Hollow Knight: Silksong

Publisher: Team Cherry

Developer: Team Cherry

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed)

My whole situation surrounding Hollow Knight: Silksong is a lot like life: a messy series of contradictions (and there's also a lot of bugs around). 

In my 300th review earlier this year, I said that I probably wouldn't be reviewing or even picking up Silksong. Then I ended up picking it up not too long after, and here I am reviewing it. 

I loathed pieces of it. I loved others.

This is going to be one of the lower review scores you'll see for this game (well, outside of the mental cases you'll see in the user reviews on Metacritic)...and yet Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's once set-in-stone victory for 2025's GOTY isn't quite so set-in-stone any longer.

Anything can happen between now and the end of the year, but that's the complicated relationship I have with Silksong at the time of writing. 

In case you, like a bug, have been living under a rock, let me set the scene. In 2017, Team Cherry took the world by storm with Hollow Knight: a tough-as-nails metroidvania featuring an entirely insectoid world. After its success, the team started working on what was to be a DLC: Silksong. But the scope quickly grew into a concept for a full sequel...and the project seemingly fell off the face of the earth for nearly a decade. There would be occasional updates, but the whole world became convinced it would never see the light of day. Soon, Hollow Knight: Silksong joined Bloodborne 2/Remaster/Remake and Beyond Good and Evil 2 in the list of games that delusional people always think will be announced or updated at major gaming showcases...until a month or so ago, when a release date finally came out of the clear blue. So great was the hype and the anticipation surrounding Silksong that on its release date, every online storefront that exists crashed from the amount of people scrambling to buy it. 

So, that's the backstory here.

When it comes to the original Hollow Knight, I liked it well enough, but between increasing responsibilities at the time and the fact that I was foolishly playing on Mac with a mouse and keyboard (yeah, I know...), I never did find the willpower to see it through to completion. With time, my opinion of that game soured. I came to revile contact damage more than I originally did, the environments started to take on a kind of monotone look in my mind, those kinds of things. 

So, I had exactly zero hype for Silksong. I was happy for all the people who had waited so long, and I was especially happy that it launched to such universal acclaim. After all, I know what it's like to wait for something for nearly a decade and be disappointed (*cough* Veilguard *cough*). But I wasn't chomping at the bit. Hell, as I already said, I didn't even think I was going to give this a chance...but where there's smoke, there's sometimes fire, and I found my curiosity getting the better of me.

Now, let's get into it.

In Hollow Knight: Silksong, you step into the cute red dress of Hornet: the occasional rival character from the original Hollow Knight. At the start of the game, Hornet has been captured by a caravan of mysterious bugs and is being carted away to a gigantic citadel in the distant land of Pharloom. After escaping her captors, Hornet makes her way to that citadel herself in search of answers (and perhaps to unleash a can of whoop-ass as well). Along the way, she learns that the land lives in reverence of a type of being largely viewed as greater than all of bug-kind. A being that wields magic silk throughout every corner of the land from its home atop the citadel. 

Hornet, for her part, is a great protagonist. She's the kind of lady you'd want to bring home to mom if it weren't for the whole "bug" thing. Solution-oriented, resourceful, tactful, addresses people as "Sir" and "Ma'am," etc. It's pretty refreshing to see, actually. You aren't going to be peeling back layers of trauma and hidden motivations or anything like that, but she manages to feel oddly "real" regardless. I guess another way to put it would be that the characterization is "simple but effective."

The same can be said for pretty much the entirety of Silksong's supporting cast. 

For instance, there's a traditional Don Quixote-style adventurer named Garmond. He wields a little wooden lance and rides into battle on his roly-poly friend, Zaza. There isn't a whole lot to him other than his bravado and fierce loyalty, but I defy you to not feel warm and fuzzy inside when he charges into the fray yelling "Zanzibooooooooo!!!"

