opportunity to slightly rebuild your shard supply and collect rosary beads. I know I was more loaded with beads than ever before by the time I actually beat this thing.

Directly preceding the fight you see you’re entering the Chapel of the Beast. It’s foreboding, there’s cages hanging from the ceiling, and there’s some big earth shaking sound. Certainly helps sell the idea that something intimidating is on the horizon. What exactly could it be? Well…

Enter the Savage Beastfly

Given all the buildup you’d think the boss would be a big ass queen ant or something. Some big hulking earthshaking menace. What we get instead? Well… it’s not not big. It’s kinda hulking. It’s definitely a menace. It’s an inexplicably flying pillbug that made the chapel shake by ramming into it too many times. I’m guessing there’s some lore reason for its behavior, perhaps it feels instinctually drawn to what’s on the other side of the door? I was drawn to it as well, so now we’re throwing hands.

I had some prior knowledge of this fight thanks to The Internet. The Savage Beastfly was the talk of the town for all those folks who played through Silksong a hell of a lot faster than I have. As such I knew ahead of time that it would be rough, and sure enough, it was. Some days I fought it one or two times then decided, “yeah this isn’t happening tonight.” It’s one of those bosses I had to set some time aside for and really hunker down to defeat it. And so I did. I got to know the fight quite well in the process.

To be fair it’s not especially hard to learn this boss in the abstract. A lot of the time in these sorts of games the bosses have complex move sets with varied timing to jam you up, making mastery of them a challenge. The Savage Beastfly doesn’t have intricate wombo combos or anything like that. She has a whopping two moves, both of which involve ramming into you.

So let’s break these moves down. First we got the move she inherited from her younger beastfly brethren, the charge forward in a straight line attack! This would seem simple to dodge, but have you seen how big she is? Not to mention she does 2 masks of damage if you get hit by her, and even more damage if you don’t take advantage of the brief i-frames to get out of her space. She’s deceptively fast and she can be rather dynamic in how she positions her charge. There were multiple occasions that I got caught out by jumping too early and then she just rammed right into me. Sometimes she can be dashed under and sometimes she flies too low for that to work. As simple as the move is on paper she’s got a surprising amount of sophistication and mixups in her ramming skills.

Her second move involves her flying above you and then slamming down into the ground. She tends to do this move 3 times in a row. One ram, and then she bounces off the ground looking rolled up like a pill bug, then rams into the ground again. I find this move easier to dodge usually. The pill bug roll can catch you in a jump but usually all I need to do is dash to avoid it. It also provides a strong opportunity to get some damage in. Problem is getting close enough to hit her without getting clapped yourself takes precision in your spacing. It’s certainly doable but it’s not exactly easy.

If it was truly just these two moves by themselves she wouldn’t be that bad. You probably wouldn’t see many people talking about her online at all. The thing is she can summon help. I guess it’s less of a summon and more like she calls for help and then the ant people or whatever drop some in. So you don’t have to just deal with the Savage Beastfly, but all the little minions that show up in the arena with her. Suddenly all the manuevering you have to do around her gets that much more complicated. Ideally you want to get the smaller bugs off the map as quickly as possible, but if you focus on them too much the Savage Beastfly can catch you lacking.

So how do we handle this? You’re locked in a basement with a mad bull and their helpers, how are you supposed to escape? Well, first of all this fight is technically completely optional, so you can always just ignore it and move on with your life. But if you’re someone hell bent on beating it that hasn’t done so yet, here’s some tips from my experience.

The Savage Beastfly is an unwieldy creature. She does not distinguish friend and foe, which is probably why the ant folk don’t go down there themselves. No matter the bug, if they cross the Savage Beastfly’s ground pound they’re just as dead as you’d be. So you can guide the beast to take out the extra crowd for you. Rather convenient when it works. It seems they’re entirely unharmed by her horizontal charge. I suppose there wouldn’t be much point in having them there at all if she destroyed them with every attack.

