Hollow Knight: Silksong Review: A Masterpiece of Verticality

Hollow Knight: Silksong Review: A Masterpiece of Verticality and Aggression

Hollow Knight: Silksong begins not with a gentle reintroduction, but with a declaration of intent. After seven years of anticipation, six of which were spent in the fervent, meme-laden crucible of fan culture known as Silkposting, Team Cherry’s sequel arrives not as a nostalgic echo of Hallownest, but as its defiant, vertical opposite. This is a game forged in the shadow of an impossible burden—to be the most incredible game ever—and its first, masterful trick is to weaponize that expectation, transforming a patient descent into a punishing, glorious ascent.

The long development, attributed by developers William Gibson and Ari Pellen to the simple joy of creation, has yielded a kingdom that feels like a direct, deliberate rebuttal to the first game’s melancholy. Where Hollow Knight invited you downward into the elegant, understated decay of Hallownest, Silksong casts you as Hornet and forces you upward through the gilded, theatrical hostility of Pharloom. This is not a world that asks for your quiet contemplation; it’s a world that demands your acrobatic, aggressive devotion. The shift is more than thematic—it’s a complete reorientation of the game’s identity, trading the original’s “lonely elegance” for a relentless, brass-and-fire climb toward the looming holy Citadel.

Silksong shifts the focus from the original's descent to a climb toward the peak of a new kingdom.

The genius of this design is that it mirrors the player’s own journey: after years of waiting, you are finally climbing toward the thing you’ve been promised, and the game ensures every step of that climb is earned through skill, not patience.

This vertical ambition is given life by its protagonist. Hornet is not a silent vessel for projection but a character with history, voice, and a palpable drive. Her status as a speaking protagonist—one who reacts, questions, and pushes back against the world—provides a more direct emotional hook than the Knight’s haunting silence ever could. You are not just exploring Pharloom; you are fighting alongside a defined personality, and her journey of capture, ascent, and self-discovery lends the narrative a dramatic, readable core that the first game’s archaeological approach deliberately avoided. This is Team Cherry trusting their world and their hero to carry a more conventional, yet still deeply effective, emotional arc.

Released on September 4, 2025, for a mere $20 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch, Hollow Knight: Silksong stands as a stark, almost radical statement in the modern gaming landscape. It is a sprawling, 70-hour epic crafted by a core team of three, a testament to focused passion in an era of corporate bloat. The Silkposting phenomenon—that years-long ritual of memes, jokes, and desperate hope—has finally met its punchline. The game acknowledges this weight not by playing it safe, but by being unapologetically itself: faster, sharper, and more demanding. It is a sequel that understands its legacy but refuses to be defined by it, choosing instead to build its own cathedral in the sky, one punishing, beautiful platforming challenge at a time.

Hollow Knight: Silksong Combat: Faster, Sharper, and More Punishing

If Hollow Knight: Silksong’s world design is a defiant vertical climb, then Hornet’s combat is the sharpened needle you use to carve your path up. This is not the methodical, defensive dance of the Knight; it’s a frantic, aggressive gavotte where offense is the only sustainable form of defense. Team Cherry has rebuilt the combat system from the ground up around Hornet’s unique physiology, creating a loop that is faster, more demanding, and ultimately more rewarding for those who can master its punishing rhythm.

Hornet's combat style is faster and more aggressive than the Knight's.

Hornet’s movement is the foundation of this new identity. She is taller, faster, and more acrobatic than her predecessor. Her signature midair thrust—a diagonal downward strike—fundamentally changes platforming and combat. Where the Knight’s pogo was a reliable, vertical bounce, Hornet’s thrust is a committed, angled lunge. It’s harder to control and leaves you vulnerable if you miss, but it unlocks sequence-breaking shortcuts and aggressive aerial combos. This, combined with her faster dash and later tools like the Clawline grapple, makes navigating Pharloom’s hostile architecture feel like a continuous, elegant assault. The game’s platforming challenges, like the Celeste-esque Mount Fay, demand you use every tool in this expanded kit with precision.

