Hollow Knight: Silksong review – A sharp sequel that skillfully threads the hype needle

When Hollow Knight originally dropped on the Switch, I bought it immediately as I had heard good things. I played it for a few hours, struggled to find anything around the map, got killed multiple times, found the lack of objective agonizing, and ended up having a horrible time.

I don’t remember when I picked it up again, but I know why. I had gone down a YouTube rabbit hole (I didn’t spoil myself, don’t worry), learning about mechanics, game design, and the incredible feeling of discovery in the game. Curious, I dove back in better equipped and determined to find the diamond in the rough, and I learned the difficulty and that purposeful feeling of being lost was the point. Now, Hollow Knight is one of my favorite games of all time.

It lives up to the hype

The wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong has been agonizing. It was originally planned as DLC, and it shows, because this is a game clearly designed for people who have beaten the original. Silksong is tough, and occasionally it delights in trolling you. Yet it respects your time better than the original Hollow Knight, and works harder to give the player purpose and the tools to survive.

For the newcomers, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a metroidvania and a sequel to Hollow Knight. Both entries in the series feature punishing difficulty with fast action and challenging 2D platforming. But they offer intricate mixtures of powers and mechanics so you can fight back in your own style. All coupled with an oppressively dark world littered with enemies, intriguing lore, and a simplistic but somber art style that accentuates the beautiful things, from flies to fountains and beyond. Crucially, both games are about getting lost.

Make no mistake, Team Cherry’s second outing is just as bewildering as its first. But it’s clear they have honed some of the difficult elements of Hollow Knight and produced a sequel more provocatively challenging, but ultimately more satisfying. Compared to the original, Silksong makes it easier to map the world, it lays out a much clearer objective, and Hornet feels like she’s driving the story.

Where the Knight was passive, Hornet is active, both in narrative when talking to the amazing NPCS like Sherma, and mechanics. Silksong has an urgency to it, and it helps that Hornet feels incredible to control after the first couple of powers are unlocked. Hornet is much more nimble than the Knight, making you feel like a deadly dancer as you chain attacks and dashes while lacerating your foes with dozens of Needle strikes.

A song of slice and ire

You move through Pharloom very fast, and every time Hornet gets another tool to aid that movement, the game feels even smoother. The world of Hollow Knight: Silksong can feel overwhelming at times, but that size is also one of its greatest assets, almost begging you to sprint across the map and uncover secrets. On several occasions, I have either broken into a hidden room or been literally kidnapped and ended up in areas I had no idea existed. What I thought was the boundary of the map was just a teaser.

Combining exhilarating movement with the snappy combat creates a flow state that’s hard to snap out of. This rare sort of satisfying gameplay is the result of a painstaking attention to both agency and feedback, and ensuring that both are perfected. Nowhere is this more evident than in the delicate dance of boss fights, where these brutish enemies smash you into pieces with their rhythmic combinations, only for you to come back swinging moments later.

Well, however long it takes you to run back to that arena. While I love the bosses in Silksong, dying to a boss can feel gut-wrenching, thanks to the occasional ridiculous trek back from bench to the boss, the loss of shell shards, and the loss of rosaries. If you reach the location where you died, you can retrieve some of your Silk and your rosaries, but it’s the loss of Shell Shards that can be the worst element, as they’re needed for many projectiles and tools.

Silksong has some amazing combinations of equipment, with great tools like the pin projectiles, which you can augment with things like poison to attack from a distance. Plus, some crests completely change the way Hornet controls. Whether changing the direction of her downward attack, changing other elements, the crests offer a really fun way to make sure each player is strategizing in their very own way. I recommend unlocking as many tools and crests as you can, and playing around with combinations until you’re happy.

Threads the difficulty needle perfectly

Some of the bosses in Silksong are among the best boss fights in recent memory, perhaps ever. If you enjoy the dance of fights like Metroid Dread’s gruelling Ravenbeak, Silksong has that in spades, with over 40 different bosses waiting to challenge your abilities and test your resolve. Occasionally, bosses spawn one too many other enemies, and fights can feel unfair or possibly random. But, again, it’s up to you to find a solution or an attack style that works.

One slight letdown is when it comes to powers, Silksong plays it safe. While this title is the zenith of world-building and immediate gameplay, there’s nothing here quite as revolutionary (at the time) as Axiom Verge‘s many weapons, or Ori & The Will of the Wisps‘ Bash mechanic, which let you slingshot through enemies. Or even the Shadow of the Simurgh from Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. In fact, the screenshot mechanic from The Lost Crown‘s map also would have been amazing here. This isn’t to say Silksong doesn’t do impressive, or even quite similar, things with abilities and combat; I just don’t think I ever had a moment that felt entirely new to the Metroidvania genre. Very, very good? Yes. New? Not quite.

Over all of this are breathtaking visuals and music. Silksong has the same simplistic but cleverly complex art as Hollow Knight taken even further. Enemies occasionally look like simple doodles, but it’s the way lighting and effects flitter across the screen that gives these things life. Running across the stage shows parallax scrolling, imbuing these dank caves a depth despite the crudeness of their detail.

Silksong jumps off the screen, and the beautiful visuals work in tandem with smart lighting and particle effects, and phenomenal sound design, to create a living and breathing world more enrapturing than many AAA games working to make photo-realistic copies of real-world locations. This is also supported by another stellar score from Christopher Larkin, who gives this entry’s soundtrack a different energy and a renewed sense of excitement and drive that matches Hornet herself.

Over around 40 hours of gameplay, Silksong delivers a Metroidvania that towers over the original, and stands tall among genre classics like Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It delivers on all of the promises of its predecessor, but makes smart choices to deliver a leaner and meaner game that dares you to get better.

Moment-to-moment gameplay just feels phenomenal, and over every minute of this grand adventure, thrill-seekers will feel rewarded for their continued perseverance with well-hidden secrets and an incredible story that similarly begs to be discovered instead of simply being told. The only things holding it back are occasionally grueling runs back to bosses, a painful economy, and a slight lack of truly original mechanics.