Hollow Knight: Silksong review – gaming’s most celebrated bug

Hollow Knight: Silksong – incy wincy Metroidvania (Team Cherry)

The most anticipated indie game of all time had turned the internet upside down even before it was released, but does the sequel to Hollow Knight live up to the hype?

Hollow Knight was an unassuming 2D Metroidvania game released in 2017 – to little fanfare other than from its Kickstarter backers – that then went on to sell an astonishing 15 million copies. Admittedly, the overwhelming majority of those were bought after the announcement of its sequel, but since that happened back in 2019, it’s had quite some time to notch up additional sales, in advance of Silksong’s release.

That extended period of anticipation has been driving some online commentators practically insane, the game’s vibrant Reddit community buoyed by years of ‘silkposting’ and memes, until the excitable buzz became a wave of hype big enough to disrupt Steam and console storefronts, none of which managed to adhere to last Thursday’s 3pm release time.

It’s heartening that the game’s more than six year gestation period hasn’t been marked by the video game industry’s usual mores of crunch and grinding overwork, in fact quite the reverse. According to Team Cherry’s co-founder Ari Gibson: ‘We’ve been having fun. This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.’

Originally and confidently expected in 2023, Silksong’s extra two years have apparently been spent polishing and refining. It may just be a 2D platform game at heart, but it’s had so much attention lavished on it, that everything from the multiple layers of parallax in its backgrounds and foregrounds to the little song that its cartographer sings as she patiently waits for you to buy a new map, feel like miniature labours of love – taking their places both in the game you play and the fictional ecosystem in which it takes place.

Like Hollow Knight, Silksong is all about insects, even if your character, Hornet, actually appears to be a spider. Plenty of the denizens of the deep you meet call her one, and she spins silk to both heal and perform certain attacks. Still, most of the enemies you fight, and friends you make amongst the villagers and pilgrims on their way to the Great Citadel, are different varieties of insect, albeit often with big white cartoon skulls grafted onto them, like invertebrates designed by Tim Burton.

Hollow Knight’s Soulsborne influences are also still readily apparent. That includes the way resting both recharges health and respawns minor enemies; the way you learn through repeatedly being killed, leaving your treasure where you died, thereby forcing you to return to the spot to reclaim it; and, of course, the ever present threat that even lowly cannon fodder can quite easily kill you if you’re careless.

It also has the imaginative and savagely difficult boss fights so beloved of FromSoftware. These battles aren’t easy, but for the most part they are at least fair. Each takes a significant amount of learning to memorise attack patterns and your response to them, but once you know what you’re doing all that’s usually required is accuracy and patience. Getting greedy and stealing an extra hit when the big beast you’re fighting is vulnerable can, as ever, be your undoing.

The difficulty is also slightly eased by Hornet’s gradually expanding skillset. Part of the magic of Hollow Knight was the way you found your way around its maps – once you’d purchased them, of course. And so it is with Silksong. Unlike most Metroidvanias, that have a distinctly binary feel, and where unlocking a skill suddenly gives you access to a new chunk of its biomes, Silksong manages to make the whole process feel much more organic.

Instead of it being obvious what you’ve gained, new skills take time to suss out, and it’s often only later that you realise there are ways of applying them that weren’t immediately evident. One of the first skills you unlock is dash, which lets Hornet sprint for as long as you like, compressing traversal times. It’s incredibly useful in battles, letting you quickly dip out of the way, or close gaps with a boss, and also in reaching platforms that were previously just out of reach of your jump.

Silksong retains Hollow Knight’s ability to use the materials you collect either to fuel stronger attacks or heal, making its use tactical. It introduces a continual series of choices into battles. On the occasions you choose healing you’ll find that process takes a second or two, during which you’re vulnerable, making the whole enterprise fraught with danger.

The boss battles are just as hard as you’d expect (Team Cherry)

On the exploration front, you’ll regularly find that rather than having just one place where you’re attempting to make progress, you actually have three or four leads you could pursue. It means getting catastrophically stuck on a boss doesn’t reduce you to a standstill, instead redirecting your efforts to another part of the map, where you might even unlock a skill that would mitigate the difficulty of that boss.

Much of the game’s challenge comes from platforming rather than fighting, though. The realisation in Hollow Knight, that you could nail jump, performing a diving attack to bounce off otherwise lethal spikes, was a two-part revelation. Firstly, that pulling it off even once seemed like a miracle and, secondly, the sense of disbelief when you realise that once is nowhere near enough, and that you’re expected to learn and repeat the move as part of your standard repertoire for traversal.

In Silksong, your downward attack is no longer vertical but diagonal and the moment you, once again, discover that it will regularly be needed to pogo your way to otherwise inaccessible parts of its maps, is a sobering one. As before, it’s intensely difficult getting it to work consistently, and while it is eventually possible after a great deal of practise, it still feels hit and miss, although naturally your skills do improve as the hours tick by.

In a typically idiosyncratic move, there’s a crest you can unlock after its own fairly labyrinthine side quest that, when equipped, makes Hornet’s dive attack vertical again, even if by that point in the game you may well feel quite at home with the slanted dive. Still, for Hollow Knight fans who can’t seem to get to grips with the new system, it remains an option.

If all this sounds like an extension rather than a reinvention of Hollow Knight, that would be wholly accurate. Silksong began life as downloadable content for the original game, before getting so out of hand that it became a separate title in its own right. It means that while Hornet’s movement and attacks feel palpably different, the world she inhabits and the way she interacts with it are warmly familiar.

The same’s true of its glorious, slightly melancholic art style, and its twilit underworld setting. Along with high levels of polish and an uncompromising philosophy of not mollycoddling players, Hollow Knight’s personality was derived not from innovation, but from its distinctive and refined take on systems that were already well explored.

Hollow Knight was a big game whose level of challenge certainly wasn’t for everyone, and Silksong is, if anything, slightly harder. The upside is that you genuinely do feel pride and accomplishment at opening a fresh portion of the map, following a particularly relentless boss fight. The downside is that if you’re busy with work, have a family to take care of, or simply don’t want to spend hours of your life repeatedly running through the same set of corridors to get back to a boss who kills you in seconds, there are legitimate complaints about this feeling a little too ruthless at times.

Silksong repeatedly dares you to rage quit. Not once or twice, but over and over again, from it’s uncompromising bosses to the horrors of pogo jumping between small orange buds, to the long runs back from a save bench to repeat the same crazily punishing encounter. And the fact that the game’s first patch reduced the difficulty of two especially brutal early bosses is proof that Team Cherry know they overstepped the mark in a few places.

If you do have the time, there’s a kind of video game Stockholm Syndrome that kicks in. Even though it continually abuses your patience and time, you find yourself drawn back to it. The artistry and the polish, and the fact that all impossibilities can be overcome if you have the endurance to meet its standards, are alluring in a way that few games manage. If you’re the right sort of masochist, Silksong is heavenly.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £15.99
Publisher: Team Cherry
Developer: Team Cherry
Release Date: 4th September 2025
Age Rating: 7

If it a first you don’t succeed (Team Cherry)

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