Hollow Knight: Silksong

Type: Game

Score: 10/10

My most anticipated game ever and while it's not a 10 like its predecessor it's certainly not as bad as I've seen some people make it out to be. First off, the art and music are both just straight improvements, no doubt about it. Hornet feels like so much more fluid of a character to play as than the knight ever was and I think the people complaining about not having the insane face-tanking ability the knight are a bit off base for that. I think just in general the knight was a stronger character, I mean when we played as the knight we were able to beat Hornet's ass pretty easily right at the start so it'd be a little weird if Hornet was able durable as the knight.

That said I do have some proper issues with the game, firstly there are a lot of pretty annoying runbacks that seem to be there for almost no reason, like the Last Judge quite frankly has no reason to have a full thirty second runback every time you die to him. You know why Widow is my favourite boss in this game? Because on top of a good boss fight you don't have to get jumped, lose 1-3 masks and then be forced to kill a couple enemies and then finally fight the boss, it almost ruins one of the best fights in the game. I also just gotta ask why Savage Beastfly even exists because I died more to that guy than any other boss in the game and he's barely a boss. One last comment on the bosses, I do appreciate that Team Cherry tried to do things different to the first game by making arena bosses like Fourth Chorus but they are just too easy (in comparison to the other bosses). Like I don't think I remember a single boss that actually got easier the longer the fight went on like the Fourth Chorus, it was insane.

Another issue I've heard is that everything costs money especially later on and early on barely anything drops money, it ticked me off at the start but now it does feel like a cool piece of storytelling through gameplay, really makes you feel like the early places are the dumps they're meant to be. Still a bit of a pain that nearly every bench requires rosaries.

Build variety is a bit of a problem for me too, it already wasn't great in Hollow Knight, like despite the charm variety there were a few that were just clearly better but it's even worse in this game, maybe I just didn't do enough wishes but I didn't have shit for most of the game apart from many many tools. On the topic, tools are cool but having to collect shards to use them is a bit of a pain as was their bind to use being the same as your silk attack with the direction being the deciding factor. It felt jank and made accidentally not moving the joystick enough up far too punishing as suddenly you don't get to heal any more. Should've made it the triangle button or something.

The bosses were generally pretty great though and I think the majority were better than those in Hollow Knight especially later into the game, lots of fun dodging patterns, didn't love fighting the two knockoff moss Gruz Mothers though. The map in this game is also just huge, like Hollow Knight is big but Silksong has it beat, especially in horizontal size. The naked Hornet sequence was funny too, she looked so silly. I have complained a whole bunch in this review but even as I write this I lowkey just want to replay the game and I can absolutely see myself getting 200 hours in this like I had in Hollow Knight especially if there ends up being DLC content like a godhome. Act 3 was really just the icing on the cake, and quite the icing it was. I was about to go all Guts on the void n shit after I saw what happened to Bone Bottom but I'll try to avoid too many blatant spoilers here.

Edit: 9 -> 9.5, I looked back on the OG Hollow Knight and forgot how many issues I had with the game, like I still love it and it's probably one of the most influential games of the 2000s but wow the Hive Knights runback is 10000x worse than anything in this game I'm sorry to say. It was a power move that instead of cutting down on the runbacks Team Cherry decided to double down.

Edit 2: 9.5 -> 10, the Hornet statue almost made me cry deadass I don't even know why, maybe I'm pregnant anyways disregard any previous criticisms I just replayed and got 100% and I love this game. Surpasses the original.

Edit 3, this will be a placeholder for a proper review I'm writing up, that said that might take a little while (writing this on the 15th of September).