Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s story continues Team Cherry’s narrative style from its first game, tucking bits of history and character development here and there. When you piece it all together, you’re left a little astounded over how something that started out so simple ended up being so important in the end. Like the rest of Silksong, almost every part of the story is better and more ambitious than its predecessor, with a strong central idea and a remarkable twist.
“Almost” is the key word, though. There’s just one big problem: Team Cherry can’t decide if the main character is Hornet or the player.
[Ed. note: The piece contains heavy spoilers for Silksong’s standard and true ending.]
Silksong starts with Hornet in a cage. The Weavers of Pharloom captured her on the bidding of Grand Mother Silk, the local god from whom Hornet is partly descended, but Hornet escapes and winds up with a bunch of nobodies starting a pilgrimage. Hornet travels from the hellish depths amid the piles of bone and corpses and gradually makes her way up to the Citadel, where Pharloom’s corrupt religious caste lives. Along the way, she bears witness to the cruelty and suffering the exploited masses endure in the name of so-called faith — the workers who give their lives so the Citadel bugs can live in comfort, the dissenters and “sinners” imprisoned for daring to think differently, and so on.
Lace, another Weaver born from Grand Mother Silk’s own silk (read: soul in Silksong-speak) is also ascending to the Citadel and plans to awaken her mother, take revenge on the ministers and choristers who imprisoned Mother Silk, and… well, that’s about as far as the plan goes, really. Hornet happens, and in the standard ending, takes over from Mother Silk. In the true ending, Hornet imprisons Mother Silk, ends up battling the Void (a recurring villainous entity of sorts from Hollow Knight), and frees Lace from the Void before Mother Silk sacrifices herself so they both can walk free.
Silksong is a pilgrimage story. “No shit,” I hear you say, but I don’t mean the obvious “everyone’s gone to the Citadel” part of it. I mean that it’s modeled after medieval pilgrimages and morality plays (stories about human struggles to be virtuous), with a Reformation-style critique of organized religion thrown in. Hornet’s journey — through a hellish underworld, to a middle layer full of people making the best of a bad situation, then ascending to the Citadel —parallels Dante’s The Divine Comedy. That piece of Renaissance literature follows a fictional version of Dante through hell, purgatory, and heaven on a pilgrimage of spiritual transformation and enlightenment, which is basically Silksong in a nutshell.
You could even make some strong connections to the Stations of the Cross, albeit out of order. Hornet is arrested and divested of everything, even her clothes; the Last Judge passes judgment on her; she faces a tortuous journey from the depths of Pharloom to her destiny; and if you make it to Act 3, she’s entombed in the abyss for a time.
In other words, Silksong definitely wants you to think about religion, spirituality, and transformation when you’re playing. All of that is necessary for understanding the game’s final act. If you dig into Hollow Knight and Silksong lore about the Weavers, the gist of it all is that the religion and way of life Mother Silk once championed has turned toxic. Her children abandoned her teachings, and a caste of self-interested ministers seized control of the Citadel, using its teachings for their own advantage. (Martin Luther would’ve loved Silksong.)
Hornet, as a part-Weaver descendant of Grand Mother Silk, was destined — pre-ordained, if you like — to follow the will of her “mother” whether she wanted to or not. Thanks to her real mother, Herrah, Hornet was raised outside of all the Weaver drama and taught to live for herself, hence why Mother Silk captures Hornet at the start of the game to make her live up to her Weaver-ly responsibilities (doing what Mother Silk demands).
If Hornet defeats Mother Silk in Act 2’s standard ending, she absorbs the deity’s spirit and becomes a new god. The fact that this isn’t the good or true ending makes it plain that Pharloom’s troubles would persist in this scenario. Hornet just swapped one corrupt deity for another. If you solve everyone’s problems in Pharloom, though, you unlock Act 3 and a true finale.
Like any good pilgrimage, this one ends with revelation and newfound purpose, though of a kind that would’ve made Good Medieval Christians wide-eyed with shock. Hornet’s discovery is that she can now live free of the Weaver taint in her blood, and choose a life she wants without Mother Silk’s influence. Lace, reminded that love is better than power and freed from her single-minded selfishness by Hornet, will, presumably, rebuild Pharloom in an image that’s better than Mother Silk’s. Religion is dead in the true ending. Everyone can live freely.
