Hollow Knight: Silksong

The gap between Hollow Knight and its sequel was long — long enough that a small studio watched its debut become the benchmark every Metroidvania since is measured against. Hollow Knight: Silksong arrived carrying an absurd weight of expectation — the kind that usually crushes a project into a competent, cautious retread. It didn’t. Team Cherry did something riskier: they made a game that is aggressively uninterested in being the thing you already loved.

The premise is a hard pivot. You play Hornet, the needle-wielding princess-protector who spent the first game alternately trying to kill you and saving your life. She’s been captured and hauled to Pharloom, a vertical kingdom of silk and song that has rotted from the inside in a way that will feel familiar to Hallownest veterans but never quite rhymes with it. Where the Knight descended into a dead kingdom’s guts, Hornet climbs — from mossy grottos and fog-drowned moors up through gilded cities toward a citadel at the top of the world. The inversion reframes the whole emotional arc from archaeology to pilgrimage.

Market position is where things get interesting. Team Cherry priced this at a fraction of what its scope justifies and launched it simultaneously on Steam and Nintendo Switch. The verdict is close to consensus: this is a sequel that clears its predecessor. The dissent is loud, though, and it’s all pointed at the same target — the difficulty. The early game reads as punishing rather than demanding, and Team Cherry later patched bosses and checkpoint density in a way that quietly conceded the point.

• Hornet’s Kit: She sprints, vaults, wall-clings, and harpoons. Where the Knight was a patient counter-puncher, Hornet is a duelist who wants to be inside your guard. The needle strike chains into silk-powered abilities, and the whole moveset is tuned for aggression — healing costs silk, silk comes from hitting things, and the game will not let you turtle your way to a win.
• Crafting & Tools: An expanding arsenal of weapons, traps, and mechanisms that reshape both combat and traversal. This is the biggest structural addition over the original’s charm system — tools are consumable, craftable, and they change how a fight or a room reads.
• Scope: A large roster of distinct enemies and dozens of bosses across an interconnected map that hides routes, tools, and lore behind curiosity. Not “content” in the padded open-world sense — density.
• Quests & NPCs: Pharloom’s survivors hand out actual quests with actual objectives, a real departure from Hallownest’s oblique breadcrumbs.
• Christopher Larkin’s Score: The composer returns with orchestral work that carries more grief and less dread than the original.
• Steel Soul Mode: Permadeath-flavored gauntlet unlocked on completion, for players who finish and want the difficulty to keep escalating.

The Gameplay Loop

The single smartest thing Silksong does is make healing an offensive act. Hornet spends silk to bind wounds, and silk only refills by landing hits. Retreat to a corner and you die slowly; commit and you might die fast, but you might also live. The original Hollow Knight let you play scared — back off, whiff-punish, sip Soul, repeat. Hornet’s economy makes cowardice mechanically self-defeating. It’s an elegant bit of design pressure, and it’s the reason the combat feels transformed rather than tweaked.

The mobility follows the same logic. Sprint, vault, and harpoon give Hornet a traversal vocabulary that the Knight took most of the first game to earn, and she has most of it early. Arenas are built for it — vertical, cluttered, full of surfaces to bounce off. When it clicks, the fights read like a fencing bout with a hardware upgrade. Few games in the genre fight this well.

The Difficulty Problem

Here’s where the praise needs a qualifier. Silksong‘s early hours are genuinely mistuned, and the patches admit it. Enemy damage is steep, benches are sparse, and the first tier of bosses assumes a fluency with Hornet’s kit that the game hasn’t taught you yet. A well-designed difficulty curve teaches through failure. Silksong‘s opening act frequently just fails you — you die, you walk back, you die again, and the thing you learned was “the walk back is long.”

Team Cherry’s post-launch checkpoint pacing changes helped. They did not solve it. There’s a difference between a game that is hard because mastery is the reward and a game that is hard because the friction between attempts is high, and Silksong spent its first weeks confusing the two. The bosses themselves are mostly superb — legible tells, fair patterns, that Team Cherry rhythm where the twentieth attempt feels different from the first. The connective tissue around them is what grinds.

Onboarding Friction

The quest system is a real improvement and a real half-measure. Pharloom’s inhabitants give you objectives, which is more direction than Hallownest ever offered — but the objectives are frequently vague enough that you’re back to the old Hollow Knight ritual of wandering until geography answers your question. That wandering is either the point or the tax, depending on the player — and it’s not only old-guard purists who find it a tax.

The map remains the series’ best idea. You explore blind, you find the cartographer, you buy the map, and the fog resolves. It rewards the specific pleasure of paying attention in a way that quest markers structurally cannot. The traversal is the game. Everything else is decoration on top of one of the best-drawn worlds anyone has built in two dimensions.

What It Asks Of You

Silksong is a game with a thesis: that friction is the point, that being lost is a feeling worth engineering, that a boss should cost you something. It mostly earns that thesis. But a thesis is not a permission slip, and there are stretches — particularly in its opening stretch — where the game mistakes hostility for rigor.

The hand-drawn art direction is the reason screenshots of this game circulate without captions. Pharloom’s regions have genuine identity — the moors are a study in fog and silhouette, the gilded cities are ornate to the point of oppression, and the shift from organic to architectural as you ascend does narrative work no cutscene could. Larkin’s score does the rest. It’s mournful where the original was eerie, and the difference matters: Hallownest was a tomb you were robbing, Pharloom is a body still twitching.

Performance shouldn’t be a worry on Steam: a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the engine is mature. The UI stays out of the way — sparse, diegetic, occasionally too sparse when you’re hunting for a tool’s cooldown state mid-fight.

Steam is the definitive version. Frame-rate headroom matters less than input latency here, and a wired controller on PC is the safer bet for Hornet’s parry and dash windows. In a game this precise, that gap decides whether a boss falls or eats a fifth attempt.

Nintendo Switch is the version we’d recommend to most people, with a caveat. Hollow Knight on Switch was a phenomenon precisely because handheld play suits the pick-up-die-retry rhythm, and Silksong inherits that. Docked, the art reads cleanly. Handheld, the density of Pharloom’s backgrounds occasionally works against readability on a small panel — telegraphs get lost in ornamentation, and in a game where reading a tell is survival, that’s a real cost.

Silksong is the rare sequel that risks its own audience. Team Cherry could have made Hollow Knight 2, sold a fortune, and nobody would have complained. Instead they built a faster, angrier, more demanding game around a protagonist who plays nothing like the one players spent the first game mastering — and then priced it like an indie afterthought.

It works. The combat is among the genre’s best, the world is a remarkable piece of craft, and the ascent structure gives the whole thing a forward momentum the original’s descent never had. What holds it back from a clean sweep is a difficulty curve that, in its first act, mistakes attrition for challenge — and the fact that Team Cherry patched it post-launch is the tell. They knew.

Buy it. Just know that the game does not care whether you finish it, and it will not apologize for that. For a certain kind of player, that’s exactly the point.