Assorted thoughts after 50+ hours of Hollow Knight: Silksong

This is a video game blog now sorry

Hollow Knight: Silksong came out September 4, which means on average I’ve played it for more than an hour a day every day since. It’s great, it’s infuriating, I’m obsessed. Since this is above all a blog, I figure anything that has sucked up my attention this fully deserves a post. Call it Slack Law¹ but if you don’t have coworkers to talk to.

My rough sense of my subscriber demographics leads me to believe 90% of you have no idea what Hollow Knight is, so: Hollow Knight is a 2017 video game that combined the classic exploration and backtracking of Metroid and Castlevania, the precision platforming of Celeste² and Super Meat Boy, and the high combat difficulty, inspired bosses, and lore-intensive storytelling of Dark Souls and the rest of FromSoft’s output. Accompanied by gorgeous music and a hand drawn artstyle, you play as a little bug warrior delving into the vast, fallen kingdom of Hallownest. The game uses its bug world in inventive ways—its mystic seer character is a moth and the true final boss, The Radiance, is a dream of pure light that seduced Hallownest’s bugs from their natural place in the dark.³ It’s a masterpiece, one of the crown jewels of my favorite genre of video games.

Along the way you cross paths and swords with Hornet, the princess of Hallownest, before she becomes an ally. Not long after release, Team Cherry, the game’s developers, promised an expansion that would make Hornet a playable character. Eventually they announced that Silksong, the Hornet expansion, had grown too large to be DLC and would be a fully fledged sequel. Years passed. The pandemic came and went. Team Cherry went radio silent. Anticipation grew and grew. Fans got angry, begging for a release date, for news of any kind. Silksong became the most wishlisted game on Steam.⁴

Now it’s finally out. As a big fan of the first game, a connoisseur of the genre, and someone whose online brand is increasingly “gamer who knows how to read,” I have Some Thoughts.

I’m going quibble with a bunch of small things so first let me say clearly, Team Cherry has done it again. I saw some initial reactions that went “yep, Silksong sure is more Hollow Knight.” This is obviously a very boring thing to say about a sequel but also, like, we should be so lucky. This game is so good. It’s more of what we loved but also distinctly its own. Hornet moves and fights differently from the Knight and her toolkit of, uh, tools provides so many different ways to approach a given encounter. There’s a maturity to the design evident in the things they’ve chosen to jettison from the formula. There is no equivalent to White Palace, which with its incongruous sawblade gauntlets felt imported from Super Meat Boy whole-cloth. If Hollow Knight was ridiculously successful in its syncretism, Silksong is perfectly confident to be itself.

Storywise, the writers were smart to distance Silksong from its predecessor. The game begins with an indefinite amount of time having passed and Hornet a prisoner being taken to the Citadel of Pharloom. We’re outside Hallownest and we’re not looking back. I don’t think “Hallownest” is in the script once. Now, Hornet’s backstory and lineage are relevant to be sure, but it’s the foundation for something new. Apart from an early line about how she has seen even gods fall, there are no references to the events of the first game, at least not until Act 3 when that lore becomes more relevant. And speaking of the act structure—

The act structure of this game is quite frustrating. Here’s how the game goes: Hornet starts in the lowlands of Pharloom and she means to climb to the Citadel at the kingdom’s top to learn why she was being brought there as a prisoner. So, Act I: Pharloom. Great. Upon defeating the Last Judge and passing through the the Citadel’s gate you start Act II, centered on the Citadel. Eventually you will reach the boss at the top, the god of this world and the source of its destruction. Beat her for the bad ending. To open Act III you need to essentially 100% the game up to that point. Accessing it is gated by a quest for an NPC that only becomes available once a long list of requirements have been met, which are themselves gated in obtuse ways. I felt like I was playing very thoroughly and I was missing almost every requirement, all because—

