Hollow Knight: Silksong is, at long last, almost here. In between my 112% replay of the first game, I've been pondering the December 2020 edition of Edge magazine that saw Team Cherry leads Ari Gibson and William Pellen briefly lift the curtain on Silksong before leaving us in the dark for years. After our latest Hollow Knight: Silksong hands-on preview, one snippet about the worldbuilding has been stuck in my mind: making your main character taller can have a butterfly effect across an entire game.
"Hornet being taller changes everything," Pellen told Edge at the time. This was one of the main reasons the team quickly realized their ideas for Silksong, once planned as a mere DLC adding another playable character to Hollow Knight, needed a game of their own.
Hornet comes up a few times in Hollow Knight, both as a boss fight and as an ally. She's considerably taller than the titular Knight, and much more agile, and that agility and physicality necessitated a game world that could keep up. Simply put, Hallownest ain't big enough for our warrior princess.
As Gibson put it: "Hornet can travel so much faster, she can jump higher, she can mantle or clamber onto ledges, she's generally more acrobatic. So the caves around her have to expand to accommodate her height."
Pellen says "the core of the world is mainly a reflection of Hornet: her fighting is so fast, and she's so competent, that it changes the way enemies need to be designed, and her nature as a character is echoed in the way the world is set up."
If you dropped Hornet into Hollow Knight as-is, it would probably either feel cumbersome, like a shoe on the wrong foot, or laughably easy as she pirouetted over and around any would-be hazards. The power of extending the Knight's attack range through equipable charms goes to show how impactful a simple size bump can be. Imagine being faster and taller in every way.
We've already seen this in the limited Silksong demo. As our own Josh West said of his hands-on time: "Silksong is building smartly on exceptionally solid foundations, and it's doing so with a greater focus on aggression, decisive action, and proactive decision making."
Importantly, Gibson pointed out, Hornet is also half-bug, grounding her character and design more in the physical realm of the buggy Hollow Knight universe and putting more distance between the ethereal elements that came to define the Knight.
"What that means is - and this perhaps happened automatically just through development - she's much more physical, and the world as a result is much more physical," he said. "So there are less glowy orb things, and magic bursts of light, and many more blades and traps."
Again, this is building on artifacts of Hollow Knight. In boss fights, Hornet uses wires and needle traps against the player. Meanwhile, I'm in the corner dislodging and catapulting an obsidian hunk of my soul.
It's a fascinating design challenge that's led to a fresh approach for Silksong's world, as well as new and interesting ways to expand and customize Hornet's play style – ways that make sense for her, but wouldn't have suited the Knight. I can't wait to see how this feeds into progression and level design.
Our Hollow Knight: Silksong countdown is putting all the news and details in one place as we await the big day.
