It can be hard for a long-awaited work of art to live up to your expectations. It’s especially hard when the wait is what defines it. Ever since Hollow Knight: Silksong was announced, all the way back in 2019, it has cultivated an aura of intrigue. This was the sequel to Hollow Knight, perhaps the most sumptuous Metroidvania ever made and a staggering creative and commercial achievement for Australian indie studio Team Cherry. It was shown off, with obvious polish, and then… radio silence. The months stretched to years; the wait for Silksong quickly eclipsed all other discourse on the thing. It was one of the most omnipresent memes in gaming, a space notoriously obsessed with memes, and that fed back into Hollow Knight’s success. But now, it’s 2025. Silksong is out and no longer haunting press events. We can treat it as a product.
Image: Source Gaming. The tantalizing and mysterious Hollow Knight: Silksong, out after seven years of almost entirely fan-driven hype.
And those years of work clearly paid off, because Hollow Knight: Silksong is excellent. How could it not be? It’s following the formula that has charmed me and, apparently, fifteen million other players since 2017. For those unfamiliar with the original, this is a sumptuous platformer set in a fantastical world of talking bugs. It’s a Metroidvania, with nonlinear level design and upgrades hidden around every corner. It’s also a Soulslike, with tough as nails bosses and a story told in whispers and background details. Seemingly every path leads to something fun; seemingly every fight feels intense. But it diverges from both genres, too. There’s no experience points or grinding, almost every item and upgrade is worth pursuing, the critical path can be walked in countless ways, and the only things it particularly looks like are its predecessor’s many knockoffs. Silksong falls in the same concerts as Dark Souls and Super Metroid, but it plays a tune of its own.
SLASHING SYMPHONY
The already masterful basics of the first game have been preserved. Once again, there’s a Gothic insect kingdom—Pharloom, a site of immense religious significance for kindly, doomed bugs—that’s crawling with danger and decay. Its populace includes friends, like kindly pilgrim Sherma and the members of a literal flea circus, as well as rivals, chief among them the smug duelist Lace. Every creature is animated with hand-drawn care and detail; every boss has a high difficulty curve. Several, such as the terrifying First Sinner, the robotic behemoth Fourth Chorus, and the inscrutable Cogwork Dancers, are among the best I’ve seen in years. Composer Christopher Larkin has returned with another unimpeachable score. Our lead is Hornet, a spider warrior who was the most memorable antagonist of Hollow Knight. She has been abducted and taken to this strange land, and, after escaping, slashes her way to Pharloom’s tallest peaks in a messy, meandering path. Every strike she makes along the way fills a spool of silken thread that’s used for attacks and healing spells, making aggressive play a necessity at every point in this world.
Image: Source Gaming. Hornet meets her own Hornet in Lace, a villain who occupies the role our hero had in Hollow Knight.
And my word, has Team Cherry crafted yet another incredible land! Pharloom and its many caverns, groves, and spires are resplendent in beauty and mystique. Hornet will find bucolic lakes, icy peaks, spooky clockwork engines, foggy lands that defy categorization, and the walls of the theocratic Citadel that tower over all else. The biomes also bleed into each other, with bits of graphics crossing over borders. Some have status effects, like sub-zero winds that freeze Hornet solid or a disgusting worm-ridden water that chews through her Silk. My favorite is the fire. The reds of flames, lava, burning black rock, and superheated steam are common. This might have been the result of the game’s origin (it started life as a Hollow Knight expansion built around a previously cut lava level), but this gives Silksong ownership of a color that the first game kept on the margins. It pops in 4K—though I have no doubt it’s more than fine on a Switch 1 or PS4.
Were that everything, I’d be inclined to give Hollow Knight: Silksong a commendable 9 out of 10. It’s a great successor to Team Cherry’s triumph, but part of what made Hollow Knight special was how immaculate and new it felt. This Kickstarter project from a tiny studio was gorgeously drawn, wonderful to play, well balanced, and flush with ideas. What’s more, it felt nothing like the crowd of indie Metroidvanias. That newness can’t exist in a sequel, not one that is overtly iterative in an era where Hollow Knight is being copied left and right. Silksong has NPCs and enemies that replace ones from the last game, and many areas evoke iconic locales like Greenpath, the Howling Cliffs, Deepnest, and the Royal Waterways. That’s fine, but if Silksong was just that, it’d be great but not essential. That isn’t the case, though. Instead of being fully new, the game instead weaves newness in like a fantastic remix. The longer it goes on, the more that uniqueness shines—and the louder its best and its worst qualities ring out.
