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Silksong was absolutely worth the wait. I've spent just over 46 hours seeing everything Team Cherry's latest Metroidvania masterwork has to offer, and after notching 100% completion and beating the final boss again, I would probably score it even higher than Oscar's excellent Hollow Knight: Silksong review. And yet, for all the things it does so well, I like it just a little less than the original Hollow Knight, which has gone unshaken as my favorite game after a 112% replay (DLC included) right before Silksong.
Part of this is down to first impressions; it's hard for sequels to overcome stellar progenitors. It's also down to anticipation – six years spent dreaming up a game that could never be matched by reality. But most importantly, despite the many areas where I think Silksong surpasses its predecessor, there are real and recurring annoyances that kept a single thought thumping in my skull throughout my playthrough: "I didn't have this problem in Hollow Knight."
Just the one, thanks
If Hollow Knight coalesced from 10 things I love, then Hollow Knight: Silksong is 13 things I love and two things I really don't love. There are more than two things to gripe about, but that's the ratio. When a sequel has been in development for this long and is so much more ambitious, there's bound to be some growing pains. And for all that Silksong has gained from its immense appetite – exceptional enemy and environment variety, some of Team Cherry's best bosses, shockingly good dialogue – I think some of its new material brought some weaker stuff with it.
I made a list, because of course I did, of everything that bothered me about Silksong. It's mostly tiny things. Here's one: the shell shard system for red tools starts to break down when grinding a hard boss and watching your shard reserves dwindle with every attempt. Yes, you can spend rosary beads on shards, and it was never a massive problem for me, but die enough times and it can feel like the game is leading you toward needless grinding. It reminds me of the blood vials from Bloodborne, which proved inferior to Estus Flasks for the same reasons. (Somehow, I see a lot of Bloodborne in Silksong.) Nevermind the fact that I like the ranged attack in Hollow Knight, the Vengeful Spirit, more than all of the red tools in Silksong. You didn't have to press two fairly awkward buttons to use it, and I didn't feel like I needed to ration it.
In a similar vein, Silksong gives you seven play styles, or Crests, shaking up your tool slots and needle attacks. This will sound far-fetched: I like the one that turns the game into Hollow Knight, the Wanderer Crest. More to the point, I only like this one, and I started to have a lot more fun with Silksong once I got it. I'm torn on this. It was an exciting discovery, and it speaks to how customizable Hornet is. But at the same time, every other version of Hornet's needle attacks are less fun than the Knight for me, so it feels like we just went in a big circle. I do like her special silk attacks, which are more comparable to things like Vengeful Spirit and use the same type of resource. And in platforming, Hornet wins by a mile. She is a joy to control. I love the way she sprints and leaps and flips. I love her harpoon attack, which is extraordinarily fun to use. I love her silly little umbrella glide.
Head-on
Here's what I don't love, and this is A Big One on my list. Team Cherry's made a point of sharpening and speeding up the world and enemies of Silksong to match Hornet's cadence, and I don't think it's a coincidence that enemy collision is a much bigger problem than it ever was in Hollow Knight. I get hit by bosses, not their attacks, way more often, and it's just a less interesting threat. I'll get hit by bosses that are stunned because a pixel of Hornet's toe met their hitbox when I went up to needle them. I'll get hit by bosses that I just stunned. I'll get hit by bosses that are dead. And above all, I'll get hit by bosses that are teleporting around the battlefield from outside the bounds of the camera.
To top it off, those collisions – which, again, are not actual attacks – will deal two damage more often than not. And as a quick aside: I do dislike the abundance of two damage attacks in Silksong. That's not because it's too hard – Hornet's incredible healing speed offsets this – but because it muddies any sense of power or danger. Two damage attacks felt special in Hollow Knight. A two-damage boss was a name taker. A clock cleaner. An elite leg breaker sent by Team Cherry to ruin your shit. In Silksong, a two-damage boss is Glorp, The Bug With a Hammer. When everything does two damage, nothing feels special, and progression gets flattened because you start and end the game with five effective hitpoints.
It turns out if you raise the speed limit by 50%, collisions go up. The sheer agility of Silksong is exhilarating when it's firing on all cylinders and it feels like you and the boss are dueling, but it sometimes feels like the pace of the game drags its combat systems into territory they aren't built for. See if you can guess what boss I'm talking about: if I can already barely parse what's happening because the ground, foreground, boss, and projectiles are all the same color, and much of the damage I take is from that half-visible boss regularly appearing from out of sight directly in front of the dash I just initiated to clock me for two damage like I got caught en passant, something might be wrong. I beat Pantheon 4 in Hollow Knight and this simply did not happen.
Tiny things
Silksong triumphs in so many areas but occasionally the gameplay takes a hit, and I'm a gameplay-first person. The quests add character to the world and bring incentives to revisit and master areas, but a lot of them are boring fetch quests that were outdated before work on Silksong even began. Pharloom is openly hostile, and the theme of penance resonates, but it can be exhausting to weather tedious and unnecessary runbacks.
The map is staggeringly large and diverse, but I found it less enjoyable and intuitive to reach 100% completion, to the point that I just looked up the last few things I was missing because my only other option was arbitrarily checking the entire world with no good way of re-tracking my adventures. I would love some sort of post-true ending hint system that helps you spot-check 100% completion without turning to Google to save time. I have 10,000 other games to play and don't want to spend days finding the hay in the needlestack. Here again, I got 100% completion in Hollow Knight without any issue or Googling the first time.
Taking silver behind my favorite game of all time, behind any game as grand as Hollow Knight, is still a heck of a medal
Sometimes Silksong just grates. Almost every flying enemy is annoying and un-fun to fight. They're annoying on purpose, I realize, but guess what: that still makes them annoying. Red tools, harpoon, double jump, yada yada, I get it. But even so, they suck! They suck twice as much in monster zoo encounters where you're locked in a room with waves of normal enemies, and I didn't care much for these to begin with. By the 500th fucking time Team Cherry pulled out a monster zoo, I didn't care for these at all, especially as a prelude to a boss. It's like an unskippable cutscene you have to play through, or a bowl of dog food you have to eat before dinner is served.
This may not be the vibe you've gotten so far, especially after that last paragraph, but I genuinely loved Silksong and it will rank highly on my personal game of the year list. All this ranting and raving is just me letting off steam and exploring the very few ways I would dock the game. And frankly, taking silver behind my favorite game of all time, behind any game as grand as Hollow Knight, is still a heck of a medal. It's a marvel that Team Cherry got this close. I'm holding out hope that the inevitable Silksong updates, not just the bug and balance patches, can push it up a notch. I'm certainly ready and willing to play more.
Elsewhere, Ali writes: 7 years after bouncing off Hollow Knight thanks to the most karmically-rancid gameplay experience of my life, Silksong is dragging me back to Hallownest to right my wrongs.