The combat philosophy is a direct rejection of Hollow Knight’s defensive “turtle and poke” meta. Here, retreat is often more dangerous than pressing the attack.

This aggression is baked into the survival mechanics. Hornet builds Silk with every landed hit, a resource used exclusively for her powerful healing spell. Healing restores a massive chunk of health—triple the Knight’s Focus—but consumes a huge portion of the Silk meter. The calculus is brutal and brilliant: to heal, you must first wade into danger and deal damage. This creates a breathtaking tension in every encounter. You’ll find yourself at one hit from death, Silk meter nearly full, desperately weaving through attacks to land the final blows needed to power a life-saving heal. It turns every fight into a high-risk resource management puzzle where the only safe space is inside an enemy’s attack range.

This leads to the most contentious shift: Hornet’s fragility. She can only withstand about three consecutive hits from regular enemies, many of which deal double the damage of their Hallownest counterparts. Crucially, her invincibility frames during dashes and heals feel nonexistent compared to the Knight’s. An enemy’s attack that clips you at the very end of your dodge will still connect. This isn’t a bug; it’s a deliberate design choice that removes the safety net. You cannot panic-dash or heal through damage. Every action must be intentional. For veterans of the first game, this is where Hollow Knight: Silksong most aggressively dismantles old muscle memory, punishing the instinct to create distance. The correct response to a leaping enemy is often to dash toward it, not away.

This heightened lethality makes boss encounters the game’s spectacular, grueling highlight. Fights like the fencing duelist Lace or the ritualistic Last Judge are balletic exercises in pattern recognition and aggressive positioning. They have enormous, multi-phase movesets that demand you internalize the new combat rhythm. The Cogwork Dancers waltz to a mechanical tune, their attacks synced in a way that feels unfair until you realize your dash is the counter-rhythm. Victory in these fights provides an electric, Elden Ring-level rush—palms slick, heart racing—because you’ve not just survived, you’ve performed. The game’s notorious runbacks, where death sends you back through arduous platforming sections, only heighten the stakes, making each hard-won triumph feel earned through sheer mastery of this sharp, demanding, and exquisite combat system.

Customization and Progression: The Crests and Tools of Pharloom

If the combat in Hollow Knight: Silksong is a demanding conversation, then the new Crest and Tools systems are the vocabulary you get to choose. This is where Team Cherry’s sequel makes its most explicit break from the original’s Charm system, trading the first game’s freeform tinkering for a more structured, yet deeply impactful, form of player expression. The result is a progression loop that feels more like customizing a fighting game character than collecting passive buffs, a change that brilliantly complements Hornet’s aggressive identity but introduces its own moments of friction.

Quest boards in Pharloom introduce new progression systems.

The Crest system is the star of the show, a masterstroke of build diversity. Unlike Charms, which were modular slots, a Crest is a complete moveset package. Equipping the Reaper Crest doesn’t just add a stat—it fundamentally changes Hornet’s rhythm, slowing her needle strikes in exchange for a devastating, screen-shaking downward thrust. The high-risk Crest of the Witch might feel inscrutable at first, but mastering its unique spell-weaving turns you into a glass cannon of a different kind. Finding a new Crest behind a brutal boss or a locked door is one of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s most exciting rewards because it doesn’t just make you stronger; it offers an entirely new way to play. This system ensures that your forty-hour playthrough can feel radically different from someone else’s, anchored by meaningful choice rather than incremental stat boosts.

Where the original’s Charms were a buffet of options, Silksong’s Crests are a curated tasting menu—each selection dramatically alters the flavor of the entire experience.

This customization extends to the Tools, which occupy passive slots on your Crest. These replace the utility-focused Charms of old, but with a crucial twist: they often directly enable or enhance offensive options. Tools can grant you airborne caltrops, a returning boomerang, or traps, directly feeding into the game’s aggressive combat loop. However, this is where the first significant friction point emerges. Offensive tools consume Shell Shards—a separate, ammo-style currency—and running dry mid-boss fight is a real possibility. The need to return to a workbench or a specific vendor to restock feels like extra homework, a mundane chore that interrupts the sublime flow of exploration and combat. While it adds a layer of strategic planning, in practice it often punishes experimentation, especially when Shards can be depleted by a particularly tough, multi-attempt boss.

