Hollow Knight: Silksong is an unreasonable game. Like a matador waving a muleta at an incensed bull, it is a game that evokes a sharp fury. It’s a dare that players answer through impressive leaps, spectacular confrontations, and peregrine ambition. But Silksong refuses to be conquered, and will only yield long enough to hold up a mirror to its beholder.
I’ve spent close to 60 hours in Silksong, and were it not for this review, I’d probably have given up hours ago. Such was the rhythm of my playthrough of the original Hollow Knight: a game played in spurts, once the flow of time had washed away whatever reason made me put it down in the first place. I suspect that a significant proportion of the time I’ve spent in Silksong was not, in fact, playing Silksong.
It’s hours of me, thumbs raw and raging, silently screaming. Hours of looking up advice, commiserating with strangers over an unusually cruel misery. Hours of deep inhales. Hours of trying to convince myself I could do it; hours of wondering if any of it was worth doing at all. Sitting with yourself, whether in disbelief or submission, is an intrinsic part of the Silksong experience.
A bleak world
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a Metroidvania roiled in mystery. You play as Hornet, a cross between an insect and a god, who has been dragged into a kingdom haunted by the effects of capitalism. The bugs in the lower caste work endlessly, faithful that the sheen of their toil will make them worthy of ascension. Their labor is in service to the Citadel, a holy city that attracts pilgrims. Most will never cross the Citadel’s gates, and they’re not meant to. Pharloom is a antagonistic world that gleefully tears its citizens into shreds. Those unlucky enough to survive are eventually infected by silk, an ethereal substance that binds bugs into eternal servitude. The denizens of Pharloom are thus stuck in a mindless haze that turns them hostile whenever their work is interrupted, which Hornet will do often.
IRL parallels abound here, but Silksong never gets heavy-handed in its delivery. This is a bleak world that reinforces its own brutality in passing, like when Silksong asks the player to pay for every single save bench inside of Citadel, a supposed land of plenty. These are simple yet effective story beats that are delivered sparsely, through item descriptions and bits hidden throughout the world. You don’t need to engage with the narrative aspect of the game at all, nor do you need experience with the game’s predecessor. Even the lore freaks who know the original Hollow Knight’s endings by heart are still trying to suss out Silksong’s meaning.
Ultimately, the game doesn’t need to waste any time spelling things out for you. Pharloom’s ambiance is akin to being at a thrift store where even the most ordinary of objects suggest a life just beyond the frame. These are handcrafted, gorgeous visuals that make it obvious why Silksong took seven years to craft. Mossy overgrowth clinging to abandoned stone, the sad drizzle of rain and fog descending on a graveyard, the golden hue of cogwork machinery: Silksong’s aesthetics and sense of place are an evocative powerhouse.
The love and care Team Cherry has poured into Silksong’s style is most evident through the characters themselves. Fleas, moths, anthropods, arachnids: Silksong’s taxonomy makes for a singular world, at once believable and alien. These are endearing creatures, surviving in a world designed to crush them. Even as tragedy and sorrow lurk in the shadows, their mere existence kindles a flickering ember of hope. It’s beauty like this that makes the act of routing a path through Silksong’s disorienting maze all the more bearable, and that’s especially true during portions of the game where exploration produces scant rewards.
On a mechanical level, the game is a kinetic marvel. Though you may not have all of them at the start, the core verbs you’d expect in a platformer are here; jump, dash, hover, and so on. These are basic actions on their face, but implemented the complexity and finesse worthy of seminal games like Super Mario 64. Dozens of hours in, I’m still constantly in awe over the jumps I can engineer based on subtle differences in button presses and stick tilts.
