I originally had just a normal comment for this but I thought fuck it, this is probably my favourite game of all time or at least up there with Terraria, certainly my game of the year for 2025 so I felt a proper long form review would be more fitting. I've 100%ed the game and currently have 47 out of the 52 total achievements so I think I have the right to talk about this game, I'll try my best to keep everything on topic but at the same time my thoughts feel as if they're going everywhere so maintaining coherence during this surely extremely long review may be difficult. This section will just be for general opinions that I have on this game if you're not looking to read my spoiler-filled ramblings below this section. Of course everything in this review is highly opinion-based, I'm just putting this here so I don't have to say "in my opinion... [insane opinion]" 1000 times, if you disagree feel free to send me an angry email still but I'm just putting this out there.
Silksong feels great to play, the movement is a clear step up from Hollow Knight and I don't think that's a take anyone who has played the game, even if they hated it, would press me on. It's certainly a lot more complex and getting from point to point can make you feel a lot more like an acrobat than in Hollow Knight especially with some of the movement upgrades you receive later into the game but everything feels super fluid and rewarding even if you're just walking somewhere. The visuals have also taken a leap up too, I've seen some complaints about the brighter colour palette that wasn't seen in some of the original trailers or the original Hollow Knight but personally I thought it was a breath of fresh air. The music was about on par with the original game, apart from a few stand-out tracks which I'll get into later because Christopher Larkin certainly didn't let me down. Lastly for the non-spoiler section, the story and the main character as a whole was improved in leaps and bounds from Hollow Knight. I loved how Hornet had an actual personality and properly interacted with the people of Pharloom instead of being talked at like The Knight was, this change was honestly the most noticeable for me and made dialogue sequences something that I was always keenly following along with. If you're yet to play this game just do it, the price to content ratio on this thing is insane and I would've happily paid upwards of $80 for this masterpiece (though I'm sure the majority of players wouldn't be as fanatical as me).
Despite the majority of non-silk abilities being the same as the original Hollow Knight, I felt like they were all more enjoyable in this game. Maybe it was Hornet's general smoothness of movement but I loved this game's wings a lot more than Hollow Knight's and the way I could be chaining a backflip into a harpoon into a wing jump into a pogo and then land a triple backflip made me feel like I was some sort of master gymnast. This opposed to Hollow Knight where in the end game the best strategy for way too many bosses was to just shadow-dash through them, the difference feels like night and day [1]. The bosses in this game also felt generally more complex than the original, even the first (real) boss (you don't count Moss Mother), the Bell Beast, despite seeming at first glance like a knockoff Massive Moss Charger, has itself four attacks it can do and even makes the players deal with projectiles wholly disconnected from the bosses movements though I'll talk more about this in the boss-by-boss reviews section.
As I mentioned in the previous non-spoiler section Hornet having a personality was a big reason I liked this game more than original so I should probably elaborate on that. Hornet being able to properly interact and feel like she's forming relationships with other characters is super cool like becoming close to Shakra, looking out for the little pilgrim and even saving Bone Bottom so many times that Flick the Fixer makes you a statue (I deadass almost cried when I got that by the way, I'm just a little baby like that). There are so many unique like interactions like that in this game that made me feel immersed in the world. Another one of my favourites was mourning Shakra's master's life. It was a really sombre atmospheric moment and not something I feel the original Hollow Knight could've pulled off, at least not so elegantly. Hornet writing the notes of the Hunter's Journal this time was another component of this game I loved. It was great being able to learn more about what Hornet thought of the world she was wandering in, I especially liked how she seems to have preferences to some furrier critters, it's small but builds her character even further.
Another thing, I've heard a lot of complains over Silksong's supposed huge learning curve and honestly I didn't really feel that in my gameplay. It is certainly more difficult than the original Hollow Knight but building on from my previous skills learnt playing the original, I didn't face too much trouble in Silksong. It makes me assume this complaint mainly comes from people who never actually beat the original game so if you haven't, I dunno, go do that, it's a masterpiece. Personally if it wasn't at least this difficult I'd have been a little disappointed, I even think they may benefit from cranking it up another notch later into the game because despite what I'm saying here, Act Three's difficultly increase just being enemies going black sometimes and doing two contact damage feels a little cheap and I'd have preferred entirely different attack patterns or something. I guess that's not a very viable option for an indie game but still...
Area-wise I think Silksong does a pretty great job too, even better than Hollow Knight in some aspects I reckon. There a lot of enemy variety as there was in Hollow Knight but also a huge amount of area variety than many of the greys, blues and rare splashes of green seen in the original. It makes sure to let you know that right from the get-go too. The Moss Grotto is a beautifully lush green, more vibrant than anything seen in the original Hollow Knight with a few simple enemies and a boss for new players to get their bearings on the game mechanics. There's even a moss berry out of reach that forces players to learn that they can pogo off of enemies to reach higher area's which is a super cool touch. It's a lot better of an intro than Hollow Knight's to me at least even if I did feel the Moss Mother was way too undertuned, if I had it my way it would've been a trial by fire with a Phantom-level boss at least to force players to get the hang of Silksong's unique movement, but I'm pretty sure I'm alone in that thought.
Barely a boss, I get that it's to ease new players in but I don't get why you'd do that if the next section will almost certainly beat them down if they can't beat this guy. The theme went insane though, why they do that?
A pretty alright fight, it's moves weren't super interesting which kind of brought it down for me but dodging the rolling bells was fun.
I don't love this version of Lace, she's too slow and simple with any of my favourite parts from the future two fights completely absent. It's still not terrible but just way too easy.
This fight was easy too and managed to get even easier as the fight went on for some reason but despite this I still really enjoyed it and the entire fight felt pretty unique too, I loved the way you could end it instantly by just breaking the bolder above the boss, such a cool decision.
I dunno, I saw lots of people complaining about this one but I beat it on my first go, he was pretty mediocre though with only three different moves. I think a lot of people just have problems with positioning themselves correctly...
No clue why this boss was nerfed when she was already too easy when I fought her. I have to assume she was added to make players get used to using red tools or something but even then they could have wailed on me a little more with this boss.
You have no clue how hard I tried to make a pun but I couldn't think of a way of saying the day part in a way that related to Hornet, real tragedy. By the way you see this footnote thing? Pretty cool I think, not sure as to if I'm going to use it though. ↩︎