This ties into Hollow Knight: Silksong’s sometimes-awkward dual-currency economy. You collect Shards (for tools) from most enemies, while the more valuable Beads (for items and unlocking benches) drop far less frequently. The implementation can feel imperfect, particularly in punishing late-game zones like Bilewater, where the combination of scarce Beads and relentless enemies can grind progression to a halt. It creates a tension that isn’t always fun—the fear of spending precious Beads on a checkpoint that might be poorly placed, versus the dread of a long runback if you don’t. This economic stinginess can sometimes feel at odds with the game’s otherwise generous spirit of discovery.

Side content is structured through the Wishes job boards found in towns. On paper, this provides a clearer framework than the first game’s entirely organic quests. In execution, it’s a mixed bag. While some Wishes lead to poignant character moments or unlock new Crest slots, too many devolve into fetch-quest busy work—collecting ten of a specific item from a region you’ve already thoroughly combed. They fortify communities in a mechanical sense, but rarely deepen your understanding of Pharloom’s inhabitants in the way that following Quirrel’s journey did. It’s a system that provides direction in a overwhelmingly vast world, but at the cost of some of that original’s magical, unguided curiosity.

Ultimately, Hollow Knight: Silksong’s progression systems are a bold, successful evolution that fully commits to its new identity. The Crest system is a triumph, offering profound build variety that makes mastery deeply personal. The friction from tool restocking and the occasionally punishing economy are real costs, but they’re the price of admission for a game that so fiercely prioritizes intentionality and player skill over convenient power fantasy. You don’t simply get stronger in Pharloom; you become more specialized, more adept with your chosen tools, and more responsible for managing the resources that let you survive. It’s a demanding curriculum, but one that makes your eventual graduation feel all the more earned.

World Design: Is Pharloom a 'Labyrinthine Behemoth'?

Pharloom is a kingdom that wants you to feel the climb in your bones—every labored step, every punishing gust, every treacherous drop. Where Hallownest was a descent into melancholy, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a vertical gauntlet of hostile beauty. This shift from elegant exploration to demanding pilgrimage is the game’s greatest strength and, in its most bloated moments, its most glaring weakness. The world design here is breathtaking in scope and punishing in execution, a labyrinthine behemoth that inspires awe and exhaustion in equal measure.

Pharloom's world is filled with unique, endearing, and alien creatures.

The sheer diversity of biomes is staggering, each a masterclass in environmental storytelling through Christopher Larkin’s score and Team Cherry’s painterly art. The mournful, ambient strings of Greymoor sell its bleak, downtrodden atmosphere before you’ve spoken to a single NPC. The Deep Docks hum with the oppressive, rhythmic clank of machinery and the eerie vocal harmonies of its cursed workers, telling a story of industrial exploitation without a line of text. The Choral Chambers, with its distant piano and decaying opulence, perfectly encapsulates a holy place left to languish. These are not just backdrops; they are characters, their moods woven directly into the score and visual design to create an unparalleled sense of place.

This is where the game’s scale becomes a double-edged sword. Pharloom’s grandeur often comes at the cost of Hollow Knight’s elegant pacing, trading mysterious discovery for obligatory completionism.

The Citadel exemplifies this tension. It’s a monumental achievement—a 2D Lyendell, a vertical city-state with a floor space equivalent to several of the first game’s regions. Finding it alone can take hours, with multiple winding paths and a brilliant, optional environmental puzzle leading to one of the game’s best bosses. Once inside, its layered, brass-and-marble grandeur is undeniable. Yet, its sheer size contributes to the feeling of excess. Navigating its Underworks, Whispering Vaults, and High Halls begins to feel like a checklist, with long, hazard-filled walks between meaningful discoveries. The sense of lonely adventure that defined Hallownest can get lost in the sheer volume of corridors and chambers.

