If you loved the first game, this one is longer, faster, bigger and harder. The live instruments also make the soundtrack more vibrant. If you've not played the first game or are not familiar with action plateformer it might be a hard game to start with.
I absolutely adore evertyhing about this game. The soundtrack was absolutely stellar, all of the locations felt uniqe and full of life, the combat was so buttery smooth and the wide array of tools at your desposal is incredible. The exploration is top notch and greatly outclasses the first Hollow Knight. This may just be the metroidvania of all time next to Metroid Fusion.
Good side:
- The platformer part works like metroidvania but bosses work like souls like games.
- Hornet talks and the dialogues are beautiful.
- You have more interaction with characters in the world and I love that.
- New mechanics like tools and the silks skills work really well, I was afraid tools would be too weak to be worth using but turns out they do good damage as well.
- It ran flawless on steam deck since day one (I was surprised there were patches to fix bugs, I didn’t find any)
Annoying side:
- Souls genre learned checkpoints far from bosses are not fun.
Yet developers like Team Cherry (and many others) insist on this. I gotta say that given the time, you learn how to optimise the route so it doesn’t get hard but it’s still annoying waste of time.
- Currency to repair tools. If you die a lot like me, this means:
1) you may wast all the currency repairing the tools and will eventually beat the boss without them or
2) that you will not use the tools on the boss to save for when you are familiar with the fight until you beat them without the tools.
The time that would take to give the boss a break so I could farm more shards to repair the tools is time I’m not practicing the fight.
There are many tools I actually never used because I would either try to save shards for a tough encounter or not use since I would die anyway.
- Boss hit too hard is not annoying per se but makes the points above more problematic.
Hard bosses can either do too much damage or make for long fights. Silksong was designed for short fights different from games like monster hunter that most people will take several minutes on a single “boss”. I don’t think this is an issue.
The problem I see with this is that it multiplies the annoyance of the tool currency and checkpoint locations. The more often I need to face those issues, the less fun the game becomes.
Conclusion:
The game is solid and I’ve been having a good time enough to keep me engaged.
I think there is some QoL missing that could really reduce the unnecessary annoyances.
I intend to finish the game but I’m not sure I’d play again like this. If no QoL is added, I might look into some mods to solve the tool repair currency and checkpoint near bosses.