Silksong's Any% speedrun is already below 1 hour, in case you were worried this game would be too hard to clown on

Hornet holds a hand up to her mask to help shade her eyes from a sunbeam in Hollow Knight: Silksong.

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

It's been less than a month since Silksong finally came out, and during said month, I beat the game in an arduous 72 hours—all three acts, most of the mementos, you name it. Well, turns out I was dragging my little heels, because the game's speedrunning community has already got an Any% to below an hour.

Hollow Knight Silksong Any% 58:52 | World Record, First Sub Hour! - YouTube

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What really surprises me, as I watch them tearing through Lace like a knife through… well, lace, is their use of the clawline—it seems like you can use it to interrupt your own swings to get more damage out, which is just good advice for anybody.

Another thing that's interesting is a complete lack of tools. I'd assumed speedrunners might (and still could) make use out of the game's extensive tool system, but I figure getting the memory lockets and shards to support them—nevermind the tools themselves—might just take too long.

After all, who needs cogflies when you've got a silk spear? "Dude! There's no way!" Nebula says. "... What now? I mean I can learn bells, I guess, but…"

Interestingly enough, Nebula goes through the Mist—accessible through everyone's least favourite zone, Bilewater. However, in the video's description, they say that "going through Last Judge is now about 40 seconds faster to an average Mist", but that "the route requires some difficult skips to make it that fast".

If that doesn't sound worth it to you, consider how close world-record speedrunning tends to get. 40 seconds is an unignorable advantage, no matter how much of a pain in the thorax the Last Judge route is. As my fellow writer Joshua Wolens noted, we're just at the very tip of the Silkberg. There's more tech to come.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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