The whole world may have been waiting for Hollow Knight: Silksong’s cocoon to finally crack open, but it sure doesn’t seem to have been burdened by that pressure. This excellent sequel to an all-time great has more than managed to live up to the high expectations I had set for it, standing as both a smart continuation of the original Hollow Knight and a fantastic game of its own. It stays close to the formula that made its predecessor so impressive, but still reshapes, refines, and revamps just about every aspect of it in ways both big and small. Silksong is unapologetically challenging, endlessly creative, and impressively thoughtful across both its gorgeous world and the stories that are told there. The metamorphosis may have taken almost a decade, but this butterfly has emerged as one of the biggest and boldest around.
If you never played Hollow Knight, the main thing you need to know is that you seriously missed out, and may want to go back and do that first. It’s a masterpiece of a 2D platformer, filled to the brim with action, exploration, and oodles of interesting lore. Silksong follows in its footsteps but doesn’t require you to have played the original, though it is certainly enhanced by having done so – both because the story has plenty of great little callbacks and references to catch, but also because it feels like an evolution of what Hollow Knight was doing mechanically. It sticks so close to the original’s style and structure, in fact, that a little bit of the sheer surprise has admittedly worn away. But that doesn’t stop it from hiding mysteries, delights, and unexpected twists all over the place that a Hollow Knight fan like myself treasured discovering.
Regardless, your journey across the brand-new world of Pharloom as the wise and confident Hornet stands on its own merits. Hornet is an excellent hero, taken to this land against her will at the start and then driven to do the right thing for its people once she finds out why. I don’t want to spend this whole review comparing what’s changed from Hollow Knight line by line (we’d be here all day), but the difference in tone with her in the driver’s seat, as opposed to your silent Knight, is a big one, and a decision that largely works to Silksong’s benefit.
Hornet is polite but stern, reserved but not cold, and the top-notch writing throughout lets you get to know her through conversations with a charming cast of bug-based characters I grew to love. They range from adorable to goofy to genuinely touching, with standouts like the singing pilgrim Sherma running that whole gamut over the course of their own personal arcs. The larger story is made more explicit as a result of Hornet being able to talk, clearly spelling out the “why” of this journey and certain key events in a way that really worked for me. I found I was more engaged from the jump here than I am in most games where you have to spend hours in a wiki to understand what’s really happening – though there are still plenty of subtle mysteries hiding in the corners of this world for you to piece together yourself. As with so much of Silksong, it strikes a fantastic balance here.
Pharloom is a fascinating place as well: a dying land where hopeful bugs go on a pilgrimage from its lower levels all the way up to the shining peak of a spectacular cogwork city called The Citadel in blind service of their faith – though few actually survive the trek you now inadvertently find yourself on. One of the greatest strengths of games as a creative medium is how they can tie themes and actions together. For example, part of the reason I gave Celeste a 10 back in 2018 was because of how it made you experience Madeline’s struggle to overcome her own personal mountain by making you climb a literal one. Silksong pulls off a similar trick: it’s about being tested and overcoming, about leaving the world a better place than you found it even when that’s hard to do, and about persevering while still making time to give yourself grace in the face of defeat. You don’t need to read a single line of dialogue to feel those themes through the actions you are taking alone.
That’s because, just like Hollow Knight, Silksong will test you. This game is Tough with a capital T – although, the specific word I prefer to use is “challenging,” because it doesn’t just punch you in the face and kick you to the curb for the sake of being hard. It challenges you to overcome obstacles that routinely feel insurmountable at first but are finely tuned to be conquered as your skill, knowledge, and toolset of earned abilities improves. Perhaps an extreme example of this is an area like Bilewater, which has very few respawn benches to rest at and includes some of the most punishing poison water I’ve seen in any game, forcing you to cleanse yourself after falling in it by wasting your precious healing ability while also draining the resource that fuels that ability – a double whammy. I thought this area was unreasonably difficult to navigate when I first tried to force my way through it – but then I took a break, explored elsewhere, and returned hours later with new combat options, items to help mitigate that poison, and a better gameplan that made it a cakewalk.
Pharloom has so many branching paths and optional areas that its roadblocks were able to feel substantial without killing my momentum. If something was too challenging to take down with my current items, upgrades, or skillset, the knowledge that I’d almost always be rewarded for trying another path stopped me from ever getting too frustrated. Rather than slamming your head against every wall you come across, Silksong is best approached by letting it come to you as you move methodically and flow down the most appealing paths you find. Having the map pin system available at launch (as opposed to Hollow Knight, which added it in after the fact) is also a godsend that allows you to keep track of all those out-of-reach ledges and the roads you don’t immediately go down as you explore – and you’re never wasting time by picking the paths that call to you.