Another example is Sherma, who is my precious baby boy who I'd do absolutely anything to protect. I won't go too deep into his character, but if you tell me you don't automatically want to protect him after you hear him sing viciously out of time with his little chime, I'll think you need a straightjacket. I mean, the first time you meet him, he's using that singing to try and compliment a locked gate into opening for him. Come on! Only a person with the deadest, blackest heart possible wouldn't want the best for him!

There's an aspect to this world and its characters that is often lacking in these Dark Souls-inspired games: hope. Make no mistake, the world of Silksong is still a bleak one, but there's a notable sense that you're able to actually improve things. Whether it's being able to donate currency to help a settlement rebuild after an attack or creating a new place of respite at the corner of a hostile area, Silksong lacks the nihilism that a lot of these titles tend to have. Now...I've only recently started the secret third act, so it's entirely possible everything I've just said goes out the window from here on out, but don't tell me if I'm wrong!

Now let's move on over to gameplay...and here I find myself a little unsure how to describe things. Gameplay in a metroidvania like this is almost always less about combat and more about the world and increasing exploration, after all. But if I were to boil down Silksong's combat, I'd say it's largely about movement. Hornet slashes enemy bugs with a needle and uses items like traps, but the emphasis isn't necessarily on the doing of these things. Rather, it's the contexts in which you do these things. 

If, for example, you're up against a slow enemy with a gigantic melee attack range, you'll likely do something like this: sprint up to it, attack right before you reach it to bounce off of it, throw down a mine or a spike trap, then dash away a millisecond afterwards to both avoid the swing and cause the enemy to walk right into the trap.

Or you could be in that exact same situation, but you're pressed up against a wall with no way to get out of the way of an upcoming attack. In this type of situation, you'll likely jump up the side of the wall, jump in the direction of the enemy, pogo (attack downward to bounce) off the enemy, then dash further away in case it decides to turn around as it attacks. 

See what I mean? Ultimately what you're always doing is hitting enemies and using tools, but that's kind of a bastardized way of putting it. This is a combat model where the bits and pieces are simple, but how you use them tends to vary. In most encounters, you'll have to avoid constant hazards that make just standing around and hitting things impossible, so survival is all about balancing hazard mitigation and damage-dealing effectively.

Adding even further layers on top of this is the crest system. There are a handful of different "crests" you can pick up, and whichever one you have equipped determines the finer details of your combat capabilities. 

One crest might make your attacks notably faster but decrease their ranges. One might do the opposite. One might allow you to carry four passive benefit tools, one silk skill, and two combat tools. Another might allow you to carry three combat tools at the cost of that silk skill slot. One might allow you to gather an increased amount of silk after you "bind" to heal. One might remove the limited healing aspect of the bind altogether in favor of a more high-stakes healing functionality where you gain as much health as you can drain from enemies for a limited time. 

Furthermore, every crest comes with a slightly different pogo angle. In the original Hollow Knight, it was a simple strike aimed straight down. But in Silksong, it's at varying diagonal angles. With pogoing being such a crucial part of both platforming and combat at times, the exact angle a crest comes with is just as important as its other facets.

I alluded to things like "silk" and "tools" in that last segment, so let me discuss those in greater detail, starting with silk. When you hit enemies, you generate a small amount of the stuff and gradually fill up a meter that can be increased by finding specific items in the world. There's quite a few uses for silk, but the most important uses are for healing and damaging skills. 

The healing is largely self-explanatory: when your silk meter reaches its out-of-the-box maximum level, you can expend it to "bind" your wounds. Health is measured in "masks," with each mask basically serving as a single hit point, and by default, a single bind heals you for three masks. With a default maximum health of 5 masks (until you find special items), this means a bind will always get you either back to full health or very close. So it becomes a bit of a strategic decision sometimes. 

Say you've had two masks knocked off and you have enough silk to bind. It might be worth waiting until you get one more mask removed so that you aren't "wasting" a point of potential healing...but by that same token, if you expend the silk and get back up to full health, you can instantly start regenerating silk to build up to another bind for any damage coming down the pipeline. And if you're using the crest that allows for enhanced silk gains after a bind like I was, that's an even more tempting prospect. When it comes to healing in games, some people like to heal any time they aren't at full health and some people like to wait until the last minute. As always, which choice is right comes down not just to your preference but to your skill as well, and Silksong provides plenty of options to make your specific choice work.

