Fresh Hollow Knight: Silksong details come out of Edge

Our rivals and/or colleagues over at Edge Magazine have gotten an exclusive look at Hollow Knight: Silksong for Edge 354, which goes on sale today. Actually you know what they got to look at this before us so I'm going to officially come down on the rivals side of this—at least for the rest of the year.

Team Cherry has blessed Edge (curse you, Edge!) with a look at the Hollow Knight sequel, which stars the character Hornet from the first game as she explores the new world of Pharloom. Game co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen revealed a lot more than they have previously about Silksong, and talked about some of its new design elements. Don't worry, they've assured everyone that the game is just as hard as the first game. About identical, actually.

Hollow Knight is a 2017 platformer that we consider a modern classic, scoring a 92 on review, worthy of its place on our Hardest games on PC and PC Gamer Top 100 and best indies lists. It's often called a metroidvania or a souls-like for its game and world design.

Hornet is a more physically capable character than little Knight, who Gibson said Hornet "can travel so much faster, jump higher, she can mantle or clamber onto ledges." A lot of the design involved the height of Hornet herself, as well as her increased vertical movement ability, so areas had to be larger. Hornet can grab onto, or mantle, onto ledges, and wall-jumping to cancel out of the mantling animation was given as an example of how Hornet can get height faster than The Knight.

Screenshot from Hollow Knight: Silksong. Protagonist Hornet is falling towards the floor. — (Image credit: Team Cherry)

Hornet's speed, and the new region of Pharloom, also necessitated that enemies get a lot smarter and faster. Enemies in Silksong can no longer be tricked into falling off platforms, for example, and are much better at pursuing or counter-attacking Hornet than any enemy in the first Hollow Knight. To counter this, Hornet can heal herself using the silk she gathers from enemies to Bind, bandaging wounds and healing three of her health bar masks at once—rather than the Knight's one-mask healing power

For more, go over to GamesRadar+, the digital home of Edge.

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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.