Hollow Knight: Silksong Review: Seven Years, One Needle, No Regrets

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a comment section when a game has been “coming soon” for the better part of a decade. That silence broke this year, and what emerged from it was not a placeholder, not a rushed cash-in on hype, but one of the most confidently designed Metroidvanias ever released. Team Cherry did not just meet the impossible expectations built around Hollow Knight: Silksong — in several ways, they clear the bar entirely.

The Basics

• Developer: Team Cherry
• Genre: Metroidvania / Action-Adventure
• Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2
• Average Playtime: 35–55 hours for a full completionist run
• Tedony Score: 9.5 / 10

Waking Up Somewhere You Don’t Belong

Silksong hands the reins to Hornet, the sharp, silk-wielding princess-protector who was one of the most beloved supporting figures in the original Hollow Knight. This time she is not a guardian standing at the edges of someone else’s story — she is the story. Captured and dragged to the distant kingdom of Pharloom, Hornet wakes bound and stripped of her tools, left to claw her way up a needle-thin thread of destiny toward a citadel she’s told she must reach. The premise is simple on paper, almost archetypal: climb the tower, reach the top, discover the truth. What makes it sing is everything Team Cherry hangs on that simple frame.

Pharloom is a kingdom built vertically, both literally and thematically. Where Hallownest felt like a ruin you were excavating from the bottom up, Pharloom feels like a living, breathing hierarchy you are scaling from the bottom rung. Bell-shrines, weaver cults, crumbling caravans, and a haunting reverence for silk and thread as both religious symbol and biological material give the world a texture that is recognizably “Hollow Knight” while being unmistakably its own place. The writing leans further into dry, melancholic humor than its predecessor, and the new cast — merchants, bards, fellow captives, and the occasional unsettling noble — are memorable enough that you’ll find yourself detouring just to hear what they have to say next.

Combat That Finally Matches Hornet’s Reputation

If the original Hollow Knight was about patient, weighty swings of the Nail, Silksong is about momentum. Hornet’s needle strikes faster and hits in different arcs depending on stance, and her signature pogo-bounce off enemies and hazards has been expanded into something closer to a full aerial combat system. She can dash, hook onto specific surfaces with her needle, and chain together strings of attacks that feel more acrobatic than anything in the first game. It changes the entire rhythm of combat: fights become vertical dances rather than grounded slugging matches, and bosses are choreographed accordingly, with attack patterns that punish players who forget they can move in more than two directions.

The new resource, Silk, sits at the center of Hornet’s toolkit. Landing hits fills a Silk meter that can be spent on a spool of aggressive techniques — bind attacks, a healing thread technique that costs meter instead of the old Soul-based system, and later, elaborate tool combinations that let you build a genuinely personal fighting style. It’s a smarter, more flexible system than a simple reskin of Soul, because it rewards offense more directly: the more aggressively and precisely you play, the more options open up mid-fight. Difficulty has also crept upward compared to the original. Some early bosses hit as hard as Hollow Knight’s late-game gauntlet, and the game is unapologetic about it. This will thrill genre veterans and occasionally frustrate newcomers, but checkpoints and bench placement are generous enough that failure rarely feels like punishment — it feels like a puzzle you haven’t solved yet.

A Map Worth Getting Lost In

Exploration remains the beating heart of the experience, and Pharloom rewards curiosity as much as Hallownest ever did. Hidden benches, crawlspaces behind waterfalls, and side-paths that loop back on themselves in ways that reward memory over hand-holding are everywhere. The map system has been refined rather than reinvented — you still need to purchase a cartographer’s work and mark your own points of interest — but quality-of-life tweaks like clearer fast-travel stations and slightly more forgiving backtracking mean the game trusts you to get lost without punishing you for it. Tool crafting, a new system that lets Hornet fashion needle variants and utility tools from materials found across Pharloom, adds a layer of light resource management that never overstays its welcome; it’s optional depth for players who want it, and easily ignorable for those who just want to fight and climb.

