Hollow Knight: Silksong review – Still a cut above

When you have a surprise hit as big as Hollow Knight ended up being, following that up is a task all too easy to screw up, especially when you decide to spend so long developing it that it generates GTA 6 levels of mouth-frothing hype. Plenty of developers a lot bigger than Team Cherry have crumbled under that pressure in the past, but rather than worrying about pleasing everyone, the team behind Hollow Knight: Silksong stuck to their vision and spent seven years making the game they wanted to make — a sequel that keeps everything great about the original while building on its ideas.

I immediately felt right at home again when I booted it up. It understands exactly what you liked about the first game and perfectly captures that, except with more surprises and more twists to the formula.

Its hand-painted visuals are even more stunning than the first time around. Despite the world of Pharloom being a pretty bleak one, it still manages to feel lively in its own way. Every weird little bug you meet drips with personality in their animations, every bit of scenery contracts as you bump into it or smash it with your needle. The oppressive atmosphere doesn’t stop you from finding zones of vibrant green moss or grand golden citadels, which just make the areas where it truly becomes dark and dank all the more impactful a shift.

Hornet’s moveset strikes a good balance between familiarity and novelty, too. The combat isn’t overhauled, but with her different style of striking, you need to take other things into consideration. Her standard strikes have a bit more range, both horizontally and vertically, which somewhat expands the potential of what enemies can do, as you have more angles and ways to strike them. On top of that, her downward dive is diagonal instead of straight down. While this has been a point of frustration for some – and it could do with a bit of a bigger hitbox – I enjoy the risk-reward nature of using this move. Succeeding gives you a good hit of damage and immediately gets you clear of your foe, but missing it is easy to do and often a costly mistake.

The game does occasionally cross the line into being too difficult or unfair. The original Hollow Knight made no bones about its difficulty, and Silksong never promised to pull any punches, but some of the changes to combat can cause frustration. Bosses now doing two damage per hit instead of one is annoying in the early game when you only have five HP to start with. It’s not an idea I’m totally against, but I’d argue that at least the first couple of bosses in the game shouldn’t have gone this hard, and even moving into the late game, some forced encounters throw a truly unreasonable amount of enemies at you — the vibrant and detailed visuals sometimes make chaotic fights hard to read, making any battle where you’re backed up by an ally feel a touch unfair. The High Halls gauntlet, where you face a very tough mini-boss only to discover that was just the halfway point, and you then have to fight two of them at once, was an absolute piss-take of the highest order.

It does balance out though, as there are major changes to your mana and healing abilities. Hornet uses spools of silk, which she gains by striking enemies, and once she has a full spool, she can heal. Where in the first game, you had to be grounded and could only heal one HP at a time, Hornet can heal anywhere, even in mid-air, and by default, it heals three HP in one go. This does help to counteract how much more aggressive and deadly your foes are, as you now have many more opportunities to find those few crucial seconds where you’re still and vulnerable while healing.

It gives boss fights a slightly different flow, as there is much less downtime. Before, bosses needed to occasionally pause to give you a window to be grounded while healing, but because you can now heal in so many more positions, bosses can continue to be aggressive, and it’s up to you to spot the vulnerabilities in these patterns for your window of opportunity. This is especially prominent in the late game, where some bosses move incredibly quickly and have a wide variety of attacks that you need to identify and move to counter the moment you spot them winding up.

Boss design overall is stronger than ever, with a huge variety of fights along the critical path and so many more hidden in all corners of the map. You’ll be fighting everything from massive monsters tenfold Hornet’s size, to small and nimble opponents who can duck and weave as much as you, to fighting multiple foes at the same time who coordinate their attacks while acting independently.

Something Silksong does a lot better than the original is weaving narratives into its boss fights — even smaller bosses along the way have some fantastic storytelling woven into their fight. 

I don’t want to spoil many of them, but the Cogwork Dancers are perhaps my favourite bosses across both games for this reason. This fight sees you face two dancers who make choreographed moves on the beat, darting around the arena and occasionally coming together for a big attack. As the fight goes on, their movement accelerates until you finally defeat one of them, at which point the other one slows right down and becomes utterly helpless without its partner, and despite it still trying to kill you, you feel so bad for it as it helplessly flails about the screen with easily dodgable attacks as you whittle down what remains of its health.

In a game where you’ll be fighting most bosses at least a dozen times before you come out victorious, it’s this kind of extra creativity that continues to make it compelling, that keeps you coming back for more over and over until you finally pull it off and get to see what’s around the next corner.

Map design in Silksong is a lot tighter than the original, too. Act 1 has a clear and relatively linear line of progression, which meant I got lost a lot less than I did in the early game of the original, with the map opening up and asking for more interweaving and going back on yourself once you reach Act 2. By that point, you have a much firmer grasp of the layout of the world, so it’s less disorienting. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of potential for you to explore elsewhere, but the critical path is always clear.

It also helps that, in Act 2, you spend most of your time in one large area, moving between the many smaller areas branching off it. This makes the signposting a lot clearer, as you’re not frustratingly poking at every wall in the hopes you’ll find a hidden passageway. However, at the same time, it still has plenty of secrets to discover if you do take the time to poke at every nook and cranny, helped by the many extra side-quests that give you far clearer objectives to help you get stronger on your journey.

It also pulls the same trick as the first game, where the true ending (and in this case, the entirety of Act 3) is locked behind a much deeper mastery of the game, as you must complete almost every side quest, explore the entire map, and complete several seemingly optional objectives before you’re rewarded with the final act of the narrative. It really pushes you to see all of it, even when trying to keep much of it as secret as possible, and the result is that every little discovery feels so satisfying. When you finally do come face-to-face with the true final boss, it feels like the culmination of so much work that you’re empowered to overcome this last obstacle like never before.

There may be dozens of indie metroidvania games released on Steam every month, but Hollow Knight: Silksong is the perfect reminder of why none of them ever got as big as this pair of games. Silksong pushes the genre to heights it has never known before, combining a fantastic aesthetic and narrative with extremely polished exploration and boss mechanics. While there are frustrations that can grate on you in those annoying moments, they quickly fade away when the game is viewed as a whole. It really does live up to the hype. I’d still like the next one in sooner than seven years though, Team Cherry.

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