Hollow Knight: Silksong
I have maggots, my crest is cursed, I’m out of shards… and I’m new in town.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a platforming metroidvania where you play as a bug. Oh, and it’s also one of the most hotly anticipated games released this decade. It was such a big deal, in fact, that multiple developers, people who spent large amounts of money and years of their life developing their own games, blamed Silksong’s sudden release for their own game’s lackluster performance. And you know what? They might just have been right – Silksong dominated the review and discussion sphere for a month or so after and before its release, it’s in contention for just about every Game of the Year award on the planet, and a good number of the people who played it probably didn’t play that much else released this year.
Silksong is also a very straight evolution of the original Hollow Knight, keeping the same basic controls, physics, art, and sound design, then ramping everything up significantly. You play as Hornet, a sort of rival character who appeared as a boss in the first game, kidnapped and taken to a different massive, decaying ruin kingdom, Pharloom. [far loom. Loom like weaving, far because its far away. Get it?] After freeing herself, she begins the ascent along a pilgrim’s route to the Citadel above. But this is a Metroidvania, you can’t just go straight there, that would be cheating.
It’s nearly impossible to talk about Silksong without comparing it directly to the first game, so I’ll get the major differences out of the way immediately. The biggest change is your character’s mobility – Hornet, once she gets the very early dash and sprint ability, is lot more nimble than the Knight, with a more dynamic moveset that includes unique attacks out of a sprint, diagonal pogo attacks, the ability to grapple onto ledges, and just a good sense of momentum and speed in general. It makes the game feel a lot more fluid, and has little touches of cinematic platformer, while still being very responsive and intuitive.
Combat is typically a bit more complex too, with enemies that are a little more evasive, more prone to using ranged projectiles, and Hornet’s own healing no longer requiring a stationary channel. Instead, she can perform her heal even in mid-air, and each use recovers three hit points at a time. She can also use the same ‘silk’ meter used for healing to cast a few special attacks, like a long-range spear, an AoE, and a parry that gives her a counterattack. Finally, she can equip tools – these act like Castlevania-style subweapons, and their limited uses are refreshed at bonfi-I mean benches, but at an unfortunate cost.
Silksong divides enemy drops into two types of currency – beads and shards. Shards are used to restock tool uses, and come primarily from unthinking ‘beast’ type enemies, while beads are carried by the sentient or formerly sentient pilgrims and guards of the citadel. Since shops only take beads, and because Silksong is just as extortionate as Hollow Knight was, that means you don’t just have to grind a lot, you have to grind in very specific screens to afford upgrades, utilities, even your fucking maps. Later, you can find some accessories that give you a currency magnet… but only for beads, or a boost to currency generation… but only for shards.
The needless overcomplication doesn’t end there. Rather than accessories using the Badge Point system from Paper Mario the way the first game did, they’re now divided into two ‘colors’ and then slotted into your crest – you can find rare items to upgrade your crest to unlock a few more slots, but those slots are of a pre-determined color, and the whole system seems engineered to be slightly frustrating. Once again, you need to keep one slot permanently occupied to see your own location on your map, and with the newly divided accessory types, there’s even less competition for that spot than before.
But wait! Your starting crest is one of several hidden throughout the game, some as rewards for deep, off-track exploration, and some for completing long, tedious sidequests. Each crest has its own set of accessory slots [and oh, yeah, buddy, you better believe you need to track down more rare items to unlock them all] sometimes with different color spreads, completely altered attack animations, and… maybe affect stuff like healing mechanics, I don’t really know, because I barely used them. For one thing, your starting crest is perfectly fine – I never encountered a situation where I felt the impulse to drop everything, backtrack to a bench, swap crests, equip all my accessories again, and then return to where I came from.
In fact, the movesets are so altered that it takes more time reacquiring the muscle memory to move and fight competently with a ‘better’ crest than it would to just do it with the standard attacks. Yeah, I bet if you’re a Devil May Cry headpuncher, the idea of practicing a half dozen totally different movesets so you can save a total of 15 seconds on your 50th replay is giving you a half-stiffy already. But it feels superfluous and counter-intuitive in a game like this, where combat and platforming are fine-tuned enough that small adjustments to attack speed, positioning, and delay can completely change whether you land your hits and survive or miss completely and die. You might as well implement a randomly shifting framerate or input delay as a difficulty option. Guess what? I’d still be able to beat it. *tugs nuts* I just wouldn’t pretend to like it.