Presentation: Same DNA, New Palette

Visually, Silksong keeps the same hand-crafted, gothic-storybook silhouette style that made the original instantly recognizable, but the palette shifts constantly as you move through Pharloom’s regions — rust-red caravans, moss-choked ruins, and the pale, bone-white architecture near the upper city all feel distinct without breaking the game’s cohesive art identity. Christopher Larkin returns to score the game, and his work here might be his best yet: mournful strings for the quiet moments, frantic percussion for the boss rushes, and a handful of choral themes near the game’s major story beats that will likely become instantly recognizable to fans the way Hollow Knight’s main theme did.

How It Compares to the Original

Comparisons to the first Hollow Knight are inevitable, and mostly favorable. Where the original was a slow-burn introduction to a genre many players had never fully explored, Silksong assumes a certain baseline fluency and builds from there. It’s less interested in teaching you the fundamentals of the Metroidvania and more interested in seeing how far it can push a player who already understands them. That’s a reasonable bet for Team Cherry to make, given how thoroughly the original converted an entire generation of players into Metroidvania enthusiasts, but it does mean Silksong is a slightly less forgiving entry point for someone who has never held a controller in this genre before.

Fans looking for continuity will find plenty of quiet callbacks — item names, environmental details, and musical motifs that reward familiarity with Hallownest without ever making Pharloom feel derivative. This is a sequel that trusts its audience to notice the connective tissue rather than spelling it out, and that restraint is part of what makes the world feel so lived-in.

Boss Design and the Pacing of Difficulty

It’s worth dwelling on just how much of Silksong’s identity is carried by its boss encounters, because they are where the game’s combat overhaul is most visible. Bosses telegraph clearly enough that every loss feels like a lesson rather than a random punishment, but the margin for error shrinks considerably compared to the original. Multi-phase fights are common even relatively early on, and several of them ask you to relearn your spacing entirely between phases as attack patterns shift from ground-based sweeps to aerial bombardments. The payoff for persistence is real: few feelings in gaming this year have matched finally cracking the rhythm of a boss that had stonewalled you for an hour, watching Hornet’s needle finally connect cleanly on every parry window.

Accessibility options exist but are relatively modest — there’s no easy mode in the traditional sense, and Team Cherry seems content to let the game’s difficulty stand as a core part of its identity rather than sand it down for a broader audience. Whether that’s a strength or a limitation will depend entirely on what you’re looking for in a Metroidvania, but it’s a consistent, intentional design choice rather than an oversight.

Who Should Play This

Silksong is an easy recommendation for anyone who finished Hollow Knight and wanted more of that specific blend of atmosphere, exploration, and demanding combat. It’s a tougher sell for total genre newcomers, who may find the early hours punishing before the game’s rhythm clicks. But for the audience it’s built for — patient, curious players who enjoy being handed a hostile world and trusted to figure it out — there is very little competition released this year, or arguably this generation.

What Works

• Combat overhaul makes Hornet feel like a genuinely different character to control, not a reskinned Knight
• Pharloom is dense, atmospheric, and rewards exploration constantly
• Silk economy gives players real agency over how aggressive or defensive they want to play
• Soundtrack and art direction are a clear step up even from an already gorgeous predecessor
• Writing and side characters add welcome warmth and humor to a bleak setting

What Doesn’t

• Difficulty spikes early and stays high — newcomers to the genre may bounce off certain bosses
• Backtracking, while improved, is still occasionally a chore in the mid-game
• Tool crafting systems are a little undercooked compared to the depth of the combat itself

Silksong doesn’t just live up to seven years of anticipation — it makes a case for why that anticipation was worth having. This is a Metroidvania that respects your patience, your reflexes, and your curiosity in equal measure.

Final Verdict: 9.5/10

Hollow Knight: Silksong is not merely a sequel; it’s a refinement of everything the genre has learned from Team Cherry’s first outing, filtered back through a studio that clearly used its extended development time wisely rather than aimlessly. It’s harder, faster, more confident, and every bit as hauntingly beautiful as Hallownest once was. If you loved the original, this is essential. If you’ve never played a Metroidvania before, this might be a demanding place to start — but it’s also one of the best possible arguments for why the genre exists at all.