Hollow Knight: Silksong review: A game that intends to make you suffer, even to its own detriment

Hollow Knight: Silksong has had a unique journey on its way to release, thanks to the perfect storm of its status as a follow-up to an indie darling, its seven-year development cycle, and a fanbase that grew increasingly rabid with every passing years’ absence.

The seven years of creation and refinement are immediately clear upon just looking at the game’s art design. The world of Pharloom is absolutely stunning — Team Cherry has built upon the haunting beauty of Hallownest by expanding outwards into a biome-spanning spectrum of colour palettes and tones. The overgrown forest of Mosshome is somehow just minutes away from the grim storms of Greymoor, resting above the burning factories of the Deep Docks and crushed beneath the gilded cage of The Citadel.

The gorgeous layering, parallax scrolling, and meticulously placed background details in every area imply incredible scale and depth to Pharloom, creating a world that feels as tangible as it does threatening. The composition and sound design play no small part in creating each area’s particular and defining vibe, with wistful strings and the stirring of Pharloom itself following Hornet across its sprawling landscape. So much care and effort has been put into every single room, every single separate area of the gargantuan map, and it never ceases to impress even many hours in.

Like Hollow Knight before, the animations of Hornet and every single bug, bell, and silk-powered bot in the game are a pleasure to look at. Hornet’s graceful movement and attacks are a masterclass in gorgeous motion and responsive control, with every input flowing cleanly into one another – the joy of movement only heightens with the gradual unlocks of her dash, float, and wall jump abilities, giving a sense of freedom and precision to maneuvering around Pharloom. Her diagonal dive slash differs from the Knight’s wide swing and takes some getting used to, but once you get it down, bouncing off of enemies and environments alike is like walking on air.

But what of the much-discussed difficulty? Some examples of the game’s punishing difficulty, like the imposing Last Judge and graceful Cogwork Dancer bosses, feel like fair challenges of mechanical skill and memorisation, putting your grasp of Hornet’s movement and reactions to bosses’ learned attack patterns to the test.

Others, such as enemy contact, almost every attack, and most environmental hazards dealing two masks of damage — Hornet starts with only five precious masks of life — alongside the arduous, several-minute-long runbacks to several bosses due to cruel bench placements, are closer to making the player suffer just for the sake of living up to the ‘Soulslike experience’.

What worsens this is the nature of most encounters as sheer endurance tests. Very few of the combat challenges in Silksong are short frenetic engagements; instead, they’re drawn-out battles of attrition due to the incredibly high health of bosses and elite enemies alike, the latter of which you’ll frequently find yourself trapped in a gauntlet fighting several waves of. Rarely is Silksong actually testing your skills — it’s testing your patience.

“What worsens this is the nature of most encounters as sheer endurance tests… Rarely is Silksong actually testing your skills — it’s testing your patience.”

The infamous bench within Hunter’s March is a microcosm of Silksong’s uniquely tiring brand of deliberate cruelty: a safe refuge after an extended series of increasingly difficult platforming and combat challenges ending in a tough gauntlet that likely leaves you with low health — except, unlike every other bench in the game, this one breaks Silksong’s own rules of safety and swings a deadly spike trap at you upon sitting down. It’s not reactable unless you know it’s there, and it’s very unlikely for a player to be looking for the well-hidden trap mechanism amongst the greenery in the ceiling.

Being forced to make the trudge back through the March after almost certainly dying on your first visit isn’t engaging or motivating; it’s just a bore. There’s nothing inherently wrong with designing a game to make the player suffer, but there has to be more engaging approaches than empty time-wasting and pace-damaging sadism. I have to wonder what would be lost if Hornet simply respawned outside a boss or gauntlet arena upon death, and I’m coming up short.

The consequence of punishing design like this is that exploration more often feels terrifying than exciting, with your brain firmly grasping onto the memory of how long ago the last bench was rather than wondering what new discovery could lie past the next secretly breakable wall — a feeling entirely antithetical to the Metroidvania genre. The preciousness of rosaries, the game’s currency, contributes to this too.

Unless you’ve stocked up on strings to keep your loose currency together, the fear of losing them all by dying on your way back to a cocoon will be at the forefront of your mind, especially with how few are given out for the majority of the runtime (without grinding, of course).

As such, you’re encouraged to repeatedly fast travel back to one of the few vendors who sell them or machines that string them up whenever you’re carrying too many, breaking the flow of exploration. Grinding for currency and worrying about a stingy economy feels alien to the adventurous spirit of a Metroidvania, and is another example of Soulslike genre norms poisoning what could have been a freeing cycle of exploration.

Aspects auxiliary to the main exploration and combat loop, such as side quests and Hornet’s customisable equipment, are also a little underbaked. Side quests come in the form of Wishes, requests from various bugs and pilgrims for Hornet to help out their corner of Pharloom. The small bits of characterisation and humour that these grant to the citizens are the highlights of Team Cherry’s writing, but in practice, they’re often little more than ‘Kill x amount of this enemy’.

“The consequence of punishing design like this is that exploration more often feels terrifying than exciting, with your brain firmly grasping onto the memory of how long ago the last bench was”

On your travels, you’ll acquire various tools and Crests, either through finding them in hidden rooms or as Wish rewards, to make Hornet’s playstyle your own. Offensive tools offer variation and ranged utility in combat, deploying gadgets like floating spike traps or firebombs alongside needle and silk attacks, but for every Warding Bell that substantively alters the risk-reward of healing mid-combat and creates interesting player choice, there’s a Compass.

It’s a baffling decision to include in a toolset with limited slots, as there is no reason you would ever unequip it, effectively removing one customisable slot from Hornet’s tool pouch entirely. One small light in the bell-buried darkness are the Crests: these completely alter Hornet’s moveset and silk abilities, making us approach combat differently after spending much of the game with the same few attacks — the Wanderer’s Crest even brings back the Knight’s simple downward swing for those struggling with Hornet’s finicky pogo angles.

After all of this, with the end in sight, Silksong threw a curveball that ground the pace to a halt and destroyed all excitement I held to complete the game. A sudden, mandatory fetch quest drags Hornet around mostly the same area Act 2 has been limited to for the past five to ten hours, just to earn permission to reach the final boss. It’s a disappointing pace-breaker to close an already inconsistently paced game out on, and recalls the much-maligned Artifact hunt at the end of Metroid Prime — a mistake that should never be repeated.

In so many cases, it seems Team Cherry was so insistent on making the game double down on the difficulty and player suffering of its predecessor, that this tunnel vision obscured lessons that should have been learned from Metroidvanias past. What’s especially unfortunate is that said difficulty is rarely interesting or rewarding, creating few feelings of accomplishment and instead just filling us with a tired, hollow relief that it’s over.

The Soulslike and Metroidvania genres that Silksong is attempting to bind together are fundamentally at odds with each other, with the necessary staples of each actively damaging the other half to end up with a lesser whole – Silksong ends up a playable identity crisis.