Review – Hollow Knight: Silksong for Nintendo Switch 2

Just over three weeks ago I began a review-in-progress of Hollow Knight: Silksong after having spent a little under ten hours playing. In the time since I’ve spent over 70 more hours with it, exploring far and wide across Pharloom. I’ve discovered a plethora of hidden areas and collectibles, fought hundreds of enemies, endured several difficult boss fights, and experienced all five endings that Hollow Knight: Silksong has to offer. I reached my final set of endings just moments ago, with 100% completion under my belt, and I have two thoughts to share before we dive any deeper: Hollow Knight: Silksong is a masterpiece, and I am extremely sad that it’s over.

I wanted to approach Silksong with a level head. I think that all too often a critic’s expectation of a game can cloud their judgement, and with a game as hotly anticipated as Silksong, that would be an easy thing to fall into. Yes I adored the original Hollow Knight, and I was very much looking forward to what Silksong had to offer, but I knew that I still had to find out if this was a good game underneath all the hype. With over 80 hours put into it, I feel that Silksong 100% stands on its own merits. It’s gorgeous, difficult, expansive, creative, and well written.

 

A Dark Ascent

 

I mentioned back in the first part of this review-in-progress that Silksong’s adventure felt more lighthearted than Hollow Knight’s. Having completed this journey I don’t know that “lighthearted” is quite the right assessment. Instead, Silksong’s world feels more immersive and the characters feel more connected. Where Hollow Knight has a silent protagonist, Silksong has Hornet, and she is far from silent. Hornet is extremely communicative with the characters that she comes across. She questions the information (or lack thereof) that she is given, she freely observes the good and bad qualities of the characters she comes across. As the game progresses she feels more responsible for the fate of Pharloom, and this shows in her dialogue. She becomes more confident and determined as she meets more of the kingdom’s residents. No, lighthearted isn’t the right word to describe Silksong, but it is warm and easy to fall into simply by virtue of how connected Hornet feels to the world, in spite of how dark the story of this world truly is.

 

 

You see, Pharloom is run by what is, for all intents and purposes, a megachurch known as the Citadel. Pilgrims gather to journey through Pharloom’s dangers in hopes of making it to the Citadel, to salvation. The problem is that much of Pharloom has fallen to disrepair and is in danger of declining further and further, and the decline is coming from the Citadel itself. The Citadel continues to operate as if nothing is wrong, and even bleeds the pilgrims dry with practices like making them pay the Citadel for the opportunity to rest on benches, or pay for the opportunity to “confess” only to be told that they “have confessed to a sin most grave and must by works cleanse yourself” no matter what they confess to. Meanwhile the Pharloom’s citizens and the Citadel’s followers continue to strive and die for some sort of holy reward in support of the very system that is causing the obvious decline of a once-great empire.

Pharloom’s grim reality feels timely as an apt metaphor for the state of the world today and I was incredibly impressed that Team Cherry succeeded at making it one of the central themes of the game without it feeling too on the nose. Once you reach Silksong’s second act, the horrors of the Citadel are made more apparent as you ascend to its peak, with grim reminders of how far this kingdom has fallen every step of the way. There’s even more to be said for the themes of Act 3, including the actions you must take to actually reach the particular ending that kicks off Act 3, which puts Hornet at the epicenter of events that leave Pharloom in even more dire straits than before, resulting in her feeling even more responsible for the fate of Pharloom and its citizens.

 

 

Smooth as Silk

 

Storytelling isn’t the only area in which Hollow Knight: Silksong excels. Team Cherry has outdone themselves with the actual design of Pharloom’s many, many areas. Silksong’s map is enormous and I couldn’t believe how many new areas I continued to discover almost to the very end of the game. Each one feels appropriately distinct and is home to its own flavor of platforming challenges alongside a variety enemy types with over 230 enemies to encounter and defeat. The types of tools and skills available to Hornet are also vast and varied, with a truly impressive array of options available to customize Hornet’s moves so that each player can tweak things to how they want to play the game. I spent the majority of my time with Silksong playing rather aggressively, using the Wanderer’s Crest, which causes Hornet’s base moveset to mimic Hollow Knight’s mechanics exactly, allowing me to swing my needle more often than any other crest, though the range of the hits suffered, meaning I had to get in nice and close to each enemy in order to dispatch them.

 

 

It should be said that it’s fairly clear that Silksong began life as Hollow Knight DLC when you look at the difficulty. This game feels tuned to players who recently spent hours beating Hollow Knight. Thankfully my muscle memory kicked in pretty quick and I was only struggling what felt like a normal amount rather than banging my head helplessly against a wall. That’s not to say that there weren’t bosses along the road that tested my patience. At least twice I had to set my Switch 2 down and walk away for the night when going against some late-game bosses, because I just simply got too frustrated. The relief I’d feel when finally beating those bosses immense, however, and most times I’d appreciate the way that the boss design taught me how to handle moves over time until, finally, something would just “click” and I’d progress through the fight in a kind of flow state that I can only describe as “the zone.”

Bosses aren’t all highly-difficult walls for players to overcome either, there are several unique bosses that wowed me with their mechanics and design. Some of my favorite fights in the game felt less than traditional, including a pair of clockwork soldiers that didn’t so much fight me as perform a choreographed dance around me while I tried to avoid their moves and do damage, or a large, burning effigy that never attacked directly and could only take damage from me striking six specific spots around the room, all in the air, so I had to find the correct order to destroy these weak points in order to still be able to acrobatically reach the other points and destroy them.

 

A Final Judgement

 

Silksong is a special game, and not only can you feel all seven years of work that Team Cherry spent working on it, it’s truly baffling that they were able to come up with, design, and implement every idea that Silksong contains in only seven years. The level of pride and polish is felt from the very first cutscene to the very end of the credits that roll after reaching one of the five endings. I don’t want my time with Silksong to be over but I truly have exhausted just about every avenue I can, other than working through speedruns or tackling the brutally crushing Steel Soul mode, which tasks players with completing the game without dying a single time. Hopefully there’s more Silksong in store from Team Cherry in the same way that Hollow Knight received a handful of updates, adding new content, new endings, and more. In the meantime, I’ll look back on my time in Pharloom fondly, still a little in disbelief that Hollow Knight: Silksong even exists.

 

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