I was also routinely lifting my jaw off the floor every time I entered some visually stunning new area, almost all of which had incredible music to match. A vibrant coral canyon filled with flying bugs that look like fish; a blustering snowy peak that had me huddling for warmth; the golden halls of The Citadel itself; and the clockwork innards that power it. Silksong does the thing every great sequel should do: it looks how you remember Hollow Knight looking, but actually makes its predecessor seem flat by comparison. Every dial has been turned up to 11 – there’s more color, more sparkle, and more variety. And whenever I thought I had found the limits of this map, I’d stumble into another new area with its own ecosystem, secrets, and hostile bugs.
Those aggressive enemies and brutal boss fights follow the same “go with the flow” philosophy as the areas around them: if you face them like this is one of the more typical 3D action games Hollow Knight clearly takes some inspiration from, you might find yourself having a rough time. But if you treat Silksong as the platformer it really is, staying patient enough to focus on positioning while dodging and getting damage in where you can, then even its most savage enemies will start to melt. It has become a cliche to call combat a “dance” nowadays, but it truly is the best way to describe some of these encounters. Silksong isn’t the most mechanically nuanced action game in the world, but learning an enemy’s patterns as you fall into a rhythm of dodging a swing, dashing in for a hit, hopping to safety, and then repeating really does feel like a bit of blade-based choreography that rewards spatial awareness over button timings alone.
Another reason the haymakers Silksong throws do more to motivate than frustrate is because, in the grand scheme of difficult action games, this one is actually pretty dang forgiving. A lot of credit for that goes to the healing system, which lets you spend Silk (a resource you earn by hitting enemies) to recover a big chunk of health all at once. This might seem like it would incentivize aggression to gather more Silk, but it actually had me playing it safe and prioritizing precision above all else. If I was ever falling behind in a fight, it was always encouraging to know that I could potentially heal back up to full like nothing had gone wrong if I just stayed alive long enough to get a few pokes in. (Of course, that is sometimes easier said than done.)
Silksong’s big fights and the paths between them don’t mess around, but they generally make sure to put this lifeline within grabbing distance as well, leaving it to you to figure out how to reach out and seize it. Bosses have reliable windows to safely heal in, and platforming areas frequently throws weaker enemies at you that are designed to do little more than stock up your Silk, which gives you a reason to fight even these smaller foes – and to do so thoughtfully, because they may not threaten to kill you outright, but taking a reckless hit limits the relief they provide before some stronger foe lurking up ahead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the areas with that poison water are pretty much the only ones where their more common enemies can respawn while you are still on the screen next to them – developer Team Cherry might test you with tall orders, but the means to meet them are always available somewhere.
As much as I love the way Silksong challenges me, there are some aspects of how Team Cherry has balanced the difficulty that can leave a sour taste in my mouth from time to time. To be clear, I think the tuning is impressively dialed in overall: outside of a couple late-game fights, I beat nearly every boss in a half dozen attempts or fewer, usually taking just two or three tries, which felt like a sweet spot in terms of providing pushback without ever making me want to throw down my controller. That said, it is a little jarring how many enemies and environmental hazards deal damage in chunks of two instead of one compared to the original Hollow Knight, often emphasized by two distinct hit sounds that make it seem like you’ve done something wrong to cause that extra pain. That can result in feel-bad moments even if the “difficulty” isn’t technically out of whack. Health upgrades also arrive so slowly that it’s a little discouraging when your life total is functionally cut in half by a boss that only deals damage in pairs (including just accidentally bumping into them sometimes).
A similarly rough feeling can be caused by a few areas that put their respawn benches extremely far apart, even turning a handful into “gotcha” traps that savagely pull the rug out from under you when you think you’ve finally found relief. I actually think those traps are hilarious, but desperately searching for a checkpoint when you are first exploring a new area teeters on the line between thrilling danger in uncharted territory and a “what am I doing wrong here?” sense of dread. However, this bench placement isn’t some mistake done without regard; just like a boss has to be learned and overcome, the challenge of the areas that use benches more sparingly is surviving to find one, and finally doing so is as satisfying as taking down any big bug. Silksong is a true-blue platformer at its heart, and mastering its precise movement options across devious, spike-covered obstacle courses was a real treat.
Reaching that mastery is supported by Silksong’s customization options, which expand on the original Hollow Knight and give you more ways to tune your playstyle to your liking. Here you can unlock Crests that change your basic attacks as if you were wielding an entirely new weapon – that might mean swapping the default diagonal downslash for the more vertically direct option provided by the Wanderer Crest, changing to the Beast Crest for a claw-based attack that turns your burst heal into temporary lifesteal, or – my personal favorite – using the Reaper Crest to gain access to wide-arcing attacks that knock extra Silk out of your foes after a heal. There’s not much incentive to swap between these Crests once you’ve found the one you are most comfortable with, but they all feel different enough to provide some genuine playstyle decisions.
