Become the Princess Knight
As the lethal hunter Hornet, adventure through a kingdom ruled by silk and song! Captured and taken to this unfamiliar world, prepare to battle mighty foes and solve ancient mysteries as you ascend on a deadly pilgrimage to the kingdom’s peak.
Hollow Knig...
As the lethal hunter Hornet, adventure through a kingdom ruled by silk and song! Captured and taken to this unfamiliar world, prepare to battle mighty foes and solve ancient mysteries as you ascend on a deadly pilgrimage to the kingdom’s peak.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is the epic sequel to Hollow Knight, the award winning action-adventure. Journey to all-new lands, discover new powers, battle vast hordes of bugs and beasts and uncover secrets tied to your nature and your past.
Game Features
Discover the fallen insect kingdom of Pharloom! Explore mossy grottos, gilded cities and misted moors as you ascend to the shining citadel at the top of the world.
Engage in lethal acrobatic action! Wield a huge suite of deadly moves as you dance between foes in swift, beautiful combat.
Craft powerful tools! Master an ever-expanding arsenal of weapons, traps, and mechanisms to vanquish your enemies and explore new heights.
Solve shocking quests! Hunt down rare beasts and solve ancient mysteries to grant the wishes of the downtrodden and restore the kingdom’s hope.
Face over 200 ferocious foes! Beasts and hunters, monsters and knights. Defeat them all with bravery and skill!
Vanquish over 40 legendary bosses! Battle fabled heroes and fallen kings in epic combat to decide the kingdom's fate.
Challenge Steel Soul mode! Once you conquer the kingdom, test your skills in a new mode that presents a more formidable challenge.
Experience a stunning orchestral score! Hollow Knight’s award-winning composer, Christopher Larkin, brings melancholy melodies, symphonic strings and heart-thumping, soul strumming boss themes to the adventure.
The ambience and inmersiveness is almost non existant.
The desicion of almost all bosses doble damaging you is terrible, agressivenes is punished and turns even minor bosses into a 2 hour lecture on dying fast and reruning all the way, the upgrades on damage or health ara more than 10 hours into the game, truly punishing. Holow knight didn't made this mistakes, the enjoyment went backwards.
The game itself is really great designed. Graphics, Sound, Enemy movements. But in all this they forgot to add fun. It is just a pain or a chore to "play" due to everything being designed to hold you back, to be in your way, to block you, to annoy you, to be frustrating and thats what the game boils down to in the end: Being frustrating. (I played to the true end and beat every boss there is.)
I played, beat and enjoyed Nine Sols, all of the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne. I even beat Chapter 9 of Celeste and got the Moon Berry. I also really loved Hollow Knight and after 80 hours in Silksong and beating most of Act 3 I'm finally and irrevocably fed up with its bull**it.
People often say TC love their work but I'm starting to think it's ALL they actually care about. I feel betrayed and trolled like never before. It really feels like they don't give a s**t about 90% of people who play their games. Silksong was designed to burn you out, little by little, and punish you for every little failure, and even when you succeed, often the only reward you get is yet another time-consuming slog through bile and waves of enemies.
Real life is like that. Adults in 2025 don't need that in a game. I get that life in Australia is easy - especially if you are filthy rich like TC - but imagine that: most of your player base is NOT in Australia. Most of us are not carefree millionaires. I like a good challenge, but this game, despite all the beauty and wonderful movement mechanics, is just an elitist, soul-draining, mean-spirited slog. And the fact there's so much to like here only makes the trolling hurt all the more.
EDIT: I now finished Act 3 with 95% completion, probably out of stubbornness. I stand by all of the above. The true ending was nice, but it wasn't worth all that hostility and frustration.
I have 25 hours played on console and reached what I am told the end of the first of three acts. I enjoy challenging games if done well. I have beaten several From Software games and others such as DMC at higher difficulties. I have also played many hard old school 2D games in my 35 years of gaming. However, this just does it very poorly.