Aside from healing, silk is also used for damaging skills. Oddly enough this is more self-explanatory than the healing. You can equip a silk skill (or not...depending on your crest) and use a smaller silk portion to use it. The one you'll likely use for most of the game is a little thrown spear, but there are also forward dashes, parries, an AOE around you, and undoubtedly a couple more I didn't find. These can be important damage-dealing measures if you're starting to get worried about a fight that is dragging on too long, but I personally never found them to be more useful than a clutch heal. 

As for tools, they come in three variants: red, blue, and yellow. 

Red tools are for active combat use. These are items like throwing knives, special potions, floor tacks, etc, and if you're anything like me, your eyes are starting to glaze over. I hardly ever use things like this, but believe me, these red tools are what ultimately made some of the game's more impossible-feeling challenges winnable. So, don't sleep on them. These tools are fueled using shell shards you pick up from enemies, with each tool having a set amount of uses before you need to visit a bench to recharge them.

The blue tools are passive combat-specific buffs. By default, you aren't protected when you heal, so one blue tool rectifies that. Another grants you an extra mask worth of healing during a bind. Another applies a poison effect to your red tools, which is a nasty combination to bring to certain boss fights that happen in claustrophobic spaces. 

Finally, the yellow tools are passive exploration/movement buffs. One lets you use silk to move faster. Another lets you cling to walls without sliding down them automatically. A couple of them increase shell shard drops from enemies or an increase in the amount of rosaries (this game's currency) you pick up. And in a mind-boggling decision, one key yellow tool lets you see where you are on the map. Another mind-boggling decision is a yellow tool that lets you automatically suck up rosaries instead of having to chase them all over god's half-acre if they happen to bounce after dropping off an enemy or a structure. 

I distinctly remember taking off points for this kind of thing in my review of the original Hollow Knight.

We can argue the particulars about whether it's good game design to cordon off things like protected healing to a slot for finite passive buffs until the cows come home...but being able to see where you are on a map? That one simply doesn't fly for me. Neither does having to expend one of these buff spaces in order to get the rosaries I rightfully earned by defeating an enemy if it happens to die above a pit of spikes. Like, come on, man! They had to add a layer of physics onto the rosaries to get them to be able to bounce around like that. Imagine how much sooner this game could've been out without that needless complication?

These are small complaints, and it's not like the yellow tools are all begging to be used in the first place...but it still doesn't sit right. 

Speaking of things that don't quite sit right...at least for some people....and to me as well in certain situations, there's the elephant in the room. As always tends to be the case in games like this, a great to-do has been made around difficulty. Silksong is, at times, difficult in ways that have to be seen to be believed. 

Let's start with the big thing: contact damage. Contact damage was a massive factor in the original game's difficulty, and I consider it the cardinal sin of game design. To me, if an enemy isn't covered in spikes or fire, there's no excuse to ever include contact damage as a difficulty factor, and Silksong is by far the worst offender that has ever existed. Why? Well, one reason is that many enemies and bosses tend to move erratically, making avoiding contact damage pretty impossible to avoid at times. But the major reason is because in many cases, you receive double contact damage in this game.

As early as the second or third mainline boss, you start to take double damage from certain attacks, and this isn't a trend that slows down. Before too long, any attack from any boss will remove two masks of health, and that includes contact damage.

So, let's say you have the default 5 masks of health. That's supposed to be 5 hit points, but in practice, it becomes 3 hit points when you enter a boss arena. Even once you get your first mask upgrade (which isn't a small task) and have 6 masks, that's still only 3 hit points in a boss room. This means that in order to get even one extra hit point for a boss, you'd need two mask upgrades, which entails finding a total of 8 mask shards in the world. These aren't exactly easy to come by, so the reality is that for most of the runtime, you can only take about three hits from any boss. Obviously you can heal or whatever, but I'm talking on a basic level here.