As a wrap-up to the pilgrimage story, it’s an exceptional bit of meta-storytelling that perfectly fits the traditions Silksong draws on. It’s telling players that the only way to change the world for the better is to care for the people around you. I can’t think of many other games that use that element of interactivity to deliver their main message in such a way, and Team Cherry deserves a lot of credit for such a thoughtful use of the medium.
For as well-crafted as Silksong‘s final message is, though, Team Cherry struggled to support it throughout the game and, more importantly, to link it to the adventure’s most important part: Hornet.
The message might be for you and me, but the story is about Hornet. When your narrative has a main character who talks and thinks independently of the player, they need to be the main focus, and their actions and growth are how you convey your message to the player. Even allegorical works like The Pilgrim’s Progress typically take great pains to make sure you know exactly who the main character is and what they represent, so you don’t miss the point of what happens to them in the end — the 17th-century equivalent of looking at the camera and explaining the subtext using only one-syllable words.
Hornet isn’t learning or changing on her journey. She has no purpose other than trying to get home. The conflict between free will and fate only shows up in that Act 2 boss fight and some hidden lore. If you tick all the boxes to unlock Silksong’s Act 3, the Songclave Caretaker remarks on how compassionate Hornet has been to the people of Pharloom, but he’s talking to you, not her.
That would’ve been fine in Hollow Knight, since you and the Knight are interchangeable. He’s a literal shell for you to fill. Hornet is her own person, though, a driven hunter with a single purpose. If you make her choose something she wouldn’t want to do normally, like going out of her way to help wimpy bugs, there should at least be some element of friction. You’d expect her to complain about it, to be gruff and unpleasant, or to do something. It could just be as simple as having her grumble about donating rosary beads the first time she accepts such a request and then, later in the game when she donates more, hoping it does the poor bugs some good.
When she’s first asked to help out Pharloom’s wimpy bugs, she responds with indifference. She presents it as a low priority that maybe she’ll get to if she has time. Even if you do choose to help them as a player, Hornet develops no particular attachment to any of them during the story. There’s no transformation, no difference in perspective. Nothing. It’s remarkable that the player would show so much care and attention for the lowly bugs of Pharloom, sure, but not for Hornet. Silksong gives us no reason to think it would be.
Hornet’s interactions with characters like the Caretaker were the perfect way to develop her personality, for Silksong‘s themes to have the impact they deserve without the main story having to explore them. Most of these end up just being ornamental, though, just here to fill space. That problem is born as much from the way Hornet is written as it is with the haphazard role Silksong’s other characters play. Garmond is essentially King Pellinore from T.H. White’s Arthurian classic The Once and Future King: a doddering, lovable old so-and-so who’s fond of a good duel and looks nice in the background, but plays no vital role in proceedings. Some of them are evocative, like the Moss Druid and Huntress, who both embody belief systems and lifestyles outside the Citadel’s norms. But even though that concept fits so well with Silksong‘s themes, it goes nowhere.
Aside from Lace and Sherma, one of the only characters whose story runs through all three acts is The Green Prince, thanks to the tale of his dead lover. It’s a strong story, even if it does lean too heavily into the “bury your gays” trope. (Queer romances don’t have to end in tragedy, Team Cherry!) But despite the pair being wrapped up in Pharloom’s history, the narrative thread is so disconnected from everything else that if you remove it from Silksong, it has no effect on Hornet’s story or the central message.
The seemingly haphazard way Silksong decides who gets the most attention in the game makes the side stories feel incomplete and tacked on, but the biggest misstep is that they cast Hornet as a passive participant in almost every case. The few times she does speak up to encourage change of any kind or express an opinion, the observations she makes are terribly bland, like when she essentially tells Sherma “Hey kid, actions speak louder than words” once the remarkable little guy makes it past the Last Judge. Hell, even the chance for her to make more of those on-the-nose remarks about oppression and free will would’ve at least linked her more closely to Silksong‘s themes. Instead, she’s just along for the ride — in the passenger seat of her own story.
For all my issues with Silksong‘s confusion over how to handle its own themes, I still respect what Team Cherry did here. Few other games synthesize so many influences and end up with a set of themes so strong and multilayered that they’re literally built into the in-game map. If Team Cherry’s next project is even bigger and better than what came before, I just hope those improvements include the fundamentals of its storytelling, too.
