Hollow Knight Silksong review: Brutal but brilliant

From start to finish, Hollow Knight: Silksong walked a thread-thin line between flushing my body with dopamine and triggering a teenage urge to fling my Switch 2 across the room.

Fortunately, my console is still functioning, and besides, feel-good emotions dominated my 25-hour-plus quest to see Hornet’s journey through to its end. Hollow Knight: Silksong is gorgeous, massive, and fiercely challenging – a masterpiece that doesn’t always play fair.

Silksong is designed to be difficult, and overcoming its tougher challenges largely comes down to honing personal skill. It’s fair to say, though, that some of the developer’s baffling design decisions are cranked up so much that they sometimes feel less like overcoming a tough-but-fair obstacle and more like pulling teeth.

I adore Silksong. I adore its attention to detail, sublime combat, quirky characters, and the dizzyingly enormous world that houses it all. But good lord does it often do its absolute damnedest to reject that adoration the second you let your guard down.

Hollow Knight Silksong screenshots

What is Hollow Knight Silksong about?

Captured and caged by a band of zealots bound for their ominous Citadel, Hornet, powerless, swiftly finds herself blessed by a series of serendipitous events. Intervening by disrupting the intended path of her caged carriage with a rockslide, gravity sends it tumbling down a maw-like chasm into the abyss.

Hornet is special. You don’t know why, but her innate ability to generate silk is something that the Citadel’s leaders are desperate to get hold of. Rather than find the nearest exit after surviving the fall, Hornet resolves to take on the religious cult to discover their motives.

For Hollow Knight fans, Silksong walks the line between familiarity and the unknown expertly. Team Cherry’s latest and greatest doesn’t reinvent the Metroidvania wheel, but it’s evident from the get-go that the studio has spent the last seven years meticulously crafting a genre-defining masterpiece that potentially even apes the best of what Metroid and Castlevania, the genre’s namesakes, have to offer.

Frustrating, then, that it’s held back in just one department.

Balancing act

Escaping a moss-encrusted hovel and ascending to the hub town of Bone Bottom, I’m served some swift exposition before being whisked away to face my first taste of Pharloom’s deeply unfriendly native wildlife.

Silksong doesn’t ease you in. At all. You’re not given an inch. This is to be expected, considering Hollow Knight’s reputation, but I quickly found myself taking the path of least resistance in the early hours rather than experimenting with its wealth of buildcrafting options to make meaningful progress.

Primary grievances centered on oppressively strong standard enemies, the redundancy of initial health upgrades, the scarcity of benches, and the tedious nature of runbacks to boss fights. However, these gripes lessened as I invested more time in Hornet’s story.

In fact, the U-turn is so stark that, in retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if Team Cherry somehow got the game’s difficulty curve reversed. From Act 2 onwards, wonky pacing and near-spontaneous difficulty spikes disappeared almost wholesale. While these caveats were a recurring pain point in the early hours of my playthrough, though, they’re a footnote in what’s otherwise a perfect world.

Perfect harmony

In size alone, Silksong dwarfs its predecessor. Pharloom is intimidatingly vast, to the extent that the downtrodden villages, steampunk forges, and other gorgeous vistas that connect the jigsaw-like structure of its lower realms make the entirety of Hollow Knight appear as miniature as its hero by comparison.

The transition between chapters was akin to the awe I felt reaching the peak of Sen’s Fortress in Dark Souls and cresting the horizon to Anor Londo. Unlike FromSoftware’s classic, though, Silksong goes from strength to strength the deeper you go.

On the advice of a friend early on, I was abducted by a lackey of the Citadel and carted off to The Slab, a prison the size of a small town. Stripped of all my gear, I had to sleuth through its guard-infested halls and pilfer keys to reach the central control room to get my stuff back.

On reflection, the whole of Silksong feels crafted with the same care as that prison sequence. Losing my gear and sneaking through guard-filled corridors was a standout moment and perfectly encapsulated how finely tuned the rest of the game is once you push past its rough early hours.

The personable NPCs I encountered, blurting out rib-tickling dialogue, their motives, and the ever-evolving nature of revisited areas all coalesced to make every dark recess of Silksong feel alive. Pharloom is an established world; I’m just here to visit.

It’s the intricate nature of Silksong that sets it apart from contemporaries like Metroid Dread and even its own predecessor. No other genre-leader has ever quite captured the sense that you’re traveling through a world that feels lived-in and structured in such a way that doesn’t immediately feel gamey.

Barring some problem areas that feel designed to be knowingly unfair (Sinner’s Road and Bilewater are torture), no zone outstays its welcome, with Hornet’s suite of upgrades, obtained in classic Metroidvania fashion, making repeat visits delightful.

Verdict

Silksong is a technical feat. So densely packed is its world that maintaining a laser focus on forward momentum is borderline impossible. At every opportunity, I found myself pausing the main campaign just to prolong my time in Pharloom.

Little did I know that pacing myself wasn’t necessary. Mechanically, Silksong is just as expansive. Superior fluidity of movement and a less obtuse approach to building the perfect bug warrior made traversal and combat feel like a treat to be savored at every opportunity..

Ultimately, games like these live and die based on how well their worlds are built, and Pharloom is one of the best from an architectural and visual perspective.

It’s a shame that its fierce difficulty spike and pacing issues in the early game will absolutely turn less hardcore audiences away, because it’s clear that Silksong is seven years of love, care, and dedication splashed on a screen. Equal parts breathtaking and brutal, Hollow Knight: Silksong proves it was worth the wait but won’t go easy on anyone.