Weekend

Up front: Silksong is obviously a good videogame.

I’ve played it for around 15 hours in the last four days, and all the while I’ve watched online communities grapple with it, most of whom seem to have progressed further than me. I’ve spent at least half as many hours reading about Silksong these past few days as I have playing it. And honestly, under the circumstances—the media didn’t get a head start here—that feels like the best way to go about playing and thinking about this curious game, which will likely delight or disappoint depending on your attitude going in.

I really like it so far, but there are some things that annoy me about it, and I don’t think it lives up to the hype through no fault of its own.

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I’m still not completely sure why Hollow Knight got as big as it did. I totally agree that it’s a great videogame and an outstanding metroidvania. Few games in this genre trust and reward the curiosity of the player as much as Hollow Knight did, and Silksong is no different in this regard.

But this doesn’t sufficiently explain its popularity. Maybe it’s because Team Cherry’s melancholy and quietly eccentric world is, in subtle ways, pretty different to anything we’ve explored before in this genre. It’s simultaneously cosy and forbidding, nasty and cute. Neither Hollow Knight or Silksong are fantasy metroidvanias, nor gothic ones, nor sci-fi ones, and that’s unusual. Most games adhere to the dictates of popular genres so strictly that when something like Hollow Knight comes along—something that doesn’t so much invent a new orthodoxy as it does artfully blur the distinctions between well-trodden ones—it can feel like a revelation. More curiously, this world of strange bugs, upright vermin, proud parasites, doesn’t feel aligned with any industry zeitgeist at all. (But nor did other mega popular indies Peak, Phasmophobia, or Among Us. I’m detecting a pattern.)

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

Which might be why Hollow Knight got as big as it did, aside from the prosaic truth that it’s fun. It’s also part of the reason why I think Silksong will inevitably be embraced despite not reinventing or even meaningfully advancing the genre it inhabits. Unless something massive changes between now and when the credits roll, Silksong isn’t a project in exceeding and thus rendering quaint and redundant its predecessor: it’s very much a companion piece. Despite the insurmountable hype built over years of gestation, Silksong’s ambitions are humble.

Beast mode

While Hornet is a much faster, more adept, more balletic character than her predecessor, Silksong feels surprisingly similar to Hollow Knight. The platforming is reliably tight, and Hornet is not beholden to the rules of inertia. She stops on a dime, and can be controlled mid-air. She doesn’t slide around too much and there is no sense of ever losing control over her. In the early hours at least, her downward attacks can only be executed diagonally, which actually makes no bloody sense, but the snooker-like gradations of complexity it introduces to movement and combat is edifying.

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Just as I’m coming to grips with Hornet’s movement, the usual onslaught of new abilities reinvent her. Aside from the major traversal upgrades I know to expect in games like this, Silksong has a take on Hollow Knight’s Charms that makes it feel more akin to an RPG. Hornet can equip different Crests once she’s found them, and all confer some minor but important tweaks to her combat moveset. On top of that, these Crests are what you slot Silksong’s equivalent to Charms into. It’s the kind of change that will please more experimental players, as well as those who spent a lot of time mixing and matching Charms in the original.

The bosses so far don’t really rock the boat in terms of design: it’s still a matter of watching, learning and then perfecting a series of attack phases.

Silksong feels good in the hand, but it’s not why I play it. While I don’t like the Ori games as much as I love Hollow Knight, I feel like the former has a better grasp on mellifluous and expressive character movement. Team Cherry’s approach to platforming can feel quite wooden, and it lacks the flair of something like Mario or even N++. Silksong is faster than its predecessor, and the combat is much more aggressive—there are a lot of potential abilities to chain together, and many early-to-mid game bosses demand it—but Silksong, like Hollow Knight, isn’t so much about flowstate as it is about observation, patience and well-timed, precise manoeuvres.

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

One thing I love about Silksong is that its world sprawls much more than its predecessor: at the time of writing I have three known directions I can explore, and probably more that I don’t know about. I love to feel overwhelmed with options in a metroidvania. I’ve read anecdotes from players online who managed to discover far-flung regions of the map in the early hours that I haven’t seen yet by mid-game, and as a general rule, areas feel much more varied, with distinct and often surprising themes (one of my criticisms of Hollow Knight is that it’s a very dark game; Silksong is less so).