To return to some positives, Silksong is also a much, much better-looking and sounding game than the original Hollow Knight, which is already a decently high bar to clear in the indie metroidvania space. Silksong benefits a lot from a bigger budget earned from the enduring success of Hollow Knight, and it shows. Almost every environment is filled with detail, animations are smooth and readable, there’s a satisfying, almost perfect amount of impact and weight to everything. There are far more frequent cutaways to full-screen cinematics, some of the boss fights and location reveals and set pieces are absolutely gorgeous, and yet none of it gets in the way or starts to feel excessive.
Hornet is not the mute blank slate the Knight was, so she actually talks back to the many bug NPCs encountered throughout Pharloom, and the dialogue, story, and characters are every bit as good as the best bits in Hollow Knight, probably a little better. There’s still a lot of vague worldbuilding, gestures to personal histories that never get fully elaborated on, and snippets of lore in item descriptions, but it steers clear of pathetically aping FromSoft’s exposition style too closely, or too superficially.
The bosses are really the crux of the action, and they’re generally pretty good. A few are a little annoying, a few are pretty steep difficulty spikes, and none of them really stonewalled me or made me want to stop playing. The runbacks, on the other hand, did. A few of the bosses have such absolutely insane, unbelievably painful and annoying return paths from the nearest checkpoint that I genuinely am shocked they didn’t buckle and patch in a bench or two. But not too shocked, because one of the things that really seems to define Team Cherry is a sort of too-clever hostility towards players, an inclination towards pranks that seem played for laughs but don’t really make the game more endearing.
One bench is actually a trigger for a spike trap – you can climb around, find a secret path, and perform an overly long platforming segment to disable the trap and make the bench safe, but that’s almost salt in the wound if you’ve died or nearly died by assuming it was a real checkpoint. Another bench, near the end of probably the absolute worst boss run-back in the game, maybe close to the worst in gaming history, is just broken, the sign pointing the way to it making you flush with anger every time you pass by after discovering the truth. In the late game, you’ll cross through several areas with pay-toilet style benches that you have to drop a toll into to use.
But my biggest problem with Silksong is also my biggest problem with Hollow Knight. It’s an unpopular opinion, but I really think both games are too long, too big, too overstuffed and bloated. The bloat in Silksong is even worse than Hollow Knight got after all of its extra content got added. There are whole areas that serve little purpose except to house a boss or two, and some ‘upgrades’ you’ll never actually use. There are too many tools, accessories, and skills that, like the crests, simply do not make for an attractive alternative to whatever you’re already using. There are too many bosses, with too many basically being a scaled up common enemy, and even the truly unique bosses sometimes just aren’t that memorable.
I feel about the same way about Elden Ring, incidentally, but the reason I’ve played Elden Ring multiple times anyway is because there are at least different ways to play Elden Ring. There’s always a weapon type or build or spell class or boss I haven’t so much as touched since my first playthrough, and you can make that an excuse to go through again, trying out something new. I can’t see myself ever doing the same in Silksong – what am I going to do, try to play through the whole game using nothing but the rosary cannon?
The game is split between two acts before you fight the big boss at the top of the citadel and roll credits. I got to this point after doing a little bit of side content cleanup and then deciding I didn’t really care about 100%, and just wanted to wrap things up. This is a minor spoiler, but it’s something I heard of without really reading much about the game while playing it so I suspect it’s common knowledge – there’s actually a third act, and apparently, that’s when the real game begins! Wow! Just like those Dark Souls soapstone messages! So after I finished the Act 2 boss, I booted it back up, expecting to go into Act 3… but I was just at the final boss checkpoint. I gave up, went online, and found the bad news.
Turns out unlocking Act 3 requires a whole extra set of side missions, which don’t even unlock until you do a minimum amount of OTHER side quests. I grumbled, I took a break, I eventually got around to chipping away enough of the ‘optional’ content to open up the ‘definitive’ third act… and then shit happened. I had to travel, I became uncommonly busy, other games came out that I wanted to try… and Act 3 loomed over me for two months or so before I finally decided to just boot it up and plow through.
For all the talk about how hard Silksong is in general, and how unbelievably brutal Act 3 is, I expected more. Basically, Act 3 just changes some of the map by closing off certain routes and opening new ones, and gives enemies the chance to become enhanced, gaining some more health and new attacks. Then you have to do a few more sidequests and boss hunts to proceed to the real final boss. It took me like two afternoons once I actually did it. But I’ll be honest – I didn’t really enjoy it anymore. It reminded me of the filler stages introduced in Mega Man 3, which in that first game were literally just revisits of normal stages with more surfaces turned into spikes.
