First Impressions of Hollow Knight: Silksong — Acrobatics in the Insect Kingdom

Hollow Knight: Silksong launched yesterday and immediately made waves: the project crashed major digital storefronts for several hours, including Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store, and also peaked at over 500,000 concurrent Steam users. No one doubted that one of the most anticipated releases of recent years would cause a stir at launch, but the sheer scale of the frenzy is still striking. Naturally, hype of this magnitude breeds extremely inflated expectations. Whether they’ve been met remains to be seen, but judging by first impressions, Hollow Knight: Silksong is indeed a truly remarkable game.

Like its predecessor, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a 2D Metroidvania focused on exploring a vast interconnected world, uncovering secrets, and battling bosses. The sequel takes place in a new kingdom called Pharloom, where the main heroine, Hornet, arrives as a prisoner of a mysterious religious sect. She manages to escape, but now the weakened warrior faces a difficult journey to the top of the underground realm, searching for answers and a way to leave these lands.

Pharloom is not Hallownest. The new land feels very different in atmosphere from the original’s setting. Yes, ruin and decay are still everywhere, but the bug inhabitants of Pharloom that Hornet can talk to show much more drive and involvement in what’s happening than the phlegmatic denizens of Hallownest. Many of them are pilgrims making their way upward to the shrines of the region’s dominant faith.

The visual style of Hollow Knight: Silksong also highlights the shift in atmosphere between the original and the sequel. Locations feel grander and more detailed thanks to ornate architectural flourishes and small touches like church bells scattered everywhere. Instead of the predominantly cold palette that matched the melancholy tone of the first game, here warm colors appear much more often. But that doesn’t mean Pharloom feels welcoming. On the contrary: the opening areas are dominated by themes of fire and heat, giving the impression you’re embarking on a perilous journey into the very heart of hell.

The journey really isn’t easy: the game has become much more aggressive and dynamic. A week before Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release, many gamers replayed (or tried for the first time) the original, and that actually turned out to be a smart move, letting them better appreciate just how different the pace of the sequel is. I’d say the leap in dynamism from the original to Silksong is reminiscent of the transition FromSoftware once made from Dark Souls to Bloodborne.

The first Hollow Knight was praised for responsive controls and enjoyable platforming, but Silksong pushes these aspects to the next level. It feels like the developers took some of the Knight’s late-game abilities and charms and built them directly into Hornet’s base moveset.

Hornet can cling to ledges, which makes platforming much smoother and lets the developers throw more engaging acrobatic challenges at players right from the start. And overall, since you don’t have to worry about the precision of every jump, traversal flows faster and more seamlessly.

Once the dash is unlocked, it can be used repeatedly with minimal cooldown — much like equipping the Dashmaster charm in the first game. But more interesting is that if you hold the button after dashing, it triggers a sprint, letting Hornet zoom across the map at train-like speed and perform higher jumps. It’s essentially a Metroid-style boost. What’s surprising is that such a versatile ability can be found so early. It makes you wonder what kind of surprises the developers have saved for later stages.

Since Hornet is quicker than the Knight and her needle allows her to keep a bit more distance, the developers balanced things by making enemies deadlier. Many rush directly at her, throw projectiles, and generally behave more like late-game foes from the original rather than early ones. The opening bosses in Silksong are also more varied in their attack patterns and hit extremely hard, often taking off multiple masks in a single blow.

But perhaps the biggest shift in combat dynamics comes from the new healing system. Previously, you could spend a small amount of energy to restore a single health mask. Now Hornet regenerates three at once. The catch is that she can only heal after fully filling her energy bar. This changes the entire difficulty curve: the game feels far more tense when you have no energy, but once the bar is full and you have a quick, powerful heal in reserve, a huge portion of the stress is lifted.

Upon death, the heroine loses Rose Beads — the game’s currency analogous to Geo. However, Hornet keeps another resource — Shell Shards, which also drop from enemies. Shards are needed to recharge certain tools like throwing knives.

Another fundamental difference from the Knight is that Hornet actually responds during conversations with NPCs. This not only fleshes her out as a fully realized character with her own motivations, but also opens up new gameplay possibilities. For example, Hornet can take on proper side quests from world inhabitants — referred to as “fulfilling wishes.”

At least early on, the quests are relatively simple and mostly “kill and fetch.” But their very presence adds variety the original lacked. And the concept itself is interesting from a lore perspective: when Hornet completes tasks, the characters who made the wishes see it as divine intervention — proof that higher powers exist and hear their prayers.

In nearly every respect, Hollow Knight: Silksong follows the principle of “bigger and better,” but two aspects still raise questions. First, the abundance of checkpoints. In one of the early areas, I counted as many as five benches, whereas in the previous game you’d usually find no more than one, which kept expeditions tense. Why there are so many save points in a game where the protagonist is far more mobile isn’t entirely clear.

The other somewhat ambiguous point is the game’s linear structure in the opening hours. Freedom and variability — key features of the original Hollow Knight — became apparent almost immediately. In Silksong, it’s hard to get lost early on. Still, it’s entirely possible that the game will eventually shift to a more nonlinear structure, just later. The original is valued for its freedom, true, but many newcomers actually dropped it because the starting areas were too confusing — something the developers may be trying to fix.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is immensely captivating. When you sit playing it all night until morning and then spend the whole day thinking about it — that’s the sign of a truly magical adventure. The main thing is for that magic to last until the very end. But that’s a topic for the full review.