This scale directly impacts the rhythm of exploration. Hollow Knight: Silksong introduces persistent environmental hazards that drain your agency alongside your health. Sub-zero winds in areas like Mount Fay will freeze you solid if you don’t keep moving, while the worm-ridden water in Bilewater steadily depletes your precious Silk reserves. These are clever, biome-specific challenges that force you to engage with the world actively. However, when paired with the game’s infamous runbacks—those long, punishing treks from bench to boss—they can curdle from engaging obstacle into pure frustration. Dying to a boss in the Blasted Steps means not only fighting through sandworms again, but also managing your Silk meter just to have a chance at a fair rematch. The world stops feeling like a place to uncover and starts feeling like a series of exams you must repeatedly pass.

Ultimately, Pharloom is a victim of its own breathtaking ambition. It is more vast, more visually varied, and more mechanically dense than Hallownest. For every moment of quiet wonder in the mystical Lost Verdania, there’s a Sinner’s Road that feels like a protracted, obligatory slog. The Wishes job boards, intended to structure side content, often highlight this by sending you on fetch quests across these vast distances for minimal narrative payoff. Hollow Knight: Silksong builds a cathedral in the sky, and every brick is hand-placed with care. But standing in its shadow, you can’t help but miss the intimate, haunting chapels of the kingdom below.

Art and Sound in Silksong: Christopher Larkin’s Orchestral Evolution

If the climb through Hollow Knight: Silksong is a test of will, then Christopher Larkin’s score is the choir that elevates your struggle into myth. His work here represents a profound evolution, swapping the original’s intimate, synth-driven melancholy for a sweeping, orchestral canvas that paints Pharloom not just as a place, but as a living, breathing character. This is a near-two-hour soundtrack that functions less as a collection of catchy leitmotifs and more as a masterclass in environmental storytelling, where every cello swell and harp pluck tells you exactly how to feel about the brass and ruin around you.

Official artwork highlighting the evolution of Silksong's visual design.

The shift to a full, live orchestra is immediately transformative. Where Hollow Knight’s score often felt like a haunting memory echoing through caverns, Silksong’s music is present and assertive, mirroring Hornet’s own agency. The mournful, ambient strings of Greymoor don’t just set a mood; they tell you this is a place of exhausted labor and quiet despair before you meet a single cursed worker. In the Choral Chambers, the distant, decaying piano notes against choral harmonies don’t just sound pretty—they scream of a holy opulence left to languish, its faith hollowed out. Larkin’s genius is in this restraint; he understands that a simple, wandering four-note melody in the hub of Bone Bottom can convey more fragile hope and looming tragedy than a bombastic overture ever could.

The soundtrack’s true power lies in its dynamic role as a narrative device, not just an atmospheric one. It doesn’t just accompany the action; it articulates it.

This is most evident in boss design. The fight against the Cogwork Dancers is a mechanical waltz set to a theatrical string arrangement that emphasizes their synchronicity. When you defeat one, the music doesn’t just fade—it strips back to a lonely, winding music box melody, sonically mirroring the remaining dancer’s resigned, mournful movements. It’s a moment of poignant storytelling without a single line of text. Similarly, the ALL-VIOLIN HEAVY METAL frenzy of the Widow fight isn’t just a cool track; its frantic, sawing strings viscerally communicate the boss’s feral, desperate aggression. These aren’t just boss themes; they are audio design as character exposition.

The score’s emotional peak is its masterful handling of Hornet’s arc. The one-two punch of Red Memory and Last Dive during the finale is arguably one of the most impactful musical sequences in the genre. Red Memory is an inward-facing, dissonant ambient piece that forces you to sit with the echoes of Hornet’s past—her burdens, her failures, her lineage. It’s a moment of crushing vulnerability. This catharsis is then sharpened into resolve by Last Dive, a track of swelling, triumphant strings that scores Hornet’s decisive plunge into the abyss. The music doesn’t just signal a phase change; it charts the complete emotional journey from doubt to determination.