And as usual, novel approaches to exploration are often rewarded. Once, to scale an insurmountable wall, I lured a bug from a far-flung area of the room to pogo-bounce off it and mantle onto the unreachable surface. It worked. I found an NPC up there, and I’m not sure who the heck they are or how they factor into my journey, but I was rewarded for doing something that would feel akin to a bug in most other games.

There are also a lot of surprising one-off encounters—many more than in Hollow Knight—which results in a delightful tension with every new room explored. Who am I going to find in here? And what will they want from me?

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

The bosses so far don’t really rock the boat in terms of design: it’s still a matter of watching, learning and then perfecting a series of attack phases. But all I’ve beaten so far, ranging from the widely loved ol’ chum Bell Beast through to the semi-puzzly Fourth Chorus, have been gripping spectacles, at least until the fifth-or-so attempt.

Silksong isn’t harder than Hollow Knight, until it suddenly is: a particular boss (I’m actually still trying to beat it) is mercilessly kicking my arse harder than any mandatory boss in Hollow Knight, and I’m definitely less than halfway through the game. This game makes no concessions for newcomers or the impatient, and some of its quirks, like taking damage when merely touching an enemy (even if they’re stunned!) can feel unfair, or dare I say, like poor game design.

Notice bored

This is a metroidvania alright. But to see why Silksong is special you have to be alert to the minor details. In one area, tiny brown bugs carry away the corpses of enemies you’ve slain, but you’ll only notice if you stand around for a while. When the Bell Beast leaps around in their unkempt den, tiny bells bounce and ricochet off all surfaces melodiously. And while the music is as grandiose or as plaintive as the situation warrants, Silksong really excels in the area of sound design: the clink of Hornet’s sword against an impenetrable metal wall, the distant foreboding rumblings in Hunter’s March that I’m sure will probably be explained at some point (but I’ll be happy if they aren’t), give the world a sense of life and tactility that very few other studios can manage on a 2D plane.

The combat is fine, but it needs the spectacle of a boss battle, or the momentum of exploration, to carry it through.

This is an unusually lavish game, and not just by the standards of sidescrolling platformers. Spend a moment in any given room, and take in the bespoke detail applied. And then, listen to the room. The map may be bigger and there may be more bugs, but the truly impressive thing about Silksong is its sensorial detail. Get it on the biggest screen you’ve got. Make sure you’ve got the sound charging through the best speakers you have. Don’t play it at barely audible volume on a handheld: it won’t do it justice. It makes Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown look like a Roblox experience.

There are a few things that annoy me. I don’t like the sidequests, or “wishes”, so far. They usually demand Hornet to collect so-and-so amount of things, and I’d happily ignore them were it not for the fact that completing some of them have far-ranging consequences. There’s even a sidequest notice board in the main township: I hate these things in games, and it feels weirder for Hornet to be rocking around doing MMO-like sidequests than it would have done for the Knight. If I wanted this nonsense I’d wait for Borderlands 4.

(Image credit: Team Cherry)

And I’m not super fond of being suddenly trapped in a room and having to fend off waves of enemies before I can proceed. Not because these sequences are arduous—though they’re sometimes really hard—but more because they’re boring, and they happen much more frequently in Silksong than they did in Hollow Knight. The combat is fine, but it needs the spectacle of a boss battle, or the momentum of exploration, to carry it through. I can’t help but groan every time two metal gates slam shut in a square room so I can fight more of the same enemies I was just fighting in the previous hallway.

I feel like those complaints are pretty minor considering how infatuated I am with Silksong, but I do get the sense that living up to the pre-release hype is basically impossible for this gorgeous but ultimately quite orthodox platforming adventure. And I don’t mean that as a criticism: it just seems basically true to me. It’s just the nature of hype.

Then again, maybe Silksong is different. This medium’s timeworn urge towards larger scale, new and innovative game systems, and envelope-pushing graphics technology—ie, the phenomena that is basically killing the blockbuster side of town right now, at least in the west—doesn’t seem to touch Team Cherry at all, whose fortune was made via Kickstarter, and whose core team is made up of three South Australians. The truth is that they’re just really good at making their weird arse bug games. And they’re really good at making me feel like a minor genius for being curious.

And, because of the huge success of their older game, they’ve been able to spend years filling this newer one with exquisite minor detail. Just don’t come here expecting a reinvention or even something dramatically different to Hollow Knight.

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