THE HARDEST NOTES ON THE HORN(ET)
Much of that stems from the protagonist. Hornet follows the basics of the first game’s Knight, but she’s deceptively different in a number of ways. For one thing, she’s an actual character, with extensive dialogue and a more formal goal. The relationships she forms feel more tangible as a result, which may be why Silksong features a banquet of quest logs instead of the first game’s loose, Dark Souls-esque format of informal quests happening around you. Primarily, though, it’s through the movement. Hornet’s taller, faster, and more complicated. Where the Knight could easily pogo off bosses with a midair thrust, she shoots down at a diagonal that’s hard to wrangle (and offers as many opportunities for wacky sequence breaking). Where the bugs of Hallownest were often slow, Pharloom’s denizens force you into grand acrobatics. And where much of an average Hollow Knight playthrough is spent sulking in the corner to heal a hit point at a time, recovering health is more intense here. The animation is faster, and it restores thrice as much health, but it requires far more magic.
Image: Source Gaming. Widow, a spectacular (and painfully hard) boss in the early game, is symbolic of how tough things are now. Many of her attacks do double damage, all of them are complex, and it takes three phases to fell her.
These changes and several others—she can grab ledges and has a dedicated run, her i-frames seem nonexistent, and far, far more enemies deal double damage—lead Hornet to feeling faster and frailer. Not stronger, not initially. She has to stay ahead, floating over wide slashes with her Drifter’s Cloak before grappling onto her quarry’s face with the Clawline. She’s got to expand her moveset with a suite of optional projectiles, like airborne caltrops or a boomerang. If Hollow Knight was Dark Souls, its sequel seems to be Bloodborne at first, eye trained on punishing defensive play. The healing factors into this; it took little time for me to learn that the best strategy was to heal quickly, wasted Silk be damned, simply because even the weakest enemies hit quickly and have more health than their Hollow Knight counterparts. It’s a tougher and less forgiving game on the whole, by a significant metric, and that reaches a breaking point in its final hours. The optional true ending is guarded by challenges of jaw-dropping, agonizing, and sometimes overlong brutality.
Even the economy’s feeling the heat. Enemies drop two currencies, Shards and Beads, and they’re both unbalanced. Shards are the ammo for the new projectiles, but they’re so common as to be meaningless—except when a extra-hard boss saps Hornet’s backlog over dozens of failed attempts. Beads are the formal currency for items and even the ability to unlock checkpoints, but only a fraction of enemies drop any. Neither are perfectly implemented, and a lack of farmable enemies compounds the already steep challenge of a region like Bilewater. Of course, within battles, the only economy that matters is that backlog of Silk, and much of the tension and fun comes from a dance of Hornet losing health, building up magic to get a big ticket heal, and avoiding the enemies and status effects that can literally dissolve Silk right off her meter. There’s rarely a point where Silksong isn’t putting on pressure, and rarely one where mistakes feel easily fixed.
Image: Source Gaming. Hornet heals in this “gauntlet” room within the Citadel’s High Halls. Healing or recovering from a bad position is tricky, especially here; there are eleven waves of progressively harder groups. This particular fight is exhausting.
Then again, this can be played with. What distinguishes Hornet most of all is her Crest, which is essentially a moveset and menu. It has slots for the projectile of her choice and several passive “Tools.” These replace the Charms of Hollow Knight, and it’s both more and less freeing. You can’t mix and match any combination anymore (the Tool that shows Hornet on the map and the Tool that collects Beads normally occupy the same slot), but each Crest radically alters Hornet’s movement. Fighting with the default Hunter Crest equipped feels nothing like the Reaper Crest, with its slower attacks and beefy downward strike, or the high risk and inscrutable Crest of the Witch. In addition, rare items, quests, and NPCs can unlock extra Tool slots. Crests are some of the grandest rewards, typically found behind exacting battles and locked doors. And they allow Hornet a complexity and depth the Knight never had. Hidden as they are, these powers both reveal and obscure the far greater size of her kit.
