Silksong Review. I have finally completed Hollow Knight…

I have finally completed Hollow Knight: Silksong! After years of waiting, it feels almost surreal to say that. I thought the game would take me three months, but I sped through it in one month. Was it worth the wait? Yes! Does it dethrone its predecessor as the Best Metroidvania of All Time? No, not quite.

Silksong has a very different feel from Hollow Knight, which I like. It definitely doesn’t feel like a rehash of the first game. I think a lot of players were hoping for Hollow Knight 2.0, and I was among them, but Silksong has its own identity and its own vibe that distinguishes it from its predecessor.

Be aware that this review will contain minor spoilers (e.g. names of bosses and locations), but I’m going to try to keep it free of major spoilers.

Things I Liked

Firstly, Hornet is so much fun to play as! I love her smooth and agile moveset. I love how she can sprint from room to room and take flying leaps, I love the variety of skills and tools she can use, I love the little spins she does as she’s bouncing around. You know that thing that video games do, when a boss becomes playable and they’re suddenly nerfed? Yeah, Team Cherry doesn’t do that! It really feels like you’re playing as the boss you fought in Hollow Knight, and a more powerful version of her at that! They really delivered on that front, which is good, because that was the premise of this game.

Hornet is also really fun as a character. She’s not silent like the Knight, so, she actually has scripted dialogue and speaks to NPCs. We get a very good sense of her personality. Her dialogue is verbose and sophisticated, and she is unerringly polite — she addresses other bugs as “sir” and “ma’am,” even when they don’t really deserve it. Even in crisis, she keeps a cool head and immediately sets about solving problems. She gives off a vibe of absolute competency (which is impressive, given how much of the game you’ll spend dying embarrassingly). I also like that Hornet herself is the Hunter whose notes you unlock! Although her Hunter’s Notes mostly aren’t as funny as those of HK’s Hunter (and the sound effect for completed entries isn’t anywhere near as cool), she drops some interesting lore tidbits about herself in her commentary. She also takes no bullshit from anyone.

I particularly enjoyed learning more about Hornet’s unique nature, as an immortal half-Wyrm, half-Weaver demigoddess. We slowly uncover more of the Weavers’ lost magic and technology as the game progresses. The Weavers are extremely cool! I knew that Silksong would give us our long-awaited Weaver lore, and I was not disappointed. The Weavers give us that “mysterious lost civilization” vibe of the original game, with an added personal stake, because of their relevance to Hornet. (The Weaver lore also retroactively makes Deepnest hit that much harder, which any good sequel should do!) It’s clear that Hornet’s nature weighs heavily on her, even with her many years of experience in bearing its responsibilities. I particularly like the conversations Hornet has with NPCs who are aware of her nature, and address her accordingly. I can’t say too much more without spoilers, but this was one of my favorite things about the game.

One of my favorite mechanical things that Silksong introduced is the Crest system. It replaces Hollow Knight’s charm system — Crests allow you to equip fewer items at a time, but they compensate by radically changing your moveset. Each Crest offers different types of needle swings (longer and heavier, shorter and lighter, sweeping, stabbing, a drill…), and different downward pogo motions, as well as some changes to your other abilities (like how many of which types of things you can equip). I really liked having that freedom to customize my playstyle! Silksong was much friendlier to my hyper-aggressive style than HK was, and I found that I could make some bosses or platforming segments much easier just by changing my crest. There were some that I didn’t touch at all, but it was still nice to have the option. (I was primarily a Reaper main; the Witch Crest would have been my favorite, if not for the fact that it makes your heal completely unreliable.)

Silksong also introduces a quest system called “wishes,” in which Hornet can look at noticeboards in towns and promise to accomplish various tasks for people: Some are fetch quests, some have you hunting unique minibosses or tracking lost people, some advance the overall plot. The more complicated and greater variety of sidequests made the game feel more RPG-like at times. The wish tracking system in your menu makes it easy to remember your active sidequests, and tick off boxes before moving on to the next thing. I like the quest tracking system, because I definitely would have forgotten about some quests without being able to see them listed. My only complaint is that I wish you could see the quest’s original prompt in your menu, because I forgot the context of some of them.

I had some issues with the early game areas (see below), but I mostly really liked the late game areas. Lost Verdania was my favorite area in the game, and I wish it were bigger! It is absolutely stunning, it has some of my favorite lore, and it feels like it’s rewarding you for a whole game’s worth of dedicated exploration.

My other favorite area is an even more massive spoiler, so I won’t mention it, except to say that fans of the first game will be over the moon!