Hornet may be a demi-god of sorts, but she’s still a fragile little bugger. Her primary weapon is a needle with the pinpoint precision of a rapier. Combined with her acrobatic arsenal of movement, combat is designed to be a sophisticated gavotte. Like fencing, but more thrilling. Much of this has to do with Silksong’s controversial damage and healing mechanics. At the start, Hornet can endure about three consecutive hits from enemies and environmental hazards. No matter how much I improved at the game or upgraded Hornet’s abilities and health, damage always accrued quickly.
Even the most basic of enemies seem to have been designed in anticipation of how a player might approach the encounter. If a flying enemy swoops in, your impulse might be to jump up to avoid it. Except, of course, attack animations tend to follow the specific trajectories a player might pursue in a panic. The correct answer is almost always the exact opposite of whatever your impulse might be, like dashing toward an enemy rather than away from it.
I spent a significant portion of the game nearly dead, hands sweating in anxious palpitation. In the heat of the moment, my looming sense of mortality was torturous. Silksong makes it so Hornet accumulates silk with every attack, however, and once she fills up her gauge, the player can heal themselves. Healing takes a few seconds to power up, but Hornet can pull it off even mid-jump. The combination of constant close calls, interspersed with tide-turning palliative measures, made for exhilarating moments of pure adrenaline.
Expectations upended
Nothing I’ve played this year has reached Silksong’s high of being in the final phases of a boss fight, Hornet visibly slumping in pain, and pulling off an unlikely heal. Then again, nothing I’ve played this year has matched the lows that come with dying repeatedly to common enemies and bosses alike.
Silksong is deeply in conversation with platforming and Metroidvanias as a genre, and defies those conventions with verve. Here is the source of friction players are ardently grappling with in public through the ongoing debates about the game’s difficulty. That outcry is steeped in a feeling of betrayal: Team Cherry has a keen understanding of what fans expect, and Silksong uses that knowledge to break an unspoken contract.
A boss battle is supposed to have three rounds of stagger, and a handful of different phases at most. The reward – and there is always a reward – must be consummate with the imposed challenge. The game can be tough, but only if it feels fair. Players should feel empowered, and, failing that, should have fun.
There are a litany of axioms, some accrued over a lifetime of experiences with games, which many of us use as a barometer for whether a game is “good.” They are the “quality of life” design decisions that a developer might highlight during a talk at a conference about maximizing player engagement.
As far as I can tell, Team Cherry cares for none of that. Silksong will place a frustrating boss fight that lasts longer than it should after a section of onerous platforming that you’ll have to repeat every time you retry the battle. And you’ll retry that showdown for hours. You will spend ages attempting to topple a boss only to have it blow up at the end of the fight, taking you with it. This will then force you to do it all over again. You lost, sucker! Silksong will offer a save station only after you’ve already explored most of a new area, when it is the least useful, and it’ll charge you for the privilege. Silksong will make demand after demand only to unceremoniously kill you anyway, just when you thought you were safe.
Silksong’s challenge borders on barbaric. The closest parallel I can think of is Infinite Jest, an infamous tome whose mere construction acts as a deterrence. To read it is to spend most of your time feeling lost. Most people who try it will never finish the book. David Foster Wallace was entrenched so deeply in his own BS that he’d spend entire chapters describing upsetting or absurd events, like wheelchair assassins shoving a broomstick up a man’s ass. He nestled critical plot points in the middle of footnotes that the reader may well glaze over after being tricked one too many times into reading an entire page’s worth of bone-dry medical terms.
But no matter how much the book might seem to want to troll you, DFW didn’t feel disdain for his readers. The opposite, really. Much of the late author’s life was spent in an earnest attempt to combat cynicism and self-centered entertainment. The point of Infinite Jest wasn’t to vex the reader, at least not entirely, but to challenge our notion of what a novel should be and to encourage self-reflection on how we consume entertainment.
This is how I’ve made sense of Silksong’s predilection for ‘runbacks,’ which refer to strips of the game a player must traverse before taking on a boss. Many modern games, including the notoriously difficult Souls games, have all but done away with runbacks. The encounter itself might be insufferable, but the upshot is that most games will plop the player somewhere near the boss battle after they die.
