Hollow Knight: Silksong review

Nothing prepared me for the Sisyphean exercise that is playing Hollow Knight: Silksong. Part of that is my bad for skipping the original Hollow Knight—I thought I'd have plenty of time to try it before Silksong ever actually came out. But now it's here and I've spent over 25 hours with the videogame equivalent of sticking your hand into the Dune pain box.

Silksong may be one of the most painful 2D action games I've played, and the worst part? I inflicted that pain on myself by pressing forward until I'd seen just about every inch of the bug-inhabited land of Pharloom. And that's saying something; despite being a 2D game, Team Cherry has stuffed enough levels, characters, and quests into Silksong to fill a 3D world. It never ends: Lift up a rock and you'll find a boss eager to be your newest archnemesis or an obstacle course of spikes and blades that are about as rewarding as scratching a mosquito bite.

Silksong makes you feel like a fool for playing it in the first place. From the moment you start a new game and bring Pharloom into existence, it's agony for everyone involved. Every bug is out to get you or struggling to eke out their own hardscrabble existence.

This diabolical commitment to knocking you on your ass in a world where everyone's been knocked on their ass for the last few decades is what impresses me the most about Silksong. Not even a game as punishing as Elden Ring outright refuses to loosen its grip around your neck. There comes a point in every FromSoftware game where you earn the right to play with your food, often by finding a character build that works for you. Silksong, on the other hand, will let you upgrade your weapon so that eventually you might deal out as much damage as the enemies have been doing to you since Act 1.

I may be bruised and sore from the experience, but I'm happy to say that for all the pain Silksong put me through, it was worth it. Team Cherry made a whole game about getting to your car without your keys and it's phenomenal, unflinching in its vision to fully consume you until you can see the mazes of Pharloom when you close your eyes.

Harmony

As much as I find the term inadequate for describing what's truly special about Silksong, calling it a soulslike has some merit. Combat-wise it doesn't quite fit, but the construction of Pharloom rivals (and echoes) that of Lordran in Dark Souls. Not only is it intricate and interconnected, but it's warped by its tragic history. You can open the map and draw a line from the golden citadel all the way down into the stagnant, maggot-infested pools of Bilewater to understand exactly where the rot began.

Every shortcut and secret area contextualizes the horrors you face in the bigger, sadder picture. A pristine dining room in the upper chambers of the citadel hides a kitchen caked in dust and decay, and just below that, in a secret room, lies the tangled corpse of a centipede pontiff. There's always something just out of view or lingering in the background that draws your eye, and those details always kept me hungry to see more. By the end of the game, I couldn't tell what was more exciting: the fact that I somehow dug my way into an entire zone I hadn't explored yet or the questions that new place raised about what's really going on with Pharloom's biggest mysteries.

There are plenty of bright spots on the journey through hell, like the little towns you can help rebuild and the bugs you meet in them. I ran so many errands for the group of bugs living in giant bells that they gifted me one of my own. I will kill anyone who dares complain about precious Sherma and his calming lullaby.

Hornet, and the characters she runs into, are a splash of cold water in this gloomy dream. There are bugs of all shapes and sizes who welcome you with warm greetings, sweet melodies, and sometimes a bit of deception. I met a whole caravan of nomadic fleas with french mustaches, a bartender beetle, and a ladybug carny who charged me for target practice.

The wide cast of weirdos kept me sane when I was losing my grip from being repeatedly squashed by a metallic bug with a bell chained to her arm. Hornet's tendency to soften from cold-blooded warrior to empathetic survivor when confronted with a bug-in-need or a fluffy flea added a tender counterpoint to the most abrasive moments. Even the fact that she speaks at all helps Silksong temper its overwhelming despair and it made me eager to talk to every bug I could find.

The thrill of playing as Hornet is what really anchors Silksong as a brilliant action game above all else. Skipping and dodging around enemies becomes a delicate dance that grows more and more intricate as you pick up new moves. I was merely poking at enemies in the first few hours of the game and by the end I was tossing out spike traps and silk missiles while bouncing between bugs like a pinball. When I wasn't getting clobbered, it felt like the tables had turned and suddenly I was the boss with the unfair, unpredictable attacks. Silksong sets the bar for mastery so high that you can only reach it for short bursts, but it's a carrot worth chasing when pulling it off is so unbelievably satisfying.

In those glorious, fleeting moments, I was able to take a step back and appreciate how creative Silksong's boss fights can be. I almost wanted to stall during a duel with a glitzy butterfly on a stage full of explosive fireworks and spotlights so that I could enjoy the absurdity of it just a few seconds longer. And despite my waning patience when I was locked in a room with two mechanical dancers who mirror each other's moves, I had to admit it was a clever way to learn how to stay focused on a single target while making me feel like I was part of the dance—which would prove useful for many bosses down the line. Again and again its commitment to cruelty had a purpose. This phenomenon continued until the final hours of the game.

Stubborn

Most of Silksong is fair despite being unrelenting, and I suspect playing it in a compressed amount of time exacerbated the moments of pain. At the same time, there are sections, particularly the ones you're forced to repeat every time you attempt a boss, that threaten curdling. One of the worst ones shows up near the beginning and forces you to pogo your way past rabid worms and flies with sniper rifles just to have a chance at seeing the boss again.

Silksong doesn't always get the balance between effort and reward right. Some games will make you find an access code to unlock a safe with a key in it—Silksong will make you fight with your bare fists through four waves of flies with crowbars to get a key that unlocks a door leading to more flies with crowbars. You're not even guaranteed to get anything after defeating a boss. For the first half, you'll be lucky to find a bench to rest on that isn't trying to kill you or take your money.

It's an evocative choice to fill the game with checkpoints that you have to pay for to underline the disparity between the upper and lower halves of Pharloom, a clever bit of friction tied to the bleak state of the world. It's also a choice to stack that on top of a system that empties your wallet if you die too much—and you will when just about every enemy and spike trap can knock out your health bar with a few mistakes. For as beautifully drawn as its tunnels and cathedrals are, not all of them made the climb worth it. Silksong, especially in the first half, requires you to take a blood oath on the promise that experiencing the entire thing will pay off.

I may be bruised and sore from the experience, but I'm happy to say that it does, in fact, pay off. There were frustrating points in Silksong where I was reluctant to hand it to Team Cherry, but I'm still processing the shock that it managed to exceed my expectations after listening to people scream about Hollow Knight over the last seven years. I can't tell you if the hype was worth it, because that hype exists on message boards and YouTube channels and Discords, not in the game I booted up on Steam every day for the last week. But I can tell you that Silksong glows with a level of precision and imagination that's hard to find anywhere else.

It's too good to let the brutal difficulty hold it back, or to hold me back from seeing all of it—even if I wish there were at least some options to tone down the nastiest punishments. Silksong will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world, confident the sight will elicit a bloody, jagged-tooth grin. When that happens, the pain will fade away and you'll press forward into the unknown, ready to endure whatever it throws at you just to stick around a little longer.