As in the first game, the music is stellar! You have to hand it to Christopher Larkin. His score for Silksong sounds notably different from Hollow Knight’s, but it still has some absolute bangers. The theme for Lost Verdania is one of my favorites, the theme for Bone Bottom straight-up makes me cry, and all the boss themes are awesome! “Choral Chambers” is probably my favorite track. It’s mysterious, enchanting, and melancholy. Like “City of Tears,” it creates the atmosphere of a once-sacred place that is grand and majestic in it state of ruin, standing as a symbol of hope whilst being consumed from within by corruption and hubris. I genuinely have a hard time deciding whether this or Toby Fox’s “Third Sanctuary” is better. (This makes Silksong not the second, but the third church-themed indie game I’ve played. Fourth, if you count the two Blasphemous titles separately.)

The bosses themselves were very hit-or-miss. It seemed a little like Silksong had more bosses than it needed, in order to be able to stand next to Hollow Knight’s staggering 47 bosses. The good bosses had unique designs and attack patterns that played well against Hornet’s speedy fighting style: Lace is really fun to fight, and fighting her genuinely feels like you’re fencing. Ditto with Phantom and the two spider bosses. Fourth Chorus is unlike anything seen in Hollow Knight, and a huge surprise in the early game. Almost all the main Act III bosses were really, really good. The Final Boss is similar enough to the Radiance without feeling like just a rehash of the Radiance fight, and becomes much harder if you fight her with a certain status effect that leaves you unable to heal or use any tools. But my overall favorite is the Cogwork Dancers! They feel like a Castlevania boss! They’re decently challenging without being too difficult, I love their boss theme so much, and finishing the fight left me with a serious emotional punch even before I learned their lore.

I loved the NPCs in this game, too! So many of them are memorable and endearing. Silksong has many more NPCs than Hollow Knight, because Pharloom is still a living kingdom, though an ailing one. My favorite was probably Shakra, this game’s cartographer. She’s a graceful warrior with a noticeable Russian-esque accent, who fights using throwing rings. She’s very different from Cornifer! I love her singing, and I love when she and Hornet team up to handle mob rooms.

The fleas are also freaking adorable, and I like how some of them have names and personalities. I have other favorite NPCs, but most of them are too lore important and spoilery to mention!

As for the lore, I was mostly satisfied with it. The lore is a little less cryptic this time around, since the game has so much more dialogue and the plot objectives are more obvious, but I’m sure it has plenty of intricacies that Mossbag will spend the next three years unpacking. I was a little worried that the religious commentary in this game would be too close to Blasphemous, and while some things are clearly inspired by Blasphemous (love to see my favorite indie Metroidvania devs taking inspiration from each other!), the story ended up going in quite a different direction. Thankfully, it’s not a reveal that the Citadel is corrupt — that’s pretty obvious from the first few minutes of the game. The real question is what the whole corrupt system is supporting, and why. That leads to many more interesting threads. No pun intended.

Silksong had big shoes to fill: Hollow Knight left us with a lot of unanswered questions, and Silksong promised to be even bigger and more complex than its predecessor was. At first, my biggest criticism was that Silksong didn’t tie into Hollow Knight enough, but it suddenly hit me hard with the HK tie-ins in Act III! I wish it tied into Hollow Knight just a little bit more than it does, but I was satisfied with what we got. There were some returning aspects that completely surprised me! I don’t want to talk too much about them, though, because that gets into spoiler territory.

Things I Didn’t Like

So why isn’t it as good as Hollow Knight?

Hollow Knight is a nearly flawless game. The few flaws it has are relatively minor, and are easily outweighed by its many virtues. Silksong is a little rough around the edges. None of these flaws come close to ruining the game — I’m being very nitpicky (this is the title of Best Metroidvania Ever we’re competing for, after all). But they were noticeable enough to affect my enjoyment of the game at certain moments.

Firstly, Silksong’s early game is a bit disappointing in comparison to Hollow Knight’s early game. I said in my previous post that the thing I was most excited for was exploration, the feeling of organically exploring a brand new world full of new wonders and secrets. And for the first few areas I… didn’t feel that at all. Hollow Knight’s first area, the Forgotten Crossroads, is perfect. It has a calm but mysterious vibe, and offers you a bunch of intriguing teases that hint at the scale of the world, and make you feel eager to discover what they are. The second area, Greenpath, has a completely different atmosphere from the Crossroads, and the vibe shift is palpable. I remember my first impression of nearly every HK area. Silksong’s first proper area, The Marrow, is… boring.