The primary issue is the spawn points after death. They are usually very far and require a lot of challenging platforming and even several battles before getting back to the thing you are trying at again. This is just disrespectful of the player’s time and a major discouragement to trying again. This is especially irritating when putting a damper on the excitement of finding the next stage of advancement after searching all over. Save points also require hefty payment to unlock.
However, this is not nearly all. The game likes to do many multi-wave gauntlets that take a long time to clear since you can barely increase your strength. Bosses often add extra enemies in the room which can easily triangulate to leave you nowhere to go amidst large AoE boss attacks, yet they zoom away from you if you try to attack them to clear the air. Some bosses require you to back away to a range where they are offscreen, then you are in a gamble of needing to approach again yet they could be starting moves off screen that you are running right into.
I am told all of these things, especially the runbacks and platforming gauntlets, only become far more difficult. I am afraid this game is only for super hardcore players who not only like a challenge, but design that is simply punishing and time-wasting for no reason. I uninstalled it today because I don’t like a game that feels like it doesn’t want me to play it. I like feeling engaged and pulled into the fray of battle with abilities that enable tight and dynamic response to every situation. This game makes me feel constantly pushed out every way it can find to make the experience simply annoying.
I finished this game about a week ago, so I’ve had time to digest it. Hollow Knight is one of if not my favorite game of all time. This is the third time I've rewritten this review-- I am very passionate about this title lol. I finished Acts I and II vanilla, Act III with mods. I've gotten the "true" ending in Hollow Knight. As for Silksong, it’s just too hardcore and not so much challenging as it is tedious.
First, more positively, I honestly appreciate the direction they went with this game. It’s not just more Hollow Knight, it takes on a life of its own by asserting itself as separate and distinct from its predecessor.
What I love:
-Hand drawn worlds and animations, of course
-Harder difficulty (although it spikes too much as mentioned below)
-Subtle and nuanced music
-Unique crests add much variety to combat and traversal
-Many enjoyable and uniquely designed boss fights
-The central story/dialogue is intriguing and written well
Dislikes (there's a lot):
-Extremely unfun runbacks which degrade nearly every boss fight experience. Some of them can be shortened with a super secret bench hidden behind wall #47 in room #352, but aintnobodygottimeforthat.
-Debuffs galore. Debuffs that prevent you from healing, specifically, because the lore apparently dictates which areas are an unfun slog to actually play. Side note: I’m waiting on an update that adds a 20% rosary tax on every transaction, ya know, to add to the “lore” /s. In fairness, you can get a crest to balance this debuff, but it’s literally the furthest point away from the starting area.
-Dozens of “gotcha” and “troll” hazards. God-forsaken fake benches which can only be found through sheer trial and error and rote memorization. No environmental cues, just cheap gimmicks which only exist, imo, to create viral clips on twitch or other social media.
-Many, many, many gauntlets, the longest of which is 24. waves. long. Several mandatory gauntlets precede boss fights. Many boss fights spawn extra enemies, because apparently difficulty in 2025 means fighting 7 enemies at once. Now, ironically, I actually love the coliseum of fools in the first game, but I did not enjoy most of the gauntlets in Silksong. Maybe because the coliseum is completely optional and rewards you generously. It’s also about 10x more varied than any of the gauntlets in Silksong.
-They added an entire bone currency just to, imo, balance one crest (architect). Consequently, earlier before you get this crest, this bone money only serves to frustrate lower skill players (read: not part of the top 0.01%) who need extra attempts on boss fights. This bone money is a total gimmick which throws the entire early-to-mid game off because of a single crest that lets you replenish tools using silk.
-A major gripe: The Reaper crest’s needle is a bit RNG. There’s a 50/50 chance of you swinging the needle above or below you. So you end up missing (mostly flying) enemies a lot because you think you’re swinging up and forward, but instead the needle decides to swing underneath and forward, evading the enemy. How fun!