Visually, Team Cherry’s hand-drawn art remains elite, but its palette has matured. Gone are the stark blacks and muted blues of Hallownest; Pharloom is a kingdom of wrought iron, tarnished brass, and pervasive fire. The Citadel gleams with a false, gilded warmth, while the Deep Docks are all grim, industrial grays choked by rust. This subtler, more metallic diversity is stunning, but it serves the atmosphere more than sheer beauty. The oppressive, sickly greens of Bilewater or the blinding, sand-scoured oranges of the Blasted Steps are designed to feel hostile, a visual complement to the world’s intent to wear you down. It’s a breathtaking world that often feels breathtakingly unwelcoming—a perfect marriage of art and intent.

Ultimately, Hollow Knight: Silksong’s art and sound are in flawless concert. Larkin’s orchestral evolution provides the emotional throughline for a world that is visually grander but narratively more diffuse than its predecessor. You may occasionally feel lost in Pharloom’s labyrinthine scale, but you are never lost in its emotional tenor. The music tells you exactly what this place is, who these characters are, and what is at stake, proving that a well-placed violin can sometimes carry more narrative weight than a thousand lines of lore.

Technical Performance: Unity Engine and Platform Differences

The technical performance of Hollow Knight: Silksong is where the game’s seven-year development cycle and its platform ambitions come into sharpest, sometimes frustrating, relief. Built on a modified Unity engine with modest requirements (a GTX 1050 is the recommended target), Team Cherry prioritized visual clarity and a rock-solid frame rate over pushing graphical boundaries—a philosophy that pays dividends on PC but creates a stark generational divide between Nintendo's consoles.

PC control and visual clarity settings.

On capable PC hardware, the game is a technical marvel of consistency. It achieves a locked 60fps with ease, and the real triumph is in its optimization for readability. The most impactful setting isn't a texture or shadow detail, but Particle Effects. Setting this to 'Low' isn't just a 10-15% FPS boost; it's a tactical advantage. During the frenetic, screen-filling attacks of bosses like the Widow or Grand Mother Silk, reduced particle clutter means enemy tells and projectile paths remain perfectly visible. This is optimization in service of gameplay, ensuring the punishing difficulty is a test of skill, not your ability to parse visual noise. The modest demands also make Hollow Knight: Silksong a portable powerhouse, running flawlessly on devices like the Steam Deck at a native 1280x800 with a steady 60fps and impressive battery life.

The Switch 2 version isn't just an upgrade; it's the definitive way to play on console, transforming the experience from a compromise into a showcase.

This is where the generational split becomes undeniable. The original Nintendo Switch version is competent, locking to its 720p/30fps target, but it feels like a distant cousin to the powerhouse Switch 2 edition. On the newer hardware, Silksong sings: native 1080p in handheld mode, a crisp 4K when docked, and—most transformative of all—an optional 120fps mode. This high refresh rate isn't just a smoother number; it translates to significantly reduced input lag, making Hornet's precise platforming and frame-tight parries feel more responsive. It’s a free upgrade for existing owners, and it highlights how perfectly this game’s kinetic combat benefits from cutting-edge hardware.

Team Cherry also implemented thoughtful quality-of-life fixes to address Hollow Knight’s more punitive elements. The new corpserunning mechanic is a masterstroke: upon death, a "silky cocoon" marks your spot, and striking it restores your lost currency and grants a free spool of Silk. This removes the dreaded "corpse run" anxiety of the original, allowing you to engage with challenging zones more freely. Early unlocks for fast-travel and a more generous distribution of shortcuts show a developer consciously smoothing the path forward, even as they make the moment-to-moment gameplay more demanding.

However, these concessions starkly contrast with the game’s most infamous technical choice: the boss runbacks. This is where Hollow Knight: Silksong’s design philosophy becomes brutally clear. In the late-game regions like the Blasted Steps or during the Act III gauntlets, the distance between a save bench and a boss arena can be egregious—a 2-3 minute trek through punishing platforming or enemy-dense corridors that must be repeated on every failure. Dying to the Last Judge isn't just about relearning his patterns; it's about successfully navigating a desert of instant-kill sandworms and wind gusts all over again, each time. This isn't a technical failing, but a deliberate, contentious design decision that equates difficulty with endurance testing. It will break some players, and for others, it will make victory taste all the sweeter, but it stands as the single greatest barrier between the player and the sublime combat Hollow Knight: Silksong otherwise perfects.

