Not gonna lie, readers, Hollow Knight: Silksong is kicking my teeth in, with gracious yet far more powerful legswings than Hollow Knight’s early stages ever managed. There’s a jumping-puzzly bit two hours in that took me about the same amount of time to clear, and the bosses seem generally sweatier too. I’m fairly sure one of them used an impossibly rapid flurry of sword slashes to spell out “Do one, James Archer of Rock Paper Shotgun dot com” in my flesh.
In other words, the review’s coming on Monday at the earliest. But I do think I’ve endured enough to determine that Silksong is a very, very good match for the Steam Deck, making small but welcome compatibility improvements over the original (in addition to its new, desktop-minded ultrawide support).
The big one is, on a resolution-related note, the addition of native 1280×800 support, with a 90Hz refresh option that looks an awful lot like it was included for the Steam Deck OLED specifically. On both this and the original, LCD Deck, fully filling out the 16:10 aspect ratio means no more of the black bars that you’d get on the 16:9-locked Hollow Knight. A new HUD resizing option also lets you tailor the thread and mask count UI to the Deck’s smaller screen; I ended up sticking with the default, largest size for readability, though you can shrink it or disable it entirely.
That’s about it for outright enhancements, not counting how the controller mapping screen now shows a diagram of a Steam Deck rather than an Xbox controller (though that’s neat as well). Still, as Hollow Knight was already a respectable Steam Deck game outside of its rez limits, Silksong gets to inherit all that handheld affinity as well. Its 2D sidescrollery is a natural match for the Deck’s gamepad controls, its gorgeous yet technical simple visuals let it run like water on max settings, and its tiny 7.58GB install size is an easy fit for SSDs and microSD cards alike.
It’s no glutton for battery life, either. I’ve yet to run a complete full-to-empty test, but last night it took 3h 16m to drop my freshly charged Steam Deck OLED down to 50%. And that was with screen brightness and speaker volume both set to their respective 50% settings, so you’re looking at upwards of six hours if you’re thrifty, with a good few hours on the original Deck as well.
Thus, Silksong gets full marks for portable play, though obviously that comes with the significant risk of your precious handheld being flung into the nearest wall after one of the sadistically overlong platforming sections has you collapsing onto a spike bed for the 112th successive time. Diagonal pogo, we would have words.