-Very poorly designed fetch quests/town center job boards. For example, one of the side quests has you go collect 15 or so “bells.” These bells are random drops which only appear in 2 rooms in a specific zone. And they only respawn once you’ve sat on a bench. So, you’re just going through these same 2 rooms 10 or more times, hoping you get a random drop so you can beat one of the dozens of side quests required for Act III (yup, these are required). Plus, you only get these quests after you’ve already ran through a zone. So you’re going *back* to old zones to grind items.
-Many tools feel cheesy and gimmicky to me. It feels like Home Alone simulator, where I’m raining down pins & needles on enemies, then hiding in a corner hoping I don’t have to actually fight anyone.
-Enemies read your inputs before attacking. They select an attack, read where you are (or where you’re going), move to that location, and then attack. This is especially jarring with flying enemies (which make up like half of the total enemies), who can read your attack, dash out of the way and *off-screen*, then throw a projectile at you from out of sight (and many bosses = 2x damage). The clawline *helps* here, but it doesn’t reward as much *silk* as a regular attack, which is very much needed to heal during the marathon gauntlets. Later on, my awkward solution was to clawline > double jump > pogo, but that can be very risky depending on the enemy (collision damage on super fast and large flying enemies just-- is not fun to handle for most of the game).
Overall, it’s like they took my least favorite parts of the first game (runbacks, flying pests which throw projectiles, deep nest) and made those parts central to this game. It’s very claustrophobic, dimly lit, and just kinda feels like you’re stumbling through it all. In addition, fundamentally, the skill floor is just too high. “Oh well, why don’t you just go explore and come back to this hard boss later?” Because so much extra content is hidden behind endless waves of sidequests/gank/gauntlets/etc. that you can’t help but feel like you’re always underleveled no matter what. Even health masks feel useless to a degree, because merely colliding with a static enemy = 2x damage.
All that said, don’t get me wrong, there's incredible content in this game. I'd recommend trying it out, especially at 20 dollars. But I can't help but think that they took a large DLC for Hollow Knight and then padded it with uninspired, well, junk and gimmicks. Sure, some hardcore Fans might eat this stuff up, but for me-- it feels like a waste of time. Tantalizingly, I think it could be a 10/10 game with a couple of changes to make the story/ambiance/etc. more central and the difficulty more justified and enjoyable.
Finally, I wanted to add a few solutions to these problems in the form of mods I used in Act III.
1. Warding Bell Plus - Makes you temporarily invulnerable while healing, preventing the mechanic which drops your entire silk bar *and* damages you if you get hit by an enemy (because of i.e. contact damage by flying/teleporting enemies).
2. Custom Hit I-Frames (No Multi-Hit Anymore) - Increases invulnerability after taking damage by a few milliseconds, preventing instances where you get spam-hit by multiple enemies.
3. All Enemies Drop Rosary Beads (and Shards) - Makes the game feel more rewarding and less like a grind, especially early on.
4. Stakes of Marika - Rebirth. I wouldn't recommend this for the original game, but for this one the runbacks are so egregious that I strongly recommend it. I wish this mod only removed the most tedious runbacks, but it is what it is.
Bonus 1 [tools]: Get Multibinder (heals for 4 hearts), Longclaw (extends your needle), and Wreath of Purity (protects against maggot water) as early as you can.
Bonus 2 [mods]: Always Have Compass Effect + Always Have Magnet Effect. Reduces a lot of the early tedious grind.
Look, I’m all for a medium-to-high difficulty game that both challenges and rewards your skill as a player. That’s why I beat Absolute Radiance in the first game. Silksong, however, adds too much difficulty with too little reward. The skill floor is too high, the difficulty is inconsistent, and there's too much poorly designed padding in the form of i.e. uninspired gauntlets and cheap gotchas. With mods, the difficulty spikes become more well-rounded and reasonable. Lastly, I wish more reviewers could look at this game for what it is-- and not through the lens of 7 years of built-up hype and expectations. It's not a bad game, by any means. Silksong just lacks a reasonable level of difficulty and reward to make it enjoyable to play.
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