Final Verdict: Is Hollow Knight: Silksong Worth the Wait?

After years of anticipation, the final question about Hollow Knight: Silksong is not whether it’s good, but who it’s for. This is a sequel forged in the crucible of fan devotion, and its ultimate act is to look those fans dead in the eye and ask, “How much can you take?” The answer defines the entire experience. For the player who thrives on punishing mastery, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a 70-hour banquet of exquisite agony. For anyone else, it’s a beautiful, locked door.

Silksong delivers a massive, challenging adventure that justifies its long development cycle.

Let’s be unequivocal: this game is engineered for the hardcore. The steep learning curve I detailed in the combat section is just the opening gambit. Hollow Knight: Silksong’s true test is endurance, measured in the brutal runbacks through the Blasted Steps, the multi-wave gauntlets of The Choir, and the optional third act’s “oppressive” trials. A main story run will take 40-50 hours for a skilled player, while thorough exploration and chasing the true ending can easily push past 70, even 100 hours. This immense value is staggering for a $20 game, but every minute of that content is designed to challenge your resolve, not just your reflexes. The sheer scale means you’ll be tested not in a single intense session, but across weeks of dedicated, often frustrating play.

This is where the game’s most significant concession to its audience isn’t found in its design, but outside of it—in the modding community.

Team Cherry offers no official difficulty sliders, only the permadeath of Steel Soul mode for an added challenge. For players who find the baseline too punishing, the PC modding scene has become an essential accessibility toolkit. Mods like ‘Show Health Bar,’ ‘Stakes of Marika (Rebirth Anywhere)’ to shorten runbacks, and ‘Damage Multipliers’ to tweak Hornet’s output aren’t cheats; they’re vital lifelines that allow a broader audience to engage with the game’s magnificent world and systems on their own terms. The fact that such a significant portion of the community relies on third-party tools to tailor the experience speaks volumes about the uncompromising vision at the game’s core.

So, is it worth it? The pros are some of the strongest in the genre. The combat’s precise, aggressive rhythm is a masterclass in kinetic feedback. The art direction and Christopher Larkin’s orchestral score are immaculate, creating a world of breathtaking, hostile beauty. The level design in peaks like Mount Fay is peerless, and the Crest system offers profound build variety. This is a masterpiece of craft and ambition.

Yet, the cons are equally stark and impossible to ignore. The difficulty spikes can feel “rude,” especially in early gauntlets designed to shatter Hollow Knight muscle memory. Navigation fatigue sets in during the labyrinthine stretches of the Citadel, where the awe of scale occasionally gives way to the chore of traversal. And the “egregious” boss runbacks remain the most contentious design choice, conflating challenge with patience-testing repetition in a way that even the Souls games have largely moved past.

Hollow Knight: Silksong earns its “Impeccable” 10/10 scores not by being flawless, but by being fearlessly, brilliantly itself. It is a companion piece to the original, not a replacement. It trades Hallownest’s lonely mystique for Pharloom’s theatrical spectacle and punishing pilgrimage. To play it is to commit to a grueling, rewarding climb. For the devout, the view from the top is unforgettable. For the uninitiated, it’s best to start your journey in the kingdom below.

Pros:

• A combat system rebuilt for thrilling, aggressive precision.
• Immaculate hand-drawn art and a sweeping, narrative-driven orchestral score.
• Incredible value with a vast, dense world offering 70+ hours of content.
• The Crest system provides deep, meaningful build customization.
• Peerless platforming and world design in its standout moments.

Cons:

• A steep, often punishing difficulty curve geared almost exclusively at veterans.
• “Rude” boss runbacks and gauntlets that test patience as much as skill.
• Occasional navigation fatigue in the game’s most bloated, labyrinthine regions.
• Key accessibility features and difficulty tuning rely on the modding community.
• A narrative and world that, while dramatic, lack the haunting cohesion of the original’s quieter storytelling.