Hollow Knight: Silksong

I went in braced for disappointment. When a game carries six years of community mythology on its back, the realistic outcome is a solid-but-slightly-deflating sequel. Silksong is not that. Within the first hour, playing as Hornet instead of the silent Knight, something clicked in a way I did not expect: this is a faster, louder, more personality-driven game, and it earns every note of that shift. The core loop will feel familiar if you logged time in the original. You are dropped into Pharloom, a kingdom with its own affliction called the Haunting, and your job is to ascend to its peak one biome at a time. Mossy grottos, gilded cities, clockwork machinery - the world is interconnected in the classic Metroidvania way, with locked routes that open as Hornet gains new abilities. What changes is the texture of movement. Hornet can sprint, mantle ledges, glide from height, and grapple with her Needle, and the level design is built around all of that agility in ways that make backtracking genuinely enjoyable rather than obligatory. The Needle also doubles as a pogo, though its diagonal dive angle replaces the vertical pogo of the original - one of the few mechanics that will make veterans stumble for the first few hours. The Charm system is gone too, replaced by Crests and Tools: equippable loadouts that alter Hornet's attack set and slot capacity, with red offensive Tools consuming Shell Shard charges and blue and yellow Tools handling passive and support roles. It is less immediately flexible than Charms, but swapping Crests at a bench and watching your whole combat style shift is its own quiet pleasure. The difficulty conversation is real and worth addressing honestly. Bosses hit harder than anything in the original - many enemies deal two damage chunks per hit rather than one, and the benches between encounters are placed far apart, meaning a failed boss attempt often involves a meaningful trek back through live enemies. The long runbacks drew the most criticism on launch, and it is legitimate: there are stretches where the distance between rest points actively undermines the flow of otherwise brilliant encounters. Team Cherry patched some of the edge cases in enemy damage values post-launch, which took the roughest corners off. Even so, if you bounced off Hollow Knight's late-game difficulty, this one will test you harder. The payoff, when a boss like the Cogwork Dancers finally cracks, is proportional to the punishment. What surprised me most was the writing. Hornet talks. She has opinions, a dry wit, and connections that give the story real emotional weight rather than the original game's beautiful but distancing silence. Side quests - the game calls them Wishes, tracked in a quest journal - range from Grand Hunts for hidden enemies to escort missions, and the best of them are laced with the kind of NPC personality that lodges in your memory. A small bug named Sherma banging away on his chime is already a community mascot for a reason. The soundtrack, meanwhile, continues the tradition of Christopher Larkin's work on the original: it is the rare score that tells you exactly what kind of place you are in before the art does. This is a game for players willing to meet it on its own terms. Newcomers without Hollow Knight experience may find the difficulty steep and the world cryptic at first. Veterans will find a familiar skeleton wearing a much faster, more expressive skin. For those of us who genuinely love this genre, Silksong lands as one of its sharpest entries, flaws in checkpoint spacing and all.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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