Hollow Knight: Silksong is a Frustratingly Mixed Experience
That gets infinitely better if you mod it.
Well, the time finally came after years and years of silence. Hollow Knight: Silksong released and it has caused a lot of controversy, as was always going to happen. The game has become this mythical game in a lot of the gaming space so to actually see it released was an event.
So then, what is it actually like to play it? How difficult is it? Is the game amazing? Or is it something that falls short of being an experience that just has to be played?
Put in simplistic terms I would say, ehhhhh. It's got such amazing bits and I did really enjoy it but it has some issues that could have been solved if Team Cherry was less secretive during development. It's complicated, so let's get into it. This is gonna be a bit of a very long hot take so be prepared.
The Premise
After Hollow Knight, Hornet goes to the new kingdom of Pharloom where she finds a place under tremendous oppression and darkness because of a caste based society. You find yourself having to face off against bugs and other enemies as you try to ascend to The Citadel to find out more about what's going on here in Pharloom. Just remember that you're not as strong as you'd think and Pharloom is a far darker and more varied place than you'd expect. Be careful.
The Good
The music is wonderful and atmospheric, the world is brilliantly represented and feels alive. There's moments of adorableness and also tremendous unease. There's so many moments in the game that make you feel how difficult Pharloom is to exist in (that are independent of the issues I will discuss in the next section). For instance, about 12 hours in I ended up back at the beginning town and sat down on the bench and suspended the game on my device. The next day I turned it on only to have something barge into the town knocking shit over while the townsfolk hid and I had to defeat it in order to save the town. You can tell that Pharloom is oppressive because of the chaotic nature of the creatures in the world and how they can come out of nowhere and change the lives of a town. That's a wonderful detail.
There's also just simple art direction where the majority of the world feels uncomfortable. It feels like people are depressed and living under an oppressive society filled with imprisoned citizens and fleas as well as dilapidated buildings and structures that look like they've been falling apart for far too long. Then, when you get to the citadel you see how the oppressors live. Like how in one area you find a grand dining room with a bunch of tables and chairs, often having gold trim, for the elite of this world to eat in. The art of the game tells you everything that you need to know about this world just from looking at it.
Then, there's combat, which, independent of the difficulty, feels satisfying and when you manage to really find a groove it feels damn good, especially when you get decently good at deflecting attacks. You get a lot of tools that make the combat have this really interesting flow where you're both attacking a bunch and often laying traps with your tools to do a ton of damage to enemies if they dare get trapped or if they dare get to just the right spot where you're able to use the tool that feels right to you that isn't a trap. I also modded my game to make it decently easier and that is what made me really appreciate the combat. I went from just being annoyed by everything being so difficult and the damage so rough to deal with to the challenge still remaining to a degree but being more manageable. I was only able to finish this game because of these mods. I was only able to actually enjoy it because of them. This is why they should be accessibility settings in the game, so people can keep some minor challenge while still being able to have more fun. Fun is key. But that'll be discussed more later.
You also get charms that allow for some really really interesting possible builds. For instance, I got a charm that allowed me to just hang on a wall as long as I wanted to. Then I had another charm that enhanced my flexibility allowing me to retreat faster from a battle. Then, I also had a charm that allowed me to recoil less when striking foes and not get flung as far when taking damage. All of these meant I could very quickly get from being hit to sticking on a wall out of reach as long as I wanted. It made a lot of fights much easier. Unfortunately, there are so many charms that are really cool but they get overshadowed by how necessary the magnet and compass charm feel so you can have your currency pulled in towards you and so that you can always see yourself on the map. There's just so many interesting potential builds and you can really tell how varied they are, if only the magnet and compass charms were just default. The Charms themselves though are very interesting and fun to mess around with.
The abilities in this game are also fucking fun. When I unlocked the grappling hook I suddenly went from being upset that I was almost not making jumps, despite technically being able to make them, to feeling like I'm good at platforming because I'm much more mobile. I started to remember years ago when I played Celeste and how awesome it felt to get those difficult platforming sections done (incidentally Celeste has fantastic accessibility settings that make the game easier for people that need it or want it, like Silksong should).
