Hollow Knight: Silksong developer Team Cherry ran into a design problem after slotting in The Marrow, the first major area of the game's world of Pharloom. It was kind of a brutal introduction to the game, so the team set about adding what we now know as the actual first area of Silksong: the Moss Grotto.
That's according to Hollow Knight masterminds William Pellen and Ari Gibson, who spoke with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) earlier this summer for an interview published on September 5.
Author and curator Jini Maxwell explains that "Team Cherry identified the need for a calmer space that allowed players to more easily acquaint themselves with the game's control scheme, and Hornet’s agility and relatively complex moveset."
Gibson says the Moss Grotto was the answer. Throughout the interview, he and Pellen stress that Silksong needed to be a world built from spaces, not a series of levels with clear design fingerprints all over them.
"Writers talk about this idea that if they know their character well enough, the character can kind of take over and make decisions, or divert from the course the writer thought they would take – and because the writer knows them so well, they can just follow that character wherever they end up," Gibson says. And to Team Cherry, building a game world is "very similar to that" in the way "the world suggests what else is going to exist."
To this end, the grotto became a rare patch of green – vibrant, welcoming green, not toxic sludge green – at the very bottom of Pharloom outside the reach of the central citadel's corrupting influence. It's a soft, verdant platform from which Hornet will launch into all manner of hostile wreck and ruin.
Gibson puts it this way: "We're trying to be kind of respectful to the player. We're not trying to baby them. And I think there’s something nice in just saying: 'Here's the world. Off you go!'"
Rather than tutorialize The Marrow, subtle gameplay hints and challenges were added to Moss Grotto to guide players into learning how it feels to be Hornet without accosting them with game-y puzzles and button prompts. Naturally, you begin to grasp that this is how far you can jump, here are some spikes to negotiate, here's a hidden room, and here are some unthreatening caterpillar enemies that will give you unreasonably kind expectations about how much damage you are going to be taking in the next two hours, and indeed the following 40.
With Silksong now in our hands, we can see the other side of Moss Grotto as well. Without wishing to spoil, it becomes a very important location – both for the arc that Hornet follows in the foreground, and the deeper lore simmering in the background. The area is, literally and figuratively, the very base of Pharloom, a load-bearing column, so it's interesting to hear that it emerged later partly as a means to round out The Marrow.
It's also kind of hilarious to hear Gibson say they are "not trying to baby" players. Actively kicking someone's teeth in is certainly one form of not babying them, but in fairness, sometimes the difficulty is the point.