There’s almost nothing in this area. It’s just a small set of generic-looking caverns with ambient sounds. There aren’t teases anywhere near on the level of the Black Egg or even the lift to the City of Tears. And you know what? That isn’t actually bad. This area felt like a normal first level for a Metroidvania, which is exactly what it is. It serves its purpose just fine. I’m complaining only because I know Team Cherry can do better. I felt pretty much the same way about the next few areas: Deep Docks is pretty cool, but it doesn’t really become interesting until later. I took a circuitous route there through Hunter’s March, an early-game difficulty spike that I found way too early, and that doesn’t stand out visually or atmospherically. My first impression of the Far Fields was Greenpath-but-worse, with a less interesting atmosphere. My first impression of Greymoor was City-of-Tears-but-worse. I didn’t start really enjoying the level design and atmosphere until I found Shellwood, which is way too late for comfort.

To be clear, I’m being really nitpicky. These areas are perfectly serviceable. The Far Fields’ bosses are among the best ones, it gives you two really important upgrades, and it does have some other interesting stuff in it. It’s kind of unfair for me to expect it to be Greenpath (and besides, I got my Greenpath when I found Lost Verdania much later). There’s things I like about Greymoor, too. But my point is, Team Cherry can do better than serviceable! Hollow Knight’s first few areas are excellent. The first few areas of Silksong felt too much like every other Metroidvania I’ve played.

Secondly, there’s the difficulty, which sometimes made it hard to enjoy the exploration.

On the one hand, I think the complaints about Silksong’s difficulty are a little bit overblown. It’s a sequel to an already challenging game, so of course it was going to be harder! A lot of newbie players jumped straight into it because of its hype, without having played HK first, and were promptly smacked in the face by it. You cannot complain about Silksong requiring you to buy maps, or about losing all your rosary beads when you die. If you’d played HK, you’d know to expect that. Hell, if you’d played any Soulslike, you’d know to expect stuff like that. Silksong is clearly designed for veteran players of Hollow Knight, people who beat the game at 112%, and beat all the bosses on at least Ascended difficulty, and did the Path of Pain. That makes sense, because it was originally conceived of as a DLC for the first game. If you’re struggling with Silksong, play Hollow Knight first! (It’s an excellent game! You won’t be wasting your money!) So yes, some of the complaints about Silksong are skill issues. As Hornet herself would say, git gud.

On the other hand, Silksong is especially punishing in its difficulty. It goes out of its way to be unfair and sadistic in ways that Hollow Knight did not. Hollow Knight is very difficult, but it never feels unfair, not even in its more brutal segments. This game gives you the middle finger, more than once. There were many times when I felt like throwing my computer across the room. Silksong’s deliberately unfair moments aren’t really a flaw, per se, because they’re clearly an intentional part of the game design. It’s just a thing that affected my enjoyment of the game. However, I think that some of Silksong’s more unfair-feeling aspects border on design flaws.

Silksong’s most discussed design flaw is its over-reliance on double damage. Everything, everything does double damage. Not just the big bosses, but your average little spider thing crawling in the dirt can do double damage. Hazards do double damage. Minibosses do double damage. The list of things that do single points of damage is probably shorter. You could argue that the double damage is compensated for by Hornet’s ability to heal multiple masks at once, and… sure. What this means in practice, though, is that your health bar is half the size it appears to be. The challenge isn’t insurmountable, and you’ll find your own ways to compensate for it, but I still think the double damage is overused: There are numerous minibosses that consist of a big thing hurling itself around the room and doing double damage on contact, e.g. Savage Beastfly, Wailing Mother, Moorwing (pre-nerf), and most disappointingly, The Unraveled. (Seriously, why isn’t The Unraveled a cool, lore-heavy Bloodborne-esque boss that lashes out at you with silk tentacles? Why is it another big thing that hurls itself around the room?) Gonna be blunt, double contact damage is a fucking travesty. Ascended Difficulty my ass, I should not be getting my ass handed to me by basic minibosses because of contact damage!

Then there are other bosses that would be fun and interesting if not for the double damage, which feels like it’s only there to make the bosses superficially harder. Examples include Crust King Khann, Nyleth, Gurr the Outcast, and the biggest offender, Trobbio. I want to love Trobbio. He’s a fun, memorable character with a great aesthetic and personality! He feels a little like he should be Silksong’s version of Grimm. But there’s two important differences: One, Grimm’s attack patterns were consistent, so when you learn them, it feels like you’re dancing with him. Two, Grimm only does double damage in his second version. Almost all of Trobbio’s attacks are based on RNG, and he does double damage. So, it’s very easy to lose the fight just from having gotten unlucky, which is extremely frustrating! On top of that, Trobbio is very hard to hit, slides halfway across the arena when you do hit him, and jumps under the floor at random moments, so you will definitely not have enough Silk to heal that many masks. It all makes what should be a fun boss instead feel annoying.

