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Hollow Knight: Silksong
game
•7/15/2026

Hollow Knight: Silksong

byTeam Cherry
SteamNintendo Switch
9.2
The Verdict
"Silksong is the rare sequel that risks its own audience. Team Cherry could have made Hollow Knight 2, sold ten million copies, and nobody would have complained. Instead they built a faster, angrier, more demanding game around a protagonist who plays nothing like the one you spent 40 hours mastering — and then priced it like an indie afterthought." "It works. The combat is the best the genre has produced, the world is a career-defining 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. Some of us have been waiting seven years for exactly that."

Gallery

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Key Features

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 genuinely change how a fight or a room reads.
Scope: 200+ distinct enemies and 40+ 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 the people who finished and thought that was fine, I guess.

The Good

Best-in-class combat built around aggression, not attrition
Enormous, dense world — 40+ bosses that mostly justify themselves
Art and score that outclass anything else in the genre
Crafting/tools system adds real strategic depth
Priced far below what the scope warrants

The Bad

Early-game difficulty is genuinely mistuned, not just demanding
Long treks between benches punish experimentation
Quest direction is vague enough to become a wiki tax
Handheld readability suffers against busy backgrounds
Assumes fluency it hasn't taught in the opening hours

In-Depth Review

I'll write this review now — no tooling needed, this is a writing task with the research already provided.

Bottom Line: Team Cherry spent seven years building a game that is bigger, faster, and meaner than Hollow Knight — and mostly better for it, provided you can stomach a difficulty curve that starts as a wall and only occasionally becomes a staircase.

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 a playthrough 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. This is the best combat in the genre right now, full stop.

The Difficulty Problem

Here's where I stop cheerleading. 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. Some players love that. The complaint shows up often enough in the review corpus that it's clearly not just old-guard purists.

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 the first ten hours — where the game mistakes hostility for rigor.

Editorial Disclaimer

The reviews and scores on this site are based on our editorial team's independent analysis and personal opinions. While we strive for objectivity, gaming experiences can be subjective. We are not compensated by developers for these scores.