The new Tool system that slots into these Crests is also flexible in a way I appreciated. In addition to equipable abilities that cost some Silk to use, all the Tools you find are split into three color-coded categories. Red Tools give you an additional, ammo-limited attack like a throwing knife or mid-air spike trap; blue Tools usually provide some sort of defensive effect like expanded Silk storage or fire resistance; and yellow Tools offer more general support options like making dropped money fly to you automatically or marking Hornet’s current location on your map. This separation is a notable improvement over Hollow Knight’s single-slot system because support effects and combat buffs are no longer fighting for the same limited space, and I was more freely swapping Tools in and out depending on the area or boss I was taking on as a result.
Each Crest has a different balance of the color-coded slots your Tools go into as well, letting you get pretty creative with weird builds that mix and match certain abilities or deprioritize stuff you don’t find yourself using. For example, I often saved my Silk for heals rather than those special abilities, so the drawback of the Architect Crest, which swaps the Silk slot out for a third red Tool, ended up fitting my playstyle nicely for a bit. That said, I do wish the “weapon” styles weren’t permanently tied to a Crest’s Tool slots and passive effects like they are – I would have happily kept using the Architect for its Tool options and unique ability to turn Silk into ammo while away from a bench, but the more rigid, drill-like basic attacks that came with that (while cool) had me returning to the Reaper eventually.
Of course, you have to find all of these different options first, and the laundry list of things waiting to be discovered across Pharloom is extensive. I always try to complete as many side tasks as I can before heading down the “correct” path in games like this, letting myself get distracted by friendly NPCs and the quests they post on boards in the small handful of towns you’ll come across. When I finally reached the end, my in-game timer was at just over 44 hours played and 96% completion. Was that enough Silksong for me? No – I’m still hungry to dive back in and clear off that last 4% (and I already know where most of it is).
There is a bit of a strange bump in the middle of that road, however, as you can “beat” Silksong much faster than what I just laid out. I am going to avoid specifics and spoilers here as much as possible, and if you don’t want to read anything about what “finishing” this game means then you can skip the next three paragraphs, but know this is a big enough deal that it really does feel worth discussing in broad strokes. That’s because the main path is actually fairly achievable if you’re only interested in following the primary quest objective, and the first time I reached the credits was before I even hit the 30-hour mark (and it could have happened sooner than that if I wanted it to). But that initial ending is… mediocre, with an abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion to the story that left me more confused than fulfilled.
Based on my experience with the first Hollow Knight, I barely even took this finale seriously, but the trouble is that there’s very little indication you could reach a different one this time around… and you can. In vague terms, doing so requires you to complete a lot of entirely unrelated activities that are framed as completely optional when you run across them. That includes some pretty uninspiring fetch quests that ask you to grind pointless items from specific enemies, as well as one particularly lame one where the required items just randomly spawn in some nearby caves, which is an addition that feels like an uncharacteristic step backwards. You will probably do everything you need to eventually if you are trying to complete all the side stuff anyway, but there is a huge amount of additional content and a stellar alternate ending waiting behind these opaque unlock requirements, and it’s wild someone might miss that because they couldn’t be bothered to complete some boring fetch quest.
This is a similar-ish structure to unlocking the “true” ending of the original Hollow Knight, but the big difference is that the requirements for doing so there were directly tied into your character’s journey of discovery, and the path you had to take was a little more intuitive as a result – here, I was essentially left floundering for a bit as I tried to figure out which checkboxes still needed to be arbitrarily ticked off. Hollow Knight’s alternate ending also only changed the final fight, whereas Silksong conceals what feels like roughly 15-20% of its content behind this false ending. The writing of that conclusion is also great, probably some of the best in the entire story, and it shakes things up gameplay-wise in a pretty delightful way I won’t spoil. I recognize this weird structural decision won’t be a huge deal in the grand scheme of things – all of Silksong’s secrets will be common knowledge soon enough – but it still feels like an odd choice.
That all being said, it is legitimately cool how any two people could take wildly different paths on the way there. It took me 35 hours to find an area a friend of mine found in less than 10, and I unknowingly took such an unusual route to reach Act 2 that I solved a special puzzle area and beat an incredibly fun boss way before I was “supposed” to, giving me access to an entirely different part of The Citadel than I expect most people will initially see. Splintering paths like this are all over the place, and it’s genuinely incredible that Silksong can be approached from so many directions without ever feeling like you are doing something wrong or have gone somewhere you shouldn’t (apart from a punch to the face feeling a little harder than normal).
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