The level design is also pretty damn good. I only had one moment where I was pissed at it and I'm terrible at platformers. The design doesn't feel like you're wandering through levels, but actually wandering through an area of the world. The majority of the time everything makes sense. It's not that tough and is genuinely fun to perfect that challenge. Except for Mount Fey, introducing a platforming section where you have to be perfect and super quick because if you aren't then you'll quickly die from the cold in between safe havens of warmth is genuinely annoying. This is a moment of "realism" coming first (something I will talk about in the next section a lot) instead of the game allowing some fuck ups and still being able to recover. That can't happen in Mount Fey but can happen most other places. It's also not really fair to say it being realistic is an excuse because when you're running through a level with a ton of lava, it should be way too hot to survive. But you don't burn up after a short period in between safe havens even though that'd be "realistic". It's okay to break realism when it comes to lava but not when it comes to mountains? Again, Mount Fey is the only spot I have a ton of issues with, the rest is pretty damn well put together.
The Bad
Difficulty is something that I've struggled with in games. I'm fine taking multiple attempts to clear a boss, but if I don't feel like I'm making any progress and am constantly being excessively punished then I just don't have fun. The problem here I think is that Silksong decided to do something that most sequels don't, start the difficulty up where the first game left off. The game was initially a DLC for the first one so would have made sense for it to have done that, but now it's a full sequel and it feels like Team Cherry wants you to play through all of the original in order to even start to play Silksong, but that's not what they said earlier in development. Sadly, a consequence of them not communicating during development for years about their design goals or how they're approaching the game is that their statements earlier in development are all we have to go by. Back in December of 2020 Team Cherry said this in an interview with Edge:
"We're trying to be really, really mindful that we want this to be a game that new people can come into, and experience as their first Hollow Knight game - that it sits alongside the original game, and the difficulty also sits alongside the game in that way."
And then they went Radio Silent. After playing a lot of Silksong before modding it, and having played several hours of Hollow Knight (I stopped just because I was bad at Metroidvanias at the time), I believe they absolutely fucking failed at that goal. Silksong is far more difficult than the first game, particularly the early game. The game feels like they were actually UPSET that so many people played and enjoyed their first game. As if they intended to weed out as many people as possible in the first couple of hours, including some people that loved the first game. This would have been less of a problem if they had communicated that intention. Instead they seemed to have created a game that was designed as a DLC that got expanded into a sequel but then they forgot to tune the difficulty back down.
See, even in Soulsborne and souls-like games a sequel doesn't usually pick up the difficulty where the first game left off. It starts fresh and allows a reset difficulty curve because it wants to be open to new players. You shouldn't be telling people new to a series who just bought your game that they should go spend more money to play the original and then come back to play the sequel. That's a horrible thing to do to a newcomer to a series and is a very good way to make sure they don't play either of your games. Imagine if Elden Ring did that where the enemies did just as much damage as late game Dark Souls 3 enemies and you only had slightly more starting health. That would be fucking insane, right? So why should Silksong?
But what do I mean by they made the difficulty start up where the first game left off? The simplest example is damage. Most enemies do 2 masks of damage (or will have a flurry attack that once you are hit you can't get out of and does 1 mask per hit so can end up being 3 masks, if you don't manage to deflect any of them) while in the first game, it was incredibly rare to come across enemies that do 2 masks and the ones that do were usually end game enemies/bosses. In the first game you'd have a bunch of health and mana increases and charms and weapon upgrades and abilities to face those enemies, but here? You don't have shit. Not only that, this not having shit seems to last for a lot longer in this one than the first one. For instance, in the first game I played for a couple hours and got a new Mask increasing my health and my survivability. While in Silksong I didn't get a new mask until 12-13 or so hours in despite exploring a lot. I've seen people argue this is purposeful, but it shouldn't be. Plus even basic enemies take several hits to deal with so until you unlock a nail upgrade like 15 hours in, you're stuck killing each normal enemy in 4-6 hits. This just feels bad when they do so much damage but you do so so little. I firmly believe that when developing a game you shouldn't sacrifice enjoyment of your players for an "artistic vision", that's just BS. Especially when you had said years ago, in one of your only interviews about the game, that you wanted a similar difficulty curve as the first game and to be welcoming to new players. Again, Team Cherry failed here. They made a game for people that beat the first one, not one that was welcoming to newcomers, difficulty curve wise.
Quick sidenote: I did some math. There are 20 mask pieces for a total of 5 masks you can add. You also start with 5 masks. So you have a max of 10 possible. But with most enemies doing 2 masks of damage you actually only have about 5 health. While in the original game you start with 5 masks and had a max of 9 masks with most enemies doing 1 damage. So in Silksong your supposed upgrades still mean you are always weaker health wise than you are in the first game. Such a perplexing decision.