That sense of deceptive difference is everywhere. It’s in the graphics, which fall in with Hollow Knight’s painterly aesthetic but draw each area with a subtler, diverse palette (wrought iron and brass are everywhere, so levels are a tad less colorful but still pop in their own way). It’s in the evolved storytelling; Hollow Knight famously blew up its first area late in the game, but much of Pharloom can change alongside its roaming cast. Often, it’s in the platforming, which has become more involved, demanding, and part of the difficulty spike. This’ll be a sticking point for many players, especially with far more platforming-focused regions that gate critical items or entrances. Each one is very complicated, and with all their hazards and time between safe zones, areas like Hunters’s March or Sinner’s Road or the Celeste-esque Mount Fay can be grueling. It’s somewhat demoralizing to bust through one of these after hours of tries, only to be deposited in front of a boss or one of dozens of “gauntlet” rooms filled with waves of enemies. Those are a bit like the last game’s Coliseum of Fools, and while some are fun enough, several are tiresome slogs.
Image: Source Gaming. The absolutely insane Groal the Great would be one of the game’s best bosses, except that the route to get to him—long platforming sections, poisonous water, tough fights—make the whole experience miserable.
One welcome change comes from the corpserunning. When Hollow Knight stole your money after you died, it also took half your magic and stuck both on an enemy, which was unduly punitive and discouraging. Now, it’s standardized; there’s a silky cocoon where Hornet dropped, and hitting it gives you not just the cash but a free spool of Silk. This change is logistical given the higher cost of healing, but it’s one of a few ways Silksong seems to be responding to Hollow Knight’s negative feedback. Fast travel is unlocked early. Vendors like the wandering mapmaker Shakra are more accessible. There’s an even greater emphasis on finding shortcuts. Certain machines can press Beads into items so they don’t drop. As much as it has ratcheted up the challenge, I think Silksong is trying to be fairer. At the same time, I can’t imagine this doing much for anyone who couldn’t overcome Hollow Knight’s notorious but less extreme difficulty. Perhaps the best Soulslike comparison would actually be Dark Souls II, which also ratcheted up the challenge, cut off some avenues for players to play their way, but also added concessions and powers. Which fits, because DS2’s loopy paths feel apropos here.
A BIG BUG BURG
Hollow Knight’s structure was one of early restriction and generous empowerment. After a few relatively linear levels, the Knight found the City of Tears, a half-dozen new areas to explore, and, eventually, three magical Dreamers to find. This was brilliant; Team Cherry gave clarity and structure before sprouting all sorts of trails—almost all of which reconnected to the critical path. It was incredibly permissive, but the areas and progression were so polished that players simply assumed theirs was the “right” way. Thankfully and unsurprisingly, Silksong has retained this. Many powers can be gotten “out of order” or not at all, secret routes are everywhere, and huge, seemingly required bosses can be ignored outright. Whole areas and sub-areas within them are missable, some offering little more than truly picturesque sights and others being vitally important. But I think the way this has occurred is curiously different, as Hornet’s paths seem… longer.
That exact structure I just described is here. There’s the early, ordered levels (mossy Bone Bottom, the flame-licked Morrow, and the far more sulfurous Deep Docks), a city in the gargantuan Citadel, and some mystical tchotchkes Hornet has to seek out after passing its doors. Except everything’s bigger. Boss fights seem to go on for longer. The quests are exponentially more numerous. Each chunk of the critical path has been stretched, often sticking an upgrade behind two or three areas instead of one. Finding the city is not an early game romp; it takes hours and hours, so many that there are multiple hubs along the way. There is a moment where Hornet can be whisked away to one end of the map for a separate misadventure. And there isn’t even one way to get to the Citadel! I found what I assume is the “default” entrance, a big ole’ front door, only to be immediately rebuffed by a boss. Instead of trying again against this rather unpleasant foe, I darted across the map, stumbled upon the kind of wild environmental puzzle you’d see in a Legend of Zelda game, and after solving it managed to enter the city through another way. This route took me through shocking environments and featured one of the best bosses in the entire game, it’s undeniably part of the critical path, and yet many players who finish the game will not see it. Then again, so many areas, mechanics, and powers are skippable as it is.
Image: Source Gaming. The disgraced, disreputable, and very funny doctor Yarnaby is central to one quest, a quest that’s fully optional, completely hidden, and extremely painful. Most players will miss her entirely.