On the subject of bosses, I do have to say this for the Silksong community: they're infinitely better than From Software fans. If Silksong were made by Miyazaki, you'd have the usual mongoloids slithering through comment sections to defend the second Savage Beastfly fight. But in reality, nobody pretends that fight is good! Bosses in Silksong are a mixed bag, with the highs being astronomical and the lows being whatever the opposite of astronomical is. 

On one hand, there's the Last Judge, the Cogwork Dancers, and Lace. On the other hand, there's the second Savage Beastfly, Groal the Great, and Disgraced Chef Lugoli. The best bosses are far from easy, but they're arguably more "fair" than some easier bosses in other games. But the worst bosses make Team Cherry look far less talented than they are. Groal the Great in particular has earned the ire of the community for his 5-minute (2 if you find the secret bench) platforming-intensive runback, pre-fight gauntlet, and debuff-inflicting floor (to say nothing of the debuff-inflicting floor throughout that aforementioned runback). 

Bad runbacks aren't exclusive to good ole' Groal, either. Most-if-not-all bosses come with some kind of time-wasting shenanigans to delay second attempts and beyond. If it isn't an extremely long runback, it's a runback filled with enemies who will almost certainly knock a mask or two of health off if you're trying to get back to the boss quickly. If it isn't that, it'll be something like a lengthy elevator ride or a lengthy elevator ride PLUS a runback. 

For one last item of discussion when it comes to difficulty, there's the gauntlets. If you don't know what that means, here goes: you'll sometimes enter a room that automatically locks until you defeat waves upon waves of enemies in one go. Gauntlets aren't an uncommon challenge choice for games, but in Silksong, the gauntlets are often pretty extreme, and they almost always take place in arenas that make contact damage a far more likely prospect than usual. In any case, these gauntlets aren't so much a test of skill as they are a test in endurance, with the final required gauntlet being especially egregious. 

In fact, that gauntlet (the High Halls gauntlet) nearly made me quit. It featured 11 waves, with the final wave consisting of two minibosses at the same time in an arena not quite big enough to have housed a third one. I could get through most of the gauntlet each time, but I wouldn't be able to last two seconds in the last wave. Eventually, I figured it was undoable and started thinking about what I was going to play next. But I found that to be a devastating thought. I'd been having such a good time up until that point (in spite of all my many frustrations), and the idea of giving it all up right at the finish line actually upset me quite a bit. So, as I sat there browsing the PS Store looking at options, I thought: "no...I can do this." 

So I took a break from that particular gauntlet and hunkered down in the world, seeking out every upgrade I could find, doing NPC questlines with the promise of some help when the time came, and trying out the various tools I hadn't tried before. After a night or two of preparation, I went back into the gauntlet and cleared it within 2 or 3 tries. So, despite this having been a challenge that nearly kicked me out of the experience, it was winnable, and it wasn't so much of a problem that it spoiled my view of the game...after all, I'm currently still doing stuff about 15-20 hours after the fact!

That right there is the caveat to the whole difficulty discussion. It isn't impossible, no matter how much it might feel that way at times. And the more challenges I overcame, the less the frankly unfair nature of some of those challenges mattered to me in hindsight. For example, the double-damage aspect eventually faded into a background detail for me. Same with the runbacks and (some of) the gauntlets. The contact damage and the High Halls gauntlet can still firmly go straight up Team Cherry's thorax, but everything else only feels like a problem for a little while. I can obviously only speak for myself though, so take my words with however big a grain of salt you'd like. This goes double considering that my opinion on the difficulty seemed to change multiple times throughout my playthrough.

There's plenty more that could be said about gameplay, difficulty, and the world's systems, but we'll be here forever if I get too far down that rabbit hole. So, how about we skip ahead to talking about technical fidelity?

In looking back over some gameplay of the original Hollow Knight and comparing it to Silksong, I can safely say that Silksong looks about 10 times as impressive. Not only is the general look of each environment better, but the attention to detail is nothing short of astounding. Compounding onto this is consistently good visual identity for each area (a feature that I felt the original game sorely lacked). Whether it's the borderline tribalistic look of the ant-infested Hunter's March, the druidic fog-filled atmosphere of the Wisp Thicket, or the eye-meltingly divine everything of the Choral Chambers, every area here feels distinct and impressively-rendered. 

