Overview
Few games have carried the weight of expectation that Hollow Knight: Silksong has. Team Cherry announced it in 2019, and in the years that followed, the silence became its own genre of internet humor. Release-date rumors, false alarms, and a fanbase that learned to joke about its own desperation all turned a sequel into a myth. A game that has been mythologized for that long has two ways to fail: by being too safe, or by collapsing under the hype.
Silksong does neither. It is a larger, meaner, and more mechanically restless game than the original, and it knows exactly who it is for.
You play as Hornet, the needle-wielding protector who spent the first game as a sharp-tongued side character. She is captured and carried to Pharloom, a vertical kingdom ruled by silk, song, and an obsessive devotion to pilgrimage. The setup is thin on purpose. Team Cherry still prefers to let environments, item descriptions, and stray NPC dialogue do the storytelling, so the lore rewards the player who pokes into every corner.
The structural change is immediate. Hornet is faster and more acrobatic than the Knight, and the game is built around that. She lunges, clings to walls, and later floats and swings across gaps. Combat is more aggressive and rhythmic, and the world is designed for momentum rather than careful plodding.
How It Plays
The central mechanic is Silk, a resource you build by hitting enemies. Spend it to Bind, which heals Hornet, or to fire off Silk Skills, which function as special attacks. This ties healing directly to offense, so you cannot hide and recover. If you want to mend your wounds, you have to be in the fight first, then make a risky decision about when to stop swinging and start stitching.
That tension is the heart of the moment-to-moment loop, and it works. Every encounter becomes a small negotiation between greed and survival. Binding at the wrong moment gets you hit mid-animation. Not binding at all means you are fighting at a fraction of your health with silk to spare, which is its own kind of mistake.
Crests are the other big system. These are equippable class-like loadouts that change Hornet’s attack pattern, her slot layout for upgrades, and how she handles the vertical space around her. The default Hunter Crest is a solid all-rounder, while others lean toward speed, reach, or specialized playstyles. Swapping crests is one of the better ways the game lets you respond to a boss or rethink an area you are stuck in.
Then there are tools. Hornet carries throwables, traps, and utility items that you craft and refill using shards and Rosaries, the in-game currency. A well-timed tool can open a boss fight or cancel a nasty enemy pattern. A poorly managed supply of them leaves you underequipped halfway through a long run. It is a resource game layered on top of a precision platformer, and it asks more of your attention than the original ever did.
Pros
World design that earns its scale
Pharloom is dense, layered, and full of surprises. The original Hallownest was a sprawling underground labyrinth. Pharloom feels more like a stacked vertical society, with cathedral spires, mossy farmland, mechanical factories, and haunted streets all pressed against one another. The transitions between regions are frequently dramatic, and the visual identity of each area is distinct enough that you rarely feel lost in terms of place, even when you are lost in terms of navigation.
Christopher Larkin’s score does a great deal of work here. Themes shift between mournful and martial, and the quieter sections leave room for the world to breathe. The music is not decoration. It tells you when a place is safe, when it is hostile, and when the game is about to ask something difficult of you.
Boss fights with real personality
Silksong’s bosses are one of its strongest arguments. They are fast, readable, and frequently theatrical. The best of them reward pattern recognition without turning into rote memorization, and many of them force you to adapt as their attack sets evolve. A fight that feels impossible on attempt five can feel almost graceful on attempt fifteen, and that arc of progression is where the game finds its most satisfying moments.
The enemy design in the field is equally sharp. Pharloom’s creatures behave with a lot of variety, and the game likes to put you in rooms that test movement and combat at the same time.
Movement that feels excellent
Hornet’s toolkit expands generously. Early traversal feels like a puzzle, and later traversal feels like a dance. Each new ability changes how you read earlier areas, which keeps the exploration loop alive far longer than you expect. The game is also generous with side paths, optional challenges, and hidden spaces for players who like to complete the map the hard way.
Quests and the living-world feeling
Pharloom is inhabited by creatures who need things, and the game uses request boards and side tasks to pull you back into areas you thought you had finished. It gives the world a sense of ongoing life that the original, with its more solitary mood, did not always reach.
Cons
The difficulty curve has teeth, and some of them are unfair
Silksong is hard. That is not a flaw on its own, since difficulty is part of the series identity. The problem is the unevenness. Some bosses, particularly in the middle stretch, spike sharply above the surrounding content. Enemies often deal two points of damage where the original would deal one, and the cumulative effect is that a few mistakes can end a run quickly.
Players who loved the original’s challenge will likely find this invigorating. Players who came in expecting a refined version of the same difficulty will hit walls that feel less like skill checks and more like tuning decisions that could have used another pass.
Long runs back after death
Dying costs Rosaries, which you can recover by returning to the spot of your death. That is a familiar rule, but in Silksong the distance between a bench and a boss can be considerable. A tough fight followed by a long, enemy-filled trek back, with your currency on the line, turns frustration into fatigue. Some players will see that as tension. Others will see it as a tax on trying again.
Economy and tool management can feel punishing
Rosaries and shards drive nearly every system, and the game is stingy early on. Running out of tools at a bad moment is a real risk, and the farming required to restock can feel like busywork. The design intent is clear, but the balance sometimes leans toward grind rather than decision-making.
Some detours feel like padding
The game’s scale is a strength, but a few late stretches lean on repetition. Revisiting areas, facing remixed challenges, and pushing through gauntlets can dilute the momentum built by the best sections. It is not a dealbreaker, but it is noticeable.
Verdict
Is Silksong worth the wait? For anyone who loved Hollow Knight, yes, and not by a narrow margin. The combat is sharper, the world is richer, and the movement is a joy. It is a sequel that tries new things rather than polishing old ones.
It is not a perfect game. The difficulty can be punishing in ways that do not always feel intentional, and the economy asks for more patience than some players will want to give. If the first game’s difficulty made you sweat but never quit, Silksong is likelier to test that threshold than to reward it gently.
For newcomers, the recommendation is a bit more conditional. The original is still the smoother on-ramp, and diving into Pharloom cold is a steep climb. But if you enjoy precision platformers, metroidvanias with strong atmosphere, or bosses that demand real learning, Silksong is among the best examples of the genre.
We recommend it with enthusiasm for veterans and with a small warning for everyone else. Hornet is a thrill to control, Pharloom is a place worth getting lost in, and the best boss fights justify the sweat. Just be ready to lose a lot of Rosaries before you start winning.
The strangest part of the whole experience is how little the long wait matters once you are playing. Somewhere around the third or fourth hour, after a hard-won fight and a quiet bench rest, you stop thinking about the years and start thinking about the next door.
