Hollow Knight: Silksong is out. I'm not playing it right now, because it is my accursed duty to write news for the hungry masses—given a lot of you are currently fighting Steam, tooth and nail. News like "hey, did you know that Silksong has two separate speedrun achievements?"
Per… well, my achievement list, the game has the two following achievements: "Speedrunner", which requires you to complete the game in five hours, and "Speed completion," which requires you to 100% it in 30 hours.
That's not to say Silksong's short, or anything—the current world record for Hollow Knight is a measly 30 minutes, and as my own library can attest, I've spent a good 40 hours futzing around Hallownest.
When it comes to the absurd tech that the internet's massive speedrunning community is certainly cooking up in their labs? Five hours is practically nothing—basically bullet time. It's that latter number that's slightly more interesting.
If we go ahead and assume that Team Cherry's played enough of the game to get a good guesstimate (a safe assumption, they made the dang thing) a fast, beelining-for-everything playthrough worthy of accolades is 30 hours. Round up a couple of dozen hours for repeat attempts, futzing around, and going to the microwave to make hot pockets or something, and we've got ourselves quite the meaty sequel on our hands.
As a matter of fact, we can compare this directly to a similar achievement for the OB (original bug) game—Hollow Knight's achievement for a similar feat, also called "Speed Completion", asks players to complete the game in 20 hours. I'm sure Cherry isn't exact with its measurements, but that implies that Silksong is a third longer than its predecessor. Hot damn.
There are also meta-achievements for both beating the game in Steel Soul mode, and for reaching 100% completion—for context, Steel Soul is a permadeath mode. Y'know, for you sadists out there.
I cannot fathom the kind of person who'd want to risk a hard reset on a 30-ish hour playthrough, but I know they're out there, and they'll likely be putting the rest of us mortals to shame in mere months, just like they did in Elden Ring. Or, uh, the entire FromSoftware catalogue.
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