Speaking of difficulty, a lot has been made of the fact that a huge variety of enemies and hazards after the first couple hours of Silksong do TWO hearts of damage to you. I didn’t find it that oppressive or unfair, but it does seem a bit odd, especially since some other attacks instead do two hits of one damage each. That, plus the convoluted damage calculation for your own attacks, and the general sense that virtually every new tool or ability feels like a side-grade at best, and I suspect that Silksong has suffered through an unbelievably grueling and somewhat flattening process of balance passes, probably beyond what it really needed. The developers have gone to incredible and inhuman lengths to ensure that you can never quite show up to a new area or boss already strong enough to trivialize them… which sounds great on paper, but in practice leads to the sense that your character progression is a logarithmic curve, maybe falling behind some vague developer expectation because you’re not being extremely thorough, or even worse, like none of it really matters that much.
The one thing I wanted to do in Act 3 was max out my weapon upgrades, because while I had already learned about the Byzantine scheme by which the developers had given almost everything a scaling amount of effective health based on your weapon strength, to keep you from one-shotting too many things, I guess, it was literally the only straightforward measure of progression that I had any remaining interest in. I was crushed to learn it’s locked not behind a sidequest, or collection quest, or grind, or secret boss, but behind a set of minigames. Oh, and to unlock the minigames, yeah, of course, you have to finish a game-wide collection quest. These minigames aren’t the worst things in the world, but they sure felt like it when I realized I was taking more losses, and probably losing more time, on just one of them than any actual boss fight I’d seen in the game. Did I mention the area you find those minigames at is behind a secret passage?
Because like half this fucking game is through an invisible path, or behind a breakable wall, and the only way you’ll find them is by smacking and rubbing against literally every surface you come across, just in case. Or looking everything up online, which is what you’re actually going to do if you, God forbid, decide to do anything more than roll credits. Don’t get me wrong – I love Metroidvanias, I love secret paths, I love smacking and rubbing every surface in a game. But this one is too goddamn long. Silksong is one of the only Metroidvanias I’ve ever played where I had absolutely zero inclination to try to get 100% clear once the end was in sight. Even if you were cheating the whole time, it’s lousy with these random breakable walls and dead end branches where you go down a hallway full of spikes and enemies and crumbling floors and get to the end and your reward is like a fucking shard bundle. Thanks, now I’ll get to use my thumbtack caltrops four more times. Christ, and I thought Sekiro was bad about giving you candy for half the item checks.
Returning to Elden Ring, my final disappointment with Silksong is the same as with that game – neither of them are bad games, or even mediocre, but are instead a sign of the developers falling into a profitable and broadly popular rut when they have much greater potential. Team Cherry and FromSoft both have the creativity and talent at their disposal to strike out into uncharted waters and create truly remarkable new works… but why would they ever bother when they could reinvest their earnings into a cycle of rehashes? And the risk of stagnation in a small studio like Team Cherry is much greater – without the extra teams, the resources to juggle multiple projects, there’s little chance of them ever being in a position to make their Sekiro, their Bloodborne, their Eternal Ring.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a great game, an incredible achievement, but I really didn’t ever want to play Hollow Knight 2. And in the years, maybe approaching a decade to come, even if the development team survives economic instability, personal tragedy, rising fascism, encroaching communism, collapsing infrastructure, global warming, global cooling, the global war on terror, the flames and the floods, Skyrim Second Anniversary Edition, Cyberpunk 2078, Elden Ring 2, 3, and 4, and the rise of the Machines, we probably won’t hear much from Team Cherry. But I think it’s safe to assume we’ll all be waiting with bated breath for that golden day when it’s revealed, two weeks before release, that Hollow Knight 3: Dung Lords is going to be 2037’s GOTY. Or they could crank out a Hollow Knight deckbuilder next year. Visit Kalshi dot com and place your bet, age restrictions based on your location, thank you Kalshi dot com for sponsoring this write-up.
Hollow Knight: Silksong can be purchased on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Playstation 5.
It sounds like all my issues with the original are only amplified in Silksong, I had a vague curiosity but now I know it won't be worth me playing it. A good review.
You really stuck the landing.