The Mount Fay climb seems impossible. Mount Fay is a cold area on the northwest corner of the map. If Hornet strays from a heat source for more than fifteen seconds she begins to freeze and will quickly die. In a Metroidvania a situation like this is always a little ambiguous—Can I make the climb despite the cold or do I need to wait until I find some piece of gear that will protect me? So I gave it a shot several times and froze to death on the first leg of the ascent. I concluded the gear was elsewhere and I would have to come back. Wrong! The cold gear is atop Mount Fay (along with double-jump). The problem is that the gap between the first and second heat sources takes, with perfect movement and knowing where you’re going, about fourteen seconds, leaving one second to spare before the cold starts to hurt. I couldn’t find it/make it in time and so went without double-jump for so much longer than I needed to. I think about the brutal platforming gauntlet to get to the top of the Cogwork Core and laugh knowing now that I could have had a second jump for it. I know it’s the case for Hollow Knight as well but it’s still amazing to me that you can get to the bad ending without double-jump.

Similarly, opening Act III requires completing Shakra’s questline to find her mentor. Doing this requires you to buy her maps for each area of the game. One of those areas is the Sands of Karak, which is very easy to miss. There’s a sidequest in Act III clearly intended to help the player find Sands of Karak, but to be in Act III and have that sidequest requires us to already have discovered it. This points to my more general gripe that—

The NPC questlines are a bit too obtuse. There’s a mandatory fight in the Citadel’s forum against waves of enemies culminating with two big guys with maces. It’s tedious to get through all the early waves just to get wombo-comboed by the double miniboss at the end. Everyone hates this fight. Well, you’re supposed to have help. Either Shakra or another NPC, Garamond, will assist you if you’ve met their requirements. Again, I thought I was playing quite thoroughly and hadn’t done enough to get help from either. I beat the forum fight on my own (brag) only after many tries and even then only by clinging to the walls and chucking tacks and bombs at the minibosses and lived on one health. Also speaking of NPCs—

I was positive Team Cherry was going to kill sweet little pilgrim Sherma and break my heart. Big ups to them for not doing that.

I would like to be able to pet and pamper my Bell Beast. It is my pet (and fast-travel transport) and I should be able to show it some love.

Too many attacks hit for two damage in this game.

Incredibly correct post:

Silksong has some of the most amazingly fast boss fights I’ve ever played. In classic Marvel movie style, the best bosses are the ones where you’re basically fighting yourself. The second fight with Lace, an acrobatic fencer, is my favorite type of fight—where the first couple attempts you die in ten seconds flat but once you learn the rhythm you can get so into the flow of the swordplay you can win hitless. The way you have to sprint back and forth chasing down the First Sinner is inspired—so often boss fights can feel overly reactive so it just feels amazing to go full-tilt and slip past attack after attack to keep the boss on her toes, rather than the other way around. Speaking of inspired—

I loved that Team Cherry recreated the abduction sequence from Bloodborne. I was howling when the jailer caught me and I found myself imprisoned in The Slab (yucky prison staffed by fat flies). I think it’s super fun they paid homage with a “quote” like that. On the other hand, Bilewater feels like their tribute to the rickety catwalks and poison swamp of Blighttown from Dark Souls, which, no, absolutely not. Blighttown is miserable every time and Bilewater almost ended my love affair with Silksong.

Anyway, I just started Act III so I haven’t finished the game yet. Are you guys playing Silksong? What area or boss broke your spirit? Sound off below!

1. Somehow the Ham Truck article doesn’t have the tag which is an editorial error of the highest order.

2. Celeste actually came out after Hollow Knight, but you know what I mean.

3. If I’m getting anything wrong in the lore please do not tell me. I don’t care. What you think I actually watch Mossbag’s Youtube videos?

4. It was this evolution from DLC to sequel that got Team Cherry in trouble. Standard practice is to work on a game for years in secret before announcing it to the public. Silksong’s development period is on the long side but not crazy—it just felt that way because we knew about it from its actual beginning.