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Hollow Knight: Silksong is wholly unfamiliar. Hornet is a new protagonist in a foreign land, and by extension, I'm a stranger. It doesn't help that I haven't played Hollow Knight since 2018 – I held off on replaying it because I naively thought that Silksong was perpetually right around the corner (laugh all you like). But ironically, this sense of venturing into the unknown – like stepping into a vastness that's multitudes greater than little Hornet – is the only thing that feels familiar.
Part of that sensation is akin to starting Hollow Knight again. That makes sense. But it also rekindles memories of playing Dark Souls for the first time, of taking my first tentative steps forward in Lordran, which was different to any adventure prior. It felt like stepping into a world that had lived before I arrived – a world so old that its inhabitants had already atrophied, decayed, before I found them. But it also had an edge, with FromSoftware's punishing mechanics both cruel yet entirely at home in the world it inhabited.
Strange new world
At a literal level, Hollow Knight: Silksong echoes some of Dark Souls' motifs. Just as Lordran is a land far beyond the known – so distant it's achingly lonely – Silksong's opening journey to Pharloom is dreamy, and it's impossible to gauge how long it takes. Hornet, our only connection to the known, is just as lost as we are. But the gothic kingdom of Pharloom has always been here, and you can feel it from the moment you arrive. Countless pilgrims prepare for a final journey at the foot of a towering mountain, none expecting to survive.
Higher on the slopes, their predecessors shuffle and crawl; driven to madness from their holy mission. The mountain itself – or at least the cavernous foundations it sits upon – is made of the bones of pilgrims past, their remains paving the way for yet more pilgrims to follow. It all feels purgatorial – everyone you meet is on one journey or another, and it's hard to shake an overbearing sadness. I don't even like killing the frenzied pilgrims, who seem to throw themselves at you in desperation, until one of their saner counterparts tells me that death is a mercy.
Walking on these bones, I'm reminded of Dark Souls' Anor Londo. While I feel small by looking down in Silksong's calcium carpet, I'm equally tiny looking up in Anor Londo – at spires and distant gleaming bridges that could not have been made in this lifetime or even ten before it. A similar touchstone, to me, is The Lord of the Rings, with Middle-earth's greatest cities built by elves and men long dead, their legacies preserved via oral history, songs that mourn now-mythical ages past. I can feel that believable history in the ruins of Firelink Shrine, and while standing next to the pilgrim in Silksong who sings before a gate of bone that may never open.
Like those contemporaries, I'm ravenous to learn everything I can about Pharloom. But that's easier said than done, as Hollow Knight: Silksong is a very hard game. Over the years, I've found that playing countless Metroidvanias and Soulslikes has given me a transferrable level of skill across both genres. None of that seems to count in Silksong though, as I'm being fought and denied at every single turn.
Worst offender of all are the flowery platforming segments that demand pinpoint accuracy with diagonal attacks to bounce off – by my fifth Sisyphean plummet to the bottom of one particular room, I was starting to sympathize with Silksong's chompy pilgrims. Merely traversing this world is a challenge, and that doesn't even account for the beasts who are out to make it harder.
The second boss, Bell Beast, constantly tripped me up. Even slipping into a clinical flow state and learning to spot when it would use certain attacks – recognizing the same patterns that turn the original Hollow Knight's Troupe Master Grimm boss fight into a strangely rhythmic routine – wasn't enough, as a single overstep would wipe a chunk of my health out. There were a lot of oversteps. I finally beat it – albeit, with a last-second attack that would have certainly led to my death if the Bell Beast had survived one frame longer – but it was deeply humbling, to know I'd struggled so much with a fairly straightforward boss so early in the game.
Even that feeling reminds me of finally conquering Chaos Witch Quelaag in Dark Souls, the first boss I truly struggled with in that game. After days of banging my head against the wall, I came away from that fight with Quelaag feeling like I finally understood so much of Dark Souls. But there was trepidation, too, knowing that it would never get easier from here.
Years later, having since ripped through each of FromSoftware's Soulslikes, I know that you only get that feeling once – which is why I'm relishing it in Hollow Knight: Silksong. An entire world is there for the taking, if only you can survive it. Silksong, like Dark Souls, is about starting with nothing and surmounting the insurmountable – and while I can't wait to learn more about Pharloom, this is one web I'm happy to stay tangled in.
We've rounded up the best Metroidvanias to play alongside Silksong
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