You could win just by learning her timing and taking advantage of her friendly fire, but I might as well just say “get gud” if I left it there. Fortunately with some good old fashioned exploration you can find additional ways to make it manageable. As much as I expect the BS to pile on in this game I must say you’re given some powerful tools. You can use the silk spear to do heavy damage in a straight line. Only problem is you also need silk for healing so I rarely used the spear. But hey it’s strong when it works and doesn’t take the whole spool like a heal does.

Thankfully the silk spear ain’t the only extra weapon at your disposal, and the other ones don’t need silk to operate. You can use shards, little shiny things that drop from slain enemies, to craft extra murder. The first red tool you’re likely to encounter lets you throw some kunai type shit in a straight line. The Straight Pin is very fast and the damage isn’t terrible. It’s a good way to hit the Savage Beastfly when she’s too far away to attack directly. It’s especially good for dealing with the extra bugs that enter the arena. It’s also a good way to get caught out by SB’s horizontal charge if you aren’t smart about it. Yes I decided to start calling the Savage Beastfly SB when I’m over halfway through the blog already. I could edit this post to make that change earlier but I don’t feel like it!!!!

Any ways, in the forges of Deep Docks you can find a tool that helps quite a bit. The resident smithy doesn’t necessarily approve of everything we’d want to build, but he’ll do whatever for the right price.

Is it possible I’ll find some later game weapon that outclasses this thing? Sure, probably, but at this point in the game this is the coolest thing I got. Here’s a key way Hornet diverges from The Knight. The Knight makes use of whatever he finds, but he isn’t coming up with whole ass Viet Cong contraptions to clear shit. Hornet’s a hunter by trade, and we can take advantage of that to win. So Sting Shard away.

Basically when you use the Sting Shard you can set up a little trap in the air up to 6 times. The trap stays in place until either A. the enemy contacts it, B. you attack it, or C. you tried to set up 4 traps at once so the oldest one exploded. There’s probably a way for it to despawn if none of those things occur but I haven’t seen it happen. In either case it will explode sending a bunch of needle looking things in multiple directions. The really good part is that the hitbox will linger upon sustained contact, doing multiple hits before exploding if the opponent stays in its vicinity. So if an enemy runs through it they eat one good hit, but if they pause in place by it they’ll get heavier damage. You can get some really good hits in on SB if you use it on her right at the start of the fight and before she does a ground pound. Good timely placement can let you do heavy damage to SB/help deal with the extra guys. Play it poorly and you’ll get a few extra hits in and not much else. Only got 6 uses per run after all, and you’ll need shards to replenish.

Which reminds me, this boss fight was the first time I ran out of shards during my playthrough. I got clapped while using my tools a few too many times and ran out of the resources to replenish them. The enemies you fight along the way to SB offer some refreshment, but you really have to grind them to get it back to the level you need. This is the annoying part of the shard system. Too many Ls and you’re forced back on the grind. Perhaps it’s not all bad. If you’re losing that much to a boss killing more basic enemies can help you let off some steam. You’re not totally incompetent, you’re just fighting a tough opponent. See how much you’re succeeding at ant slaughter? Of course if you manage to mess up against the ants too that’d probably make you feel even worse. At that point it’s probably a good idea to put the game down and try again another day. It can be tedious grinding up until your tools are refilled, getting rekt, and then having to grind some more. I hope I can find a stronger grinding spot next time I encounter this situation, because most of these ants don’t drop much.

None of these tips I offer are a silver bullet. No matter what nonsense you use you still got to avoid getting run over too many times in a row. Perhaps the easiest way to win is to just leave it alone until you far out scale it later in the game. But if you’re like me and want to see it through, my final tip that got me through is one of mindset. When you lose so many times in a row it can be frustrating, even rage inducing. To counteract that, I found myself exclaiming something that lightened the load.

I’m getting fucked by bugs!

Cosmia 2025

Indeed, damn near everything you fight in this game is some sort of bug or bug-adjacent creature. In this case the Savage Beastfly appears to be a cross between a pill bug and some sort of beetle, and I don’t mind losing to a pill bug. Pill bugs, roly polys, saddle bugs, wood lice, whatever, they were always one of my favorite bugs. Technically it’s neither bug nor insect they’re crustaceans. Walking trilobites that found their way on land and never looked back. Of course they’re probably not directly related to trilobites. Their ancestors survived to the modern day while trilobites just kinda died millions of years ago, L bozo.

