Silking my song…

…I Hollowed all over my knight…

It's like Super Metroid on steroids with a pinch of dark souls.

I love it when a game f**ks with me. This is F**king With The Player: The Game.

I wanted Hollow Knight 2, we got Hollow Knight 4.

We now live in a post-Silksong society. It’s so surreal.

Doubters had to win every time, but beleivers only had to win once.

I can confidently say this was one of the best video games I have ever played. One of the best gaming experiences in my pathetic life. Imagine spending just $20 and getting this absolute masterpiece. Meanwhile shorter AAA games are costing 4 times the price with 1/4 of the content. Absolutely a Masterpiece, and a kick in the jaw to the AAA industry.

Allow me to elaborate on my experience:

Its predecessor Hollow knight is like the carnival worker who made you the best hamburger you've ever had but then they bounced out of town.

Silksong is like you meet that same guy 10 years later at a 4 star restaurant and he’s famous. And you get a burger and it’s still even at a carnival price. But it’s almost too fancy at first. You wanted that carnival burger again.  

But then you start eating it and by the time you’re at the middle of the burger you’re like 4 orgasms deep and you realize this burger chef is just simply not on the same level as everybody else. 

And then there is a part of you that really, really wants for this chef to never consider making pizzas, or pasta, because even if you know they will be good, you want to keep tasting the f**king burgers forever.

First things first: Dear Team Cherry, I would like to apologise.

When I first played this game I died over and over and over, and my first response was to join the legions of whiners who were all complaining about the difficulty. This game isn't too difficult, I just wasn't good enough. For me now it's the good type of difficulty where, after you learn attack patterns, you can overcome anything and feel like a badass. Having now invested a good 100 hours into Silksong, I can honestly say it's one of the best games l've ever played, and I was genuinely sad to complete it.
Thanks, guys.

Like most I think Silksong is a better game by most metrics than HK. Combat and movement are much more fun and the level of polish in the art and enemies is unreal. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Even so, Hollow Knight has a certain magic to it that I don't think can be replicated. I've never played a game before that feels so lonely without being boring, so goofy while also horrifying. When I first finished Hollow Knight, my thoughts boiled down to “this is one of the best Metroidvanias I’ve ever played, but I wish they pushed the envelope further on a few things…”

Silksong was the answer to exactly that, it pushed that envelope further in all the ways I wanted it. It’s more fluid, snappier, there’s a greater focus on challenging platforming (which I adore), more weapon types, etc. I love the hostility of Pharloom and how it feels like you genuinely have to claw your way towards everything you own. It feels very ludonarratively satisfying in a way that a lot of games are afraid to push towards. The biggest surprise for me is that they got it feeling so similar to HK (gameplay and enemy design wise), but it's so different? It feels so familiar but so fresh and new. It reminds me of Doom 2016 -> Doom Eternal. Silksong iterates on Hollow Knight by cranking everything up to 11 and giving the player all sorts of awesome tools to deal with it.

The gameplay is perfection. Action is tough but fair. Exploration is always fun and rewarding. Secrets abound. There’s always something to do, a new place to explore and new powers that expand your abilities. Areas begin to interconnect. The challenge is also calibrated in such a way that you know if you fail, it’s your fault. And when you win, it feels earned and great. My wife, who is not a gamer, said: “this is far and away the most beautiful game I’ve ever seen.” Everything is hand drawn and detailed. The world is hand crafted and looks like a gloomy, mysterious and gorgeous world. Metroidvania refined. It is a damn masterpiece that doesn’t seem to age, because besides Hollow Knight no other game looks like it and few play as fluidly.

Combat. Yes it's harder. But the moves. The flow. Every encounter feels more exciting. Weaving between attacks and utilizing tools just adds so much to every combat encounter. I'm sure some might find it annoying that every encounter requires some amount of effort but I'm fine with it. The fights are really acrobatic, fluid and interesting. I love that you can change your move set with crests and I have had a lot of fun learning how to quickly traverse through the map. All in all the game just feels like more-more-more. More speed, more movement, more damage, more secrets, more beauty, more chaos, more frustration. I love it all. It's consumed every ounce of my free time for the last several months and there's no way I'm going to be able to find everything.

The world design alone is astounding. The way regions of the world blend with each other through both visuals and audio is a huge improvement over the first game. Not that the first was bad, it's just that Silksong is so much better. Exploring Pharloom gave me a feeling that I haven't had in ages in gaming. Absolutely engrossing with great atmosphere, music, visuals. The people of Pharloom are also much more interesting to interact with. They give you an incentive to go back and re explore older zones outside of just finding new items. Each person has a lot of dialogue and it seems unlikely to see it all in one playthough with how conditional some of it is. It really feels like the game is acknowledging your actions through the people of Pharloom.

By extension, Hornet, our protagonist. Having the Knight be a silent protagonist was cool. There are questions as to the Knight's motivations with some tasks but overall it was fun. However, I just love Hornet. Between her dialogue and her being the writer of the hunter's journal this time around we get so much personality. Coming to terms with her past and helping the people of Pharloom really helps develop Hornet's character. We get to learn so much more about the world and the overall story. Again. The Knight was great, but Hornet is just better for me.

To add to this the game truly feels handcrafted by a small dev team that loves video games. It’s so incredibly detailed and exploration is rewarded throughout. The music is top notch, the setting/themes are creative and compelling, and the game is challenging in a very fun way. The game is cheap, uses graphics that are beautifully drawn yet easy to run, and despite having lots of story and atmosphere, it’s very much a gameplay first sort of game. It really just has a lot going for it. Overall, Hollow Knight is one of my favorite games. But, for me, Silksong absolutely tops it. And once we get more content, I'm sure my enjoyment of the game will only grow. Best 20 dollars I've spent on a game.

10000000/10

---{ Graphics }---
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☑ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☑ Dark Souls+Metroidvania

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind Rosary Beads
☐ Too much grind Rosary Beads
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding Rosary Beads

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never see Bug
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10

I just finished Hollow Knight: Silksong after 100%ing it, and I’m more conflicted than I’ve ever been with a game. So much of it is amazing great moments, beautiful areas, satisfying challenges but so often wrapped in frustration and tedium. The early game difficulty felt steep but fair, yet once the world opened up I constantly hit mini-bosses and gank rooms I just couldn’t beat. I assumed I’d get upgrades later, but the intended progression felt so unclear that I eventually looked up where to get the dash just to move forward, which really broke the experience for me.
The map system also felt unintuitive. Buying incomplete maps, needing a tool to fill them in only at benches, and odd bits like finding a map tattooed on a dead bug kept pulling me out of the world. The resource grind for using tools was another sticking point. Instead of encouraging experimentation, it punished it especially when the areas I struggled in didn’t even drop the needed resource. The game clearly expects grinding, with loop rooms and trinkets for farming, but I would have preferred not to grind at all.
Benches were another odd system: temporary and permanent benches costing the same felt thematically inconsistent, especially in the “oppressed” zone where the economic metaphor didn’t quite land. Runbacks before boss fights ranged from fine to frustrating, taking fun platforming and turning it into a chore.
The game pulls ideas from Elden Ring, Metroid, and Star Wars, but not always in a cohesive way. The crest and tool systems should encourage build variety, yet the cost of experimenting made me stick to one loadout. Even the crest upgrade character in Weavenest had baffling progression requirements.
Despite all this, many boss fights were fantastic, and the game is overall very good—I just feel like it could’ve been truly great. I wanted to understand the intense fandom, and while I see the quality, I still don’t fully get the fervor. Still, it’s a strong game at a fair price and absolutely doable if you’re up for the challenge.