Hollow Knight: Silksong Review

Hollow Knight: Silksong has lingered in the gaming consciousness for over seven years. While its predecessor wasn’t an instant success, over time, it garnered exceptional word of mouth, catapulting the Metroidvania series into being one of the most prominent indie franchises ever. Add to that a comparative eon of waiting for news on the sequel, and that’s a lot of pent-up excitement.

And now, a couple of weeks out from the game’s release, the dust has begun to settle. After all the waiting, Team Cherry has held up their end of the bargain. However, from my own playtime (and seeing the discourse build around it), it appears what they’ve delivered is a complicated beast that is far from a slamdunk crowdpleaser to satisfy everyone who had been waiting. For some, it will be a masterpiece, for others, a frustrating cyclone of pain.

Having an understanding of who you might be is important to have a grasp of. Team Cherry has cooked up an exquisite meal here, but one, even for some Hollow Knight faithful, that might be too much of an acquired taste.

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Silksong is a beautiful game.

Metroidvania at its Best

If you’ve wandered into this review off the back of collective excitement, Silksong is a 2D platformer set in a bug-centered world with a specific focus on difficult bosses, combat arenas, and platforming challenges. There should be particular emphasis put on the difficult nature of that, too.

The world of Hollow Knight comes with a surprisingly dense lore that’s there for those who want to really get into the dirt with the bugs - but unless you are putting a particular effort into understanding it, Silksong’s story will essentially be ancillary. It’s FromSoftware-esque in its story delivery, so while good, it’s unlikely to be the thing pushing you through the experience. This is gameplay first and remains so through most of its 25-50 hours. That variance is down to both how difficult you find it and whether you intend to complete everything. That includes a whole final act with multiple excellent bosses that are locked behind very specific post-game requirements.

This is a big, difficult experience. Prepare accordingly.

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Silksong has some fantastic characters and lore if you seek it out.

Grueling Difficulty

That difficulty is no joke either, and is perhaps the thing for you to understand coming into this experience. Unless you are a god gamer, and kudos to you if you are, you’ll hit walls in your Silksong journey. Everyone will find different ones, but there will almost certainly come a moment when you say, “I don’t know if I got this in me.”

There can be hours of frustration with the way something is designed that will really try your patience. In one particular section, I got stuck on an arena and hadn’t upgraded accordingly earlier in the game. Where I’d normally go back and get new tools and power to beat the fight, because of where I was in the story, I couldn’t. The only way was through. Cue five hours straight of trying to beat the fight. It was grueling and really hit my enthusiasm for progressing. If I weren’t obliged to go further, the game might have bested me there. This experience isn’t uncommon. This is a tough-as-nails game, rivaling, and maybe exceeding, just about anything you’ll find in Dark Souls or Elden Ring.

Even if you are a seasoned Hollow Knight player, Silksong is significantly harder than Team Cherry’s first. If you’re salivating at the thought of that challenge, Silksong will be a dream come true for you. If you want to come home after work and not heighten your stress levels, Silksong may not endear itself to you.

This isn’t helped by Team Cherry sometimes being malicious in their design. In one notoriously difficult platforming section, when I was screaming for a bench to set my respawn, you could see a bench you couldn’t get to yet - and then just a little later, they did have a bench but hid it behind a destructible wall. While it wants you to succeed and best these challenges, every once in a while, you can’t help but feel you’re being taunted just a little bit. For some, that devious spirit with which the game is designed might just be a touch too much.

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Silksong often puts you in challenging situations.

Masterfully Designed

If you can get through Silksong’s hard exterior shell, though, it has some delicious fruit contained within. It has supposedly been in development for over half a decade, and it feels like it. Considered is a word that comes to mind. That’s to say, each area, the enemies, the music, the experience, the secrets - it all feels human-crafted with a strong vision acting as a throughline for both the macro and micro-scale.

Team Cherry is an infamously small development team, and while a seven-year wait is one of the downsides, the artistic and design clarity that permeates is a defining trait here. This is a game whose developers knew exactly what they wanted to make, and they did it on their own time. Every art asset, every agonizing runback to a boss, every placement of an enemy, how an area is connected to the next - it all feels singular in its details and designed to evoke a specific experience.

As you’re playing, you can almost feel the weight and quality that came with the time taken to make it. You can see why it might take months to complete one area. Get the lore around it right, seed its position in the world, and explore the difficulty aspects it wants from the player. When Silksong is firing on all cylinders, it is really something special.

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There is always a reason to everything in Silksong. From its arts to its difficult platforming.

Art and Vibes

That is especially the case for the game’s art and overall vibe. While this world can be very dreary and even threatening, it’s executed with a brilliant artistic flair. I found it impossible not to get swept up in its stoic mysteriousness.
It was not rare to leave play sessions with the game’s aura permeating my mind even after putting it down for the day. That doesn’t happen all the time, especially in a game that is custom-built to cause you stress and frustration through challenge. That execution is important to the pull, too. Again, unless you know the franchise’s lore, the story likely isn’t what’s pushing you through - in my experience, it was almost entirely wanting to see what Team Cherry had designed next. What area it’d meticulously concocted, what new Boss challenge it had designed. Areas like Greymoor and Choral Chambers will stick with me. A vibe can be a throughline for a game, and Silksong is evidence of that.

One illustrative indicator of this is the game’s soundtrack. Every area has bespoke music, each conveying a different feeling about an environment. While games with less singular focus might have reused music for multiple areas, Silksong had embedded the texture of each with its own orchestral accompaniment. It’s not the only example, but it is a great one of the defining intentionality that’s on display here, facilitated by a developer who had the time to implement it.

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Silksong nails both the art and vibe.

Final Thoughts

Hollow Knight: Silksong is magnificent - for the right kind of player. For all of its clear quality, Silksong is a tricky game to recommend full-heartedly. At its worst, it can feel vicious and cruel. That’s by design.

If you are sitting down to play a video game after a long day, it’s an experience that’s only going to appeal to a very particular type. If that’s you, Silksong could be an all-timer. However, if you found Hollow Knight difficult, just know Silksong ramps up that difficulty substantially. I say this as a caution - know what you are getting into to avoid frustration.

That out of the way - Team Cherry made the game they wanted to make and didn’t compromise its vision in the pursuit of appealing to a wide base. For a game with such a huge, expectant audience, that’s undeniably bold. It’s a testament to the bravery in Silksong’s design. Taken on its own terms, it is exceptional. Just know that it sets its bar high for its players, and for some, consistently trying to meet that could be a recipe for a crash out.