When the Savage Beastfly she rolls into a ball and conglobates on the way up. Looks just like a pill bug when it rolls up. Apparently conglobation is the proper word for that roll up mechanism, or volvation. I like conglobation. That’s a word I know now and you do too. There are many words I could use to describe real world pill bugs. Whimsical, adorable, unusual, chill, but dangerous is not one of them. Maybe you can make an argument that their occasional crop damage is dangerous to us in some sort of indirect way, but oh well. Other guys want to eat our plants too, what a shock. Why must we fight nature so hard? Our habitat destruction, pollution, widespread pesticide use, etc. has decimated the global insect populations to concerning degrees. Perhaps you’re reading this and you’re like “bugs freak me out so fuck them let ‘em die.” That kind of short sighted hateful bullshit that got us into this environmental mess. Listen folks, when too many bugs die a lot of other things will die with them, and humanity is not immune to the consequences.

As such, I feel as though it is only fair that bugs get the chance to fuck us up from time to time. We take and reshape much of their home and countless lives, they get to piss a bunch of gamers off in a video game. It’s a rather light payback compared to how much real bug death we’ve collectively instigated. I’m not excluding myself from this picture, I have directly or indirectly caused the deaths of some bugs myself. So I can handle a little simulated bug punishment. I embrace the absurdity of the fight, and the frustration at repeated losses doesn’t sting so hard. Any game that can somehow take inspiration from a pill bug to make a genuinely challenging boss gets kudos from me.

Nevertheless I defeated her eventually. As tough as she is I’m sure it’s just a preview of the crazy shit I’m going to have to dodge eventually as I get deeper into the game. I didn’t mind dancing with her too much. I can see why she’d be rage inducing for some people. I didn’t count how many times I lost to her, I’m guessing like 12, and the runback takes some effort. But I think by now I’ve explained why I don’t hate her. My ass won’t be able to handle the rest of this game if I get too worked up about SB. She’s one of those early warnings of, “hey this game’s going to kick your ass” to scare off players that aren’t ready for what comes next. Will I be ready? Uh, hopefully?

By the way the reward for taking this boss down is the Beast Crest. You stab a big dead bug that probably has some deeper significance to the Silksong ant community I’m not aware of, and now you can become a werebug kinda. Your attack turns into a claw, you can roll like Blanka, and you can heal by going into frenzy mode and stealing their life force. Seems like a fun and different way to play the game, but not my thing. I prefer to heal from a distance.

That pretty much covers everything about good ole’ SB. I hear you can fight it a second time later and show how you’ve progressed or whatever, but I haven’t reached that point yet. I’m not sure if I’ll write another blog related to Silksong again. I’m enjoying it well enough so far but who knows if it’ll stay that way by the end. Persistence is your strongest asset in these sorts of games and they always find a new way to test it. I can handle some punishment, but if these sorts of games continue their difficulty creep I’ll reach my limits eventually. So far this game hasn’t bothered me too much but I haven’t even left Act 1. But no matter how far I do or don’t get, I’m sure I’ll remember this fight.

SB fucked me up her fair share of times. Enough times that I got a rush when I finally took her down. So I appreciate my time with her. From what I gather she’s become a hot button rage magnet online but you won’t hear it from me. You get caught in some ridiculous tight situations, and she’s unusually good at catching you out. If you make a prediction jump too early she’ll fly up higher and catch your ass out. Looking back maybe I could have survived some of those scenarios with a downward strike, but that’s some serious maneuvering you’d have to do. Sometimes when you’re caught you’re caught, and SB punishes you heavily when that happens. I guess it’s still more forgiving than a real bull fight. The bull only ever has to catch you once. And unlike a real bull fight, there’s no actual living creature dying. I’m sure I’m not the only one who will remember SB for some time to come. For some she might be the reason somebody dropped the game. For others they’re that fuck ass boss they struggled through and defeated eventually. For Cosmia she’s a blog post. Now as long as I got this blog post up I got my victory digitally preserved. Suck it SB!