Silksong does not do this. Every boss I’ve fought requires some type of runback, and the farther you get into the game, the more elaborate these become. There are portions of the game where the platforming itself is as difficult as the boss battle. In practice, this can mean that by the time you crawl back to the boss room, Hornet might be hanging on by a thread of health. That’s if you get through at all. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time in Silksong just completely tilted, reduced to a total stereotype of an angry gamer.
Is Silksong inherently a worse game because of this design choice? If you look at it from the perspective of approachability, with the assumption that players should be able to make reasonable progress with enough effort, sure. It’s not “good game design.” By that same measure, it strikes me just how restrictive my notions of what a game “should” do truly are. Somewhere down the line, I’ve conflated convenience and comfort with quality.
Games can be art under this framework, but let’s be real. The primary function of a game designed around the wants and needs of the player is entertainment. In the case of Silksong, what began as a passion project for a tiny studio in Australia exploded well beyond its originally intended audience. The first Hollow Knight began as a Kickstarter project with a mere 2,158 backers; the game has since gone on to sell 15 million copies. The price of that exposure is pressure to conform and to become digestible.
To not buckle under those expectations is remarkable and a testament to Team Cherry’s clear-eyed creative vision. I say that as someone who very well may never be able to beat Silksong, and in spite of the small tuning patch the game received a week after its release. Conviction like this is increasingly becoming a rarity for games with this type of reach. For all the grousing, even Souls games don’t intentionally inconvenience the player nearly as much as Silksong dares to. Coincidentally, Souls games like Elden Ring have never been more popular than they are now. The older ones, the ones that made Souls games into cult darlings, are transgressive in the same way Silksong is. You can’t talk about Dark Souls 2 without also talking about those awful runbacks, for example. Diehards will argue that’s the best one.
Run it back
There’s lots I haven’t touched on in this review, like Silksong’s upgrade system, Hornet’s roster of tools, and the quest system. Truthfully, these are the least interesting parts of the game. Generally speaking, no matter what Hornet equips or how she develops her powers, her abilities will never make her next hurdle any easier. At best, new abilities equip Hornet to go back and discover more pathways. Sometimes, these new areas will bestow new powers upon the player.
More often than not, whatever awaits you at the end of the new path you’ve opened will feel disappointing. You could spend hours traipsing an impossible expanse only to find a poem or a meager cache of resources. You have to do it for the love of the game, if you can muster it. I can’t help but chuckle at the thematic irony here. I spent a lot of Silksong shaking my head at the misguided devotion of the Pilgrims. Yet there I was, extolling suffering as virtue. Surely this time, a small voice in my head thought, my efforts would be recognized materially.
The Silksong experience transcends that which you control on the screen. It is internal work and therefore infinitely more daunting than anything the game could possibly throw at you. You will die repeatedly. You will get angry. Your anger will envelop you like a toxic sludge. Things might deteriorate enough that you’ll suddenly become worse at the game. Perhaps you might wonder if Silksong is something you’ll ever be able to beat.
The thing about those runbacks is that, if you do them enough times, at a certain point you have to confront some ugly truths about yourself. Like: I’m impatient. I want to speed things up, and my approach becomes greedy. I move without intention. I’m ruled by impulse and fear, and these tendencies blind me to extremely obvious boss calls. I’m doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
At a certain point, what seems unfair turns out to be edifying. That part of the level that began as an exasperating exercise in futility becomes second nature. Whatever I was cursing to hell and back turns out to be something I can overcome after all.
“You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place,” David Foster Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest. He’s talking about tennis here, but I can’t help but think about Silksong in a similar context.
“It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…”
In Silksong, there’s always a new horror that will replace whatever last vexed you. You could become discouraged, and likely, you will, at least for a while. Eventually, though, you’ll tap into one unassailable truth: you are capable of more than you realize.