Since Trobbio has a second version, it begs the question: Why doesn’t the first version do a normal amount of damage? It would have been much more fun to learn how to handle the RNG with lower stakes, and then do the double damage version as an extra challenge later. As it stands, Trobbio’s second version isn’t actually that different from his first version, which makes it feel a bit redundant.

And there are a lot of other, less egregious examples of that: As much as I love the Cogwork Dancers, why do they do double damage when we get the Clover Dancers later? Let the later version do double damage, and the earlier version do normal damage. This goes for bog-standard enemies, too: Why does a Gromling do double damage? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the Gromling to do normal damage, so the beefed-up Plasmid can do double damage later? Instead, both do double damage, lessening the impact of the latter. I think that’s the bigger problem of the overreliance on double damage. In Hollow Knight, double damage was serious business! If an enemy did double damage, that was actually scary! When you get to the True Final Boss and every hit does double damage, that’s a sign of just how divinely powerful she is (ditto with NKG and Pure Vessel). In this game, because literally everything does double damage, there’s nothing impactful about it! Plasmids aren’t more powerful than Gromlings, Tormented Trobbio isn’t more powerful than Normal Trobbio, and a literal goddess isn’t more powerful than your average overgrown fly that hurls itself at you. That is a design flaw.

I don’t have any real advice here about how to better balance this. I’m not a game designer, I’m just a player with a lot of experience in this genre. All I can say is that, as it stands, this isn’t working.

(Edit: This has been toned down in patches. Most of the environmental hazards no longer do double damage, and there are some basic enemies that used to do double damage, but no longer do. Overall, the use of double damage feels a lot more sparing my second time through. Some of that may be a result of actual changes to the game, and some may be a result of me having gotten gud.)

I haven’t even mentioned the platforming. This game has some of the most brutal platforming of any game I’ve played, and I’ve played Aeterna Noctis, so that’s saying a lot! Mount Fay makes the vanilla White Palace feel like a cakewalk. And why? Because it’s timed. The platforming itself isn’t actually that hard, but you have a very short window in which to complete each section, before you freeze to death. So, there’s very little room for error. And on top of that, there are ice lakes that are basically instant kills if you fall into them, and widely-spaced checkpoints. While technically optional, the grueling climb up Mount Fay isn’t a vanity challenge for only the most dedicated players, like the Path of Pain. It’s necessary to get Double Jump, which a fair amount of endgame content is locked behind. So it doesn’t feel optional. Double Jump is totally worth it, so at least the challenge doesn’t feel pointless, and it also insulates your cloak so you aren’t affected by the freeze status effect going forward. But it would have been nice for there to be a charm to lessen the freeze effect, just as there’s a charm to lessen the magma effects. Adding even a few more seconds before you begin losing masks, making the challenge even slightly more forgiving, would have made a big difference. I legitimately feel for casual players who have to drag themselves through the frozen ninth circle of Platform Hell to get a necessary upgrade.

(Edit: I made the mistake of trying to do Mt. Fay with the Reaper Crest, which makes you heavier. I may have also been wearing the weighted belt. Horrible mistake. Using Wanderer Crest and Weavelight made all the difference. These are the noob mistakes that one must make.)

Thirdly, the other common complaint is how damn expensive everything is, especially because (in contrast to HK), not every enemy drops rosary beads, the game’s main currency. Most enemies drop shell shards, which you use to rebuild your tools, and which have a cap (which means that secrets that reward you with shell shards often feel completely useless). Only pilgrims or other formerly-sapient bugs drop rosaries, which is a cool lore detail, but really impractical when everything costs rosaries. It gets exhausting to have to pay for every other bench, station, map, and upgrade, and it drains your pockets quickly. A lot of Silksong’s benches are spaced out or in weird spots, and a lot of the bosses have really long, annoying walkbacks (the less said about Bilewater, the better). So the paid benches feel really necessary. This is especially hard on new players who will die often, and who really need those benches. Hollow Knight made you pay for a few benches, but not this many, and it never made you pay for both the bench and the station. That’s just mean. And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of how mean this game gets with its benches. Again, the unfairness of the benches isn’t really the problem, since it’s clearly intentional. The design flaw is in how hard it is for newbie players to get the currency to pay for all this necessary stuff. That’s mitigated by the ability to string beads, so you can keep a stash of beads in your inventory without losing them when you die. But you need a certain amount of beads for that to even be an option. Then, you suddenly get to Act III and have more rosary beads than you will ever need, and nowhere to spend them. It’s like the game withholds all its treasure until it’s irrelevant. I didn’t personally struggle with this as much, but it did piss me off enough times for me to understand just how hard it must be on newbie players.