Ultimately, in a web of innumerable subtle differences, the largest and bluntest difference Silksong brings to the table is simply in its size. It is a massive, downright brobdingnagian game, with more and larger areas than its predecessor. Almost every boss within a widely expanded bestiary has a huge moveset. The “runback” between each one and the closest checkpoint is downright egregious at times. Bizarre quests, routes, and powers abound. The Citadel alone—to complete the Souls analogies, it’s Elden Ring’s Lyendell in 2D—has the floor space of several Hollow Knight regions put together. Silksong is so big that it incorporates actual act breaks, with the walk up to the city being merely Act I. That structure helps craft a more conventional story, which feels like another branch towards casual players and a byproduct of Hornet’s characterization. Either way, it’s all part of what makes Silksong more majestic, dramatic, and flat-out overwhelming. This is not good or bad, but mainlining the game to get this review out in a timely manner was a lot, and the realization that my journey to the Citadel was just a fraction of the adventure was as intimidating as it was cool. Act II consistently surprises and delights (though its visuals get a bit samey), but it does constrict slightly into a still-nonlinear cavalcade of crushing sequences. Many are great; the bosses are beyond imaginative, and I pretty much never stopped finding delightful new mechanics. Some are less so, like those excessive gauntlets and the long walks between checkpoints.
SECOND VERSES
It’s kinda funny. Millions of people, including those who’d otherwise shun Metroidvanias or Soulslikes, will be playing this game because Silksong might be the cultural event of the year in the gaming community. I don’t know if they realize what they’re getting themselves into. Hell, I don’t know if fans like myself knew what we were getting into. Between the more powerful enemies, the harsher environments, the rougher economy, and the crazy platforming, the adventure is geared towards hardcore fans almost exclusively. That is perfectly fair! But it’s worth keeping in mind for any potential buyer and indicative of one elephant in the room: it’s impossible for me to review this game and not constantly compare it to its forebear. Like, if you loved Hollow Knight, you’re probably gonna love this too. I do. If you hated it, this will not fix a single bugbear. If you haven’t played either, I think it’s best to start with the more accessible first game, but if you’re desperate to join the discourse, I won’t stop you. For all its size, all its clout, Silksong is inextricably bound to Hollow Knight in a way Hollow Knight isn’t to it.
Image: Source Gaming. Mad actor Trobbio is another one of those excellent bosses. He’s tough—extremely so—but he crucially never feels unfair, he’s super close to a checkpoint, and his general vibe is stunning.
Forty-one and a half hours in, I beat the “final” boss, got the customary Soulslike ambiguous bad ending, and hit the credits. Of course, this doesn’t tell the full story. It ignores the road to Act III and its secret “good” ending, like the one Hollow Knight had, and the challenges along the way that run the gamut from fantastic to exhausting to hilariously unfair. It ignores the secrets, the optional areas, the delightful side characters, and the bonkers revelations. Some of these I discovered before finishing the game; some afterwards, though even after another fifteen hours just to start the downright hellish Act III and eleven beyond that, I still couldn’t make it to the true ending by publication time. Alas. This is a testament to Silksong’s wealth of content, polish, and imagination. It throws out concepts like confetti before moving on. Even still, I don’t know if that translates into a better game. The difficulty curve is higher, but it often feels less balanced and a little too ruthless, cruelly so in several instances (one Act III twist overhauls that battle economy in a way that’s more mean than anything else). There are astonishing and wonderful levels, but they don’t all “pop” quite as consistently as the lands of Hallownest. It’s a true masterpiece, but, once again, I don’t think it can’t supplant the original. And maybe those points of frustration are a consequence of that long development, like the gorgeous graphics and bounty of ideas.
Perhaps the best way to treat Hollow Knight: Silksong is as a companion piece. Hollow Knight came out a fully formed, near-perfect masterpiece. Silksong is also a masterpiece, with peaks of its own and a couple more valleys, but it’s also reacting to its predecessor at every turn. From its additions to the formula, to its drive to heighten the difficulty, to the problems that arose from that drive, the game is defined by its being a sequel. Fortunately, it manages to not just survive, but thrive under such a light. Instead of only being another tough romp through a beautiful world, Hornet’s epic is invigorated with surprises, tweaks, and tricks to the formula that never stop coming. It’s absolutely essential for Hollow Knight fans and no less a masterclass on nonlinearity, level design, art direction, and surprise.
10/10: Impeccable
Thanks to Nantenjex for edits.
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