My time with Hollow Knight: Silksong…

I love this game when I’m exploring... and I hate this game during runbacks to the bosses.

There is so much to love about this game; it continues the worldbuilding, the art style, and the beautiful music from Hollow Knight. I will not be able to get Cogwork Core out of my head for at least the next seven years, until Hollow Knight 3 comes out.

There is something to be said, though, for the continuing presence of people online lamenting about how hard this game is. And as I’m sitting at the bench for the ninth time, preparing for the run back to fight five waves of enemies and then a giant ball with a tiny mask on their head, I understand.

I was late to the party with Hollow Knight because I saw all the talk online about how hard that game was, so I didn’t get it for a few years. When I did finally play it, I of course fell in love. It was hard, as I hadn’t played any metroidvanias as a kid, nor did I play many FromSoftware games that would have prepared me for the level of continue, live, death, rebirth that would occur. I did play a lot of Crash Bandicoot games, so I wasn’t unprepared.

I finished the game once, and just the first ending, not what people describe as the “true ending” or the Godhome alternative ending. I do not know when I’ll try for these endings. I’m currently at a point in a save where I can go either way, but then I bought Silksong and here I am, staring at Hornet casually sitting on a secret bench in one of the already most hated areas in the game.

When people bring up issues with Silksong, there seems to be a few camps; the first being that the difficulty is too dang high, another is the balancing feels off, and another is the game feels different to the first game. And to be fair, they are all correct. It is harder, the balance feels almost mean sometimes, and the fact that it feels like the setting theme is “the place is ruined, and we’re all born to march towards our death, and capitalism is here” feels somewhat more poignant for today than Hallownest’s most destroyed city.

The first game feels like you’re exploring an ancient civilisation that has been paved over by a newer civilisation that had just fallen. Silksong feels like you’re visiting a monument to the greatness of a civilisation that, underneath the surface, is just feeding its people into the chipper.

So it’s harsh. The game is harsh, and it shows down to every detail. The game is harder because Team Cherry clearly wanted the player to feel the weight of what was happening. If it was easy, I don’t know if you would feel as much for the other inhabitants who are climbing up to the citadel (with no weapons!). So I get it. I need to be smacked every 30 seconds by a new contender for why the entire community hates flying enemies in Hollow Knight.

I do wish the game was maybe like, 80% of the difficulty that it was set as. Because, to be honest, the parts of this game I hate the most are when you are just waiting to finish the fight. When you have the moves down, you know the movements and the signposting the boss will make, and you just get your digital butt handed to you again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again (I feel like my point was made by the fourth “again”… Team Cherry?!).

I also want to be clear: I am well into my first playthrough. I’m at the point where I just need to take a ride down in a giant bell to get on to the endgame. I want to finish with the big ending, and I’m wondering if I want to do that because I don’t know if I’ll play this game again after that for a while.

Starting again in Hollow Knight felt jarring, because you lose so much of your movement and spells, but you feel like it won’t be long until you have a fighting chance. I worry that the gap to get back to feeling confident again in Silksong is much longer.

I think what really cements this feeling that this game might be a little, maybe a minuscule amount, too hard is hearing speedrunners and veterans talk about how hard some of the boss fights are. When you have the best of the best in the community say that it may take them longer than normal to be able to absolutely body bosses, you know there may be a tiny issue.

I don’t want to end this on a negative, so let’s talk about the best part of this game for me: Swift Step. The second I got this and was able to just leg it all over the map, I knew I would love exploring in the game. I have a guess that maybe this skill was designed with speedrunners in mind and/or allowing the runbacks to not feel like an absolute pain. Either way, it just makes exploring the map so satisfying (with some worm-infested exceptions).

I’m also not using the map as much in Silksong as I did in Hollow Knight. Because you kind of need to lock in when sprinting, and this makes you pay more attention. I feel like you create main routes in your head between locations. Think of it like knowing the main streets of a city, the ones you use the most. You have those in your head, and then you use GPS if you need to go somewhere outside of those lines.

In the end though, I do recommend the game. It’s a brilliant piece of art. Me not thinking it could be a little bit easier doesn’t mean it isn’t a perfect game. Because it kind of is, it just feels like a single tweak would deliver the same result, just quicker.