Bosses also have a level of difficulty that is frustratingly annoying. Some are more reasonable because you only have to deal with the boss. I actually enjoyed the Moorwing fight (although I played it after modding and before the patch), but then later game fights introduce adds (short for additional enemies), which can be useful when there's 2 so you can get some silk regenerated from hits, but what about when there's 4 and they're all flying around in a game where you're designed to be in the air a lot? Or what about when you're facing a boss that has an attack that you would think only does 2 damage but actually does 3 because it's a spinning blade and you can't get out of the way once you're hit? Or when you're facing a boss who summons adds and environmental hazards, all of which do 2 damage? Then, there are the moments where you have to face 5 waves of 2-5 enemies and only then do you get to fight the boss. And then every time you die you have to re-fight all those enemies. That's not enjoyable difficulty, that's just exhausting and needlessly punishing and could easily be fixed with some tweaks and accessibility settings like Prince of Persia The Lost Crown or Celeste has. Would the game be balanced for that? No, but so what? You should want more people to play the game all the way through not less. And as the designer of Celeste once said about what it feels like as a developer adding accessibility options that aren't balanced for:
...it’s easy for me to feel precious about my designs. But ultimately, we want to empower the player and give them a good experience, and sometimes that means letting go.”
And there's more than just damage that contributes to the difficulty. In one word, Tedium. The biggest problem with the game, even more so than the increase in difficult in the early game compared to the first one, is that the game is filled with tedious tasks. Specifically, things like long boss runbacks and difficult platforming sections only to be rewarded with just a few currency that you could easily lose on your way back through the platforming section (or when it falls on environmental hazards) since often there is no "quick exit" path and you have to go back through all of it, because that's part of the challenge! Then, there's the economy in the game that is tedious and frankly fucking broken. The biggest problem is you have to pay for benches (checkpoints) and fast travel and maps so you have to make the choice, do you pay for the map and risk not having enough to pay for a bench you come across? Or pay for the bench but never know where the fuck you are? Or, pay for the bench and not be able to buy almost any maps until the second act of the game when you're given a lot more currency? This is just incredibly unsatisfying and unhelpful when this game has a core part of exploration so having to choose between buying maps or buying benches and fast travel is just a horrible decision. Saving up to buy maps? Fine. Charging for the other stuff as well? Shit.
All of this leads to boringness and tedious gameplay. Runbacks are bullshit because they don't increase the challenge and only decrease your health before you get to the boss who will whoop your fucking ass in two hits and while you are flying back from getting hit they'll walk into you and boom, you're dead because you also take 2 damage from contact with enemies. Or you'll land on one of the adds that literally just spawned so you're dead. Or you'll defeat the boss, watch them explode, but be slightly too close and die to the explosion that some bosses do on death causing you to have to redo the entire fight. Or they'll quickly do another attack after the one they did and you'll die. And there's no i-frames for getting hit, at least not noticeable ones. You can easily be hit again literally immediately after being hit. You have to be as perfect as possible. And all that is needed to at least help this tedium is just a bench outside the boss room so you can immediately try again. It doesn't matter that that might not be "realistic" because what matters is that it feels better to play.
Another sidenote, in a game about using agility to be in the air and dealing with difficult bosses and enemies, contact damage is a tiresome inclusion. It should at least do only 1 mask of damage because at 2 it's just fucking brutal. Again, you're forced to do everything perfectly and can't really have this great feeling of fucking up and recovering enough to defeat the boss. That's just boring and needlessly punishing. And I don't care that there's a lore reason for Hornet taking so much damage. Team Cherry writes the lore. They could have decided that the lore should justify not taking so much fucking contact damage.
Back to the tedium, the economy tedium leads to you grinding for currency. Grinding in a game like this is just not fun. The game is designed around every enemy being a challenge, but also demands that you farm them to be able to get basic things that were free in the first one. That is tedious and reminds me of Tears of the Kingdom where you had to grind to be able to get materials to be able to engage with one of the best mechanics in the game, building machines. Grinding is not fun in this kind of game, and one could argue at all, but that's another discussion.
