Hollow Knight: Silksong Review – Punishing Grandeur

Hollow Knight: Silksong is an exemplar of its form. Games like Metroid and Castlevania helped establish the fun of an exploration and platforming adventure filled with upgrades that open up new paths to progression, and Team Cherry’s second Hollow Knight game takes that concept to a profound level of depth, sophistication, and scope. Pacing issues and a punishing approach to forward progression prevent a full-throated endorsement to every type of player, but those with significant patience can uncover a true masterpiece. 

While there are some scant references to the prior game, players should be comfortable thinking of Silksong’s story as a standalone installment, in which a warrior princess bug named Hornet is taken against her will to a distant kingdom called Pharloom. After escaping, she seeks to uncover the reason for her kidnapping and the secrets of the place, gradually unfolding a story of ancient mysteries and the decayed remains of a sovereignty governed through the powers of silk and music. The worldbuilding is immaculate, from the visuals of a land that has fallen into ruin to the beautifully written dialogue between characters that fleshes out the fiction. 

The environmental storytelling is backed up by rewarding exploration and traversal. Silksong’s world is truly vast, with an interconnected network of biomes that each contribute new threads to the web of understanding, from abandoned halls of long-forgotten experiments to clockwork machinery that drives the kingdom’s waning functions. Hidden paths abound, and the gradual unlocking of new shortcuts and areas that appear through the acquisition of abilities makes for a satisfying loop. 

Several platforming sequences are highly challenging, demanding split-second pad/stick control for long and unforgiving stretches. I relish those challenges for their design and canny pathing, but the distance between rest points does little to contribute to that enjoyment. Instead, I found the insistence on extremely long checkpoint placement hampered the sense of pacing in several instances, since I was forced to repeatedly redo early and manageable sections just to get a chance to practice and perfect the later ones. 

While combat encounters are frequent and demanding, they are tuned to reward careful attention and clever use of resources. Over the dozens of hours it takes to reach even the first of several endings, I consistently felt a sense of evolving control over the onscreen action, which is enhanced by several distinct crests, each of which alters movement, attacks, and available abilities in subtle but important ways. The distinct playstyles are yet one more way that Silksong layers in nuance.

I was especially fond of many of the bosses, which often have a wide variety of interesting movesets to learn and evocative visual themes that set each apart from the rest. In particular, bosses like Lace, Phantom, and the Cogwork Dancers feel rhythmic and intense, like impactful duels between master combatants. 

While the boss battles themselves are a rewarding challenge, I can’t say I was always a fan of the extreme damage each dealt, often ending individual attempts in mere seconds, or the sponge-like health pools of most, which sometimes feel like a chore to work through, even after nailing the mechanics of the fight. The frequent insistence on long, gauntlet-like runbacks to retry a given battle exacerbates those issues, which reads more like an unnecessary time sink, rather than a fun addition to the difficulty. 

Like many great games, all of Silksong’s systems, difficulty, and storytelling feel intentional and crafted to be as they are. Even as particular frustrations held back some measure of my potential enjoyment, I simultaneously marveled at the care that has gone into each detail of Silksong’s measured unraveling of plot and gameplay. Even beyond the credits, hours and hours of optional endings, additional zones and bosses, and new plot elements wait to be brought to light by a devoted player. It’s a truly immense game filled with hard-won moments of discovery and revelation. 

Musicians know the feeling of a piece that is woven with complexity, which takes longer to learn than most, but brings commensurate satisfaction upon mastery; Silksong is the video game equivalent, sitting ready to be played and adored, but only after appropriate levels of devotion and persistence.