Go, you know, the thing

There's a weird game design thing I notice often where things are balanced based on how powerful or even just "cool" an ability sounds rather than anything to do with its actual efficacy. Once you notice this is a thing you start to see it everywhere, even places where it doesn't exist, and begin to wonder whether programmers as a class literally hate fun. Now you too must share in my hallucinatory curse.

Let's look at an example. In Hollow Knight, there is a resource called SOUL that is used to heal or cast offensive spells. Healing costs 33% of your baseline SOUL capacity and requires you to stand still for a second or so, meaning you either have to do it in a safe area or be familiar enough with a particular battle to know where there are safe windows to heal. This is an extremely central mechanic, and a large part of so-called gitting gud revolves around getting better at dodging so more of your SOUL can be used for attacking.

Another central mechanic is the charm system. Wearing charms can make the player stronger in very powerful, but often very specific ways, and the system is limited, of course: you have a finite amount of charm notches and each charm uses up a specific number of them. For a rough idea of how valuable an individual notch is: you start with three, and can find up to eight more over the course of the game.

Now, let's compare two different charms:

Deep Focus costs four charm notches. Unlocking it requires you to access a secret room as well as possess an advanced movement ability. While wearing this charm, healing is much slower, but heals two masks instead of one, effectively halving the SOUL cost of healing.

Gubsong costs one charm notch. Unlocking it requires rescuing a modest number of grubs, which are a common reward for exploration and optional challenges. This is fairly easy to do pretty early on, even if playing the game blind. While wearing this charm, the player will gain 15% of their baseline SOUL meter when they get hit.

If you know how to multiply, the issue here should be fairly glaring, but if you're scratching your head:

In order for double healing to be useful, you need to be hit twice. In this case, Deep Focus will save you 33% SOUL, while Grubsong will generate 30% soul for one fourth of the cost. That's just in terms of the number of notches. It's not factoring in what a massive liability slow healing is, or how it doesn't offer granularity - if you're just topping up with one missing mask, the healing process is still slowed and you get no cost reduction whatsoever. And speaking of granularity, taking up over a third of all the charm notches it is possible to have means part of Deep Focus's effective cost is the reduced flexibility it gives you in how you set up the rest of your build, so if anything it should be more than four times as effective as a one-notch charm with a similar effect.

You might think to mention that there are enemies that do two masks of damage and Grubsong is worse against these, and that's true. It's still about twice as good per charm notch, and those three extra notches could be going to, I dunno, 50% more melee damage or something else equivalent in value to 1.5% extra soul whenever you get hit.

(oh, also, Grubsong has useful hidden interactions with other charms that are decent on their own. Deep Focus has only one hidden interaction, and it's to buff one of the worst charms in the game in a way that doesn't even make it much better)

Now let us be cleah, I don't really begrudge or look down on any player that thinks Deep Focus is a better charm than Grubsong, for a couple reasons. First of all, these numbers aren't displayed in the game anywhere, and it's all but impossible to tell the precise level of the SOUL meter by eyeballing alone. And second, the effect of Deep Focus sounds cool, and the effect of Grubsong sounds pretty weak.

What this is actually about is the developers inexplicably making this terrible charm that's acquired late-ish cost so much space in your loadout, despite them having direct access to the exact numbers. It makes no sense at all. It's not like there's any thematic significance to Deep Focus where it sucks to make some kind of point, either. It just sucks.

This is not supposed to be an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and why it occurs, just a thing where I point out it exists and provide an example. Sorry if you expected otherwise.