Finally, the Needolin isn’t as good as the Dream Nail. I like the concept of it: Hornet plays Weaver songs that have magical effects on the world. That’s cool! But its use isn’t really intuitive. In Hollow Knight, the Dream Nail is quite literally a game-changer: Once you get it, you can get unique dialogue from corpses and inanimate objects, you can see ghosts, and you can access unique boss fights. It’s tempting to Dream Nail literally everything you see to squeeze as much lore as possible out of the environment. The Needolin doesn’t really work like this. Its biggest drawback is that it costs a resource to use, which disincentivizes the player from using it. Using it spends Silk continuously, which is like if Hollow Knight drained your Soul every time you used the Dream Nail. Instead of using the Needolin in every available spot to see if it does anything cool, I basically forgot about it until I learned what it does by looking online. You can use it to make characters sing unique dialogue. That’s a cool concept, but in order to see all the dialogue, you need to hold down the Needolin and spend nearly your entire spool of Silk. And the dialogue itself isn’t that interesting! Characters mostly sing about what they’re already doing, without providing any new information. I’m sure there are exceptions, but again, I don’t feel incentivized to use the Needolin in every available circumstance.

And of course, you can’t use it to talk to corpses and inanimate objects, though I suppose Silksong makes up for that by having many more living NPCs. (Edit: There actually are some empty rooms and inatimate objects that react to the Needolin, but I didn’t figure this out organically the first time through, because of the disincentive.) Pre-Act III, the Needolin’s only other real purpose (apart from a few scripted cutscenes) is to open Weaver doors, which are one of the coolest things to find in the game. This is where I really started seeing its potential. Oh, and there’s The Mist, where I never would have figured out you were supposed to use the Needolin — I wish they’d put harp strings in the entrance room or something, anything, because I spent way too long wandering aimlessly before I looked it up. In Act III, the Needolin gains some more uses, and starts acting a little more like the Dream Nail. (Act III also gives you the ability to regenerate Silk at a bench, which makes spending it less costly). But until then, it feels like a gimmick instead of like a unique and integral means of interacting with the world.

These are all minor issues, but together, they add up. I think all of this amounts to at least half a star. So, Silksong does not steal its predecessor’s crown. But while Hollow Knight is an exceptional game, Silksong is “merely” a great game. It is still a really, really good Metroidvania, and a solid entry from a developer that has proven itself one of the titans of the indie gaming world.

I think Silksong will be a game that I enjoy more on subsequent playthroughs. That seems ironic, because the thing I was looking forward to the most was repeating the experience of playing Hollow Knight blind. But I think this game will be more fun when I’m already familiar with the movesets and level design, so the difficulty isn’t as punishing. I’ll be able to focus on the details of the lore, experiment more with my crests, tools, and skills, and prioritize different kinds of challenges. Everything will feel more fluid. I could see Silksong becoming a comfort game for me after at least one more playthrough.

I can confidently say that there is nothing else like Silksong. It’s similar to Hollow Knight, but it doesn’t feel like Hollow Knight. It takes some inspiration from Blasphemous, but it’s not Blasphemous. It’s as punishing as Aeterna Noctis, but it’s not Aeterna Noctis (and succeeds in many places where that game failed). It stands alone as a completely unique gaming experience, and that’s probably my biggest point of praise for it. I’ve played so many Metroidvanias that they all start to feel samey after a while, and — bar a few moments in the early game — this one did not. For that reason alone, it was worth the wait! I give full props to Team Cherry for having created this experience, and I’m so happy that they enjoyed making it! Their artistry and love for what they do really shows. I’m so excited for future DLCs, and whatever else Team Cherry decides to do going forward.

Postscript: I’m now on my second playthrough of Silksong, and I was right that the game feels a lot smoother and more fun on the replay! I’ve also made up for a lot of the mistakes I made on my first playthrough, which is helping me to realize the full potential of many of the game’s mechanics. I feel about Silksong similarly to how I felt about Bloodborne: The first time through is almost too frustrating to enjoy, and subsequent times are super fun. I don’t think I’ll be able to meaningfully compare Silksong and Hollow Knight until I replay the latter, so I might make a follow-up post in the future.