All of this is even further enhanced by the game's soundtrack, which is among 2025's best. I've actually been using the backing track for Act 2's Choral Chambers to fall asleep in recent weeks, but it's far from the only standout track. Silksong's version of Blighttown is made tolerable specifically because its soundtrack piece is beautiful. The piece used in the fight against Shrine Guardian Seth actively makes you wonder who he is in the lore to warrant such a tearjerker...and then you look it up and start to feel a little something in your eyes. Not every track is memorable like in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but the many tracks that do stand out are instant classics.

In addition to these things, I also never came across any bugs (well, I mean, other than, you know...), crashes, animation/texture troubles, or audio blips....but that doesn't mean the package is perfect.

There are, for example, some isolated framerate drops. In the worst case, I was experiencing these drops during the cogwork dancers fight. In most cases, though, these drops occurred in background animations while characters were talking. 

The only other negative to note is one that can partially be turned off, but it's worth making a note of just in case you're like me. In Act 2, you'll come up against a flamboyant pink boss named Trobbio. If you, like me, and prone to sensory overload with lots of bright color explosions and screen shaking, you're going to want to go into the options and turn off that screen shake. That's going to make your life a lot easier, but the color explosions are still so bright and all over the place that you're likely to experience a lot of discomfort. For the next patch, I'd strongly suggest Team Cherry find some kind of accessibility setting for that, as Trobbio is the only boss that employs these kinds of attacks. 

I've neglected to mention a key detail about Silksong up until this point. At the time of writing, I'm close to 80 hours in the game with only about 75% completion and plenty of Act 3 remaining. So, despite the insane amount of time I've put into Silksong, I still have a significant amount of stuff to do.

And the game is $20.

Yeah, $20. It isn't even that I suck at it. I arguably do, but even if you beat every boss and gauntlet on your first try, this game is so massive that you simply aren't likely to get through it all in a timely manner unless you're some kind of speedrunning freak of nature. In a world where Microsoft will sell Doom: The Dark Ages for a marked up $70 price for less than 15 hours or so, it's astounding that Team Cherry came out with OVER 80 hours of content for such a low price. The value for money proposition here is simply inarguable and unrivaled even in the indie space.

Sometimes a game well and truly comes and takes you by surprise. I enjoyed my time with Silksong, and I knew I was enjoying it while I played. But I didn't quite grasp how much. When the credits rolled, I knew there was a third act, but I also knew that getting there would involve a lot of difficult tasks...so I decided that the standard ending was probably going to be "it" for me. 

So, I put the game down and moved onto the next thing...only to find myself feeling empty. It could just be that Cronos: The New Dawn blows a fat one, but I eventually gave up on it so I could go back to Silksong to try and get into act 3. I ended up succeeding, and I'm still making my way through it...anything to avoid going back to Cronos, I suppose!

Folks, I don't think there's likely to be too many people on the fence about whether or not to get Silksong, but I was such a person, so it's not impossible. With that in mind, allow me to address others like me.

People can huff copium or tell you the difficulty doesn't matter in hindsight (like I have), but the fact of the matter is that Silksong is blatantly unfair at times. It's poorly-designed at times. It commits what I consider to be the cardinal sin of game design. So if you don't have the patience for this kind of challenge or if you have better things to do with your time, this isn't going to be for you. But if you can roll with the punches, I can guarantee that you're going to see how special this experience is. And like I said, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't quite so far in front as it was before, despite having earned a much higher score than I'm giving this. Let that be proof that my recommendation is firm.

Let us review:

Cardinal sin - 1.0

BS in difficulty - 0.5

Small framerate dips + sensory overload - 0.5

The final score for Hollow Knight: Silksong is a strongly-recommended...

8.0/10 - Great

Well done, Team Cherry, well done