This is rationalized as being integral to the world. That the Kingdom of Pharloom is an oppressive place. That it is a tiered society with those at the top in The Citadel being surrounded by gold and those at the bottom being stuck in the muck and poor as fuck. The game wants you to feel that by making you hate the experience of being there as much as the citizens do. It's supposed to be "immersive" or even "realistic". But immersion and realism should not come first in a game that is supposed to be FUN. As a developer you are supposed to prioritize enjoyment and it feels like Team Cherry put enjoyment at least 3rd (arguably 4th behind super punishing difficulty). It's not fun to be so broke that when you're super low on health and desperate to find a bench and finally come across one feeling a sigh of relief, only to find out that you don't have enough currency to buy it. That you have to go hope to find currency somewhere or to go back to a bench you've already unlocked. That's not enjoyable. There's a reason Soulsborne games don't charge for bonfires and it's because that feeling of finding one after a tough experience is fucking amazing. You finally feel like you can breathe for a minute and upgrade so you don't lose your souls. Silksong takes that idea and instead of replicating it, ruins it.
Something that plays into the problem with charging for everything is that only some enemies drop currency because it's "realistic" that they're the only ones who would be carrying it. But even worse, bosses usually don't drop ANYTHING. Now, not all bosses need to drop items or ability upgrades, but they should absolutely drop currency. This would help fix the economy and increase satisfaction with beating a tough boss. Right now the only satisfaction you get is to be able to progress. That's not satisfying. It feels anticlimactic and disrespectful to the time (often several hours) you put into beating the boss to see them explode but not reward you with anything tangible. It sucks only getting to go into a new area that, instead of feeling like a reprieve from the difficulty, is actually just as annoyingly, or more, difficult as the fight you just finished. Soulsborne games do this wonderfully because you get your upgrade materials/currency from beating enemies and you get a ton from beating bosses. It's incredibly satisfying to defeat a super tough boss and get over 50,000 souls. Those games would not have been as successful if after all you didn't get a reward after suffering.
Then, there are the side quests. Many of them are great while others are simple fetch quests. These aren't usually things you can get while just running around and exploring because, well, you only unlock most of them after you've already explored the area and often after you've finish most things there. The fetch quests are designed around forced backtracking and grinding enemy kills as opposed to something to do while progressing or doing the much more interesting side quests. That's just poor design. If you're going to have fetch quests you should just let me get them done during my original exploration so that I don't feel like I'm doing a fetch quest and more just doing something boring alongside the more interesting stuff.
Going off of that, exploration is one of the biggest aspects of the Metroidvania genre, they're games designed for you as a player to want to explore every corner. But when so many of the enemies do 2 damage and it takes so long for you to increase your health, exploration goes from being a fun time to being a super sweaty experience where you're dreading fighting every enemy you face and every environmental hazard since many of them do the same amount of damage as bosses. Enemies also get far more mobile as the game goes on so even as you get more powerful, exploration continues to be something you dread instead of something you enjoy. You have to be perfect 95% of the time while playing and that's exhausting. Mods helped with this but before that it just felt bad.
With how the game is balanced it feels like Team Cherry got so used to their own game and so damn good at it, that they believed it was too easy. As if they balanced it to account for their own skill and only their own skill. I'm a developer, I know that as a developer we are not a good judge on our own games. Can we tell if something is fun or difficult or easy for us? Sure. But if you don't have a ton of people play your games as playtesters then you are just not able to tell if it's ACTUALLY fun.
Producer sidenote: this is something I've experienced when running playtests for the first Table Top RPG I worked on. We had played it a lot internally and enjoyed it but it wasn't until we got people from outside to play it that we could really see how other people approached it. That we could really take in what works and what doesn't. While Silksong did have playtesters, it doesn't feel like there were enough of them. This is an instance when communicating with your audience during development could have helped because you could have put out a demo for select Kickstarter supporters or something. Anything to see how people from the outside react.
Thankfully, Team Cherry are finally seeing how people from the outside experience the game and, as evidenced by their first patch, they're realizing they made some mistakes with early game difficulty and the rosary economy. But those design mistakes didn't have to be made if they had been less secretive.
Last point, can bosses without visible health bars please stop being a thing? It's far more satisfying to see how far down you got a boss to convince yourself to give it another try than it is to have no idea how much health they had left. It's probably a "we don't want it to feel too much like a videogame" but...it is a videogame. It always will be. Put the players first and give the bosses a damn health bar.
The Ending - Details
**Start Spoilers**
Okay important note, the game doesn't really "end" when you expect it to. After doing a bunch of quests in each town and some others as well, you can beat the supposed final boss, the credits play, then you can unlock Act 3 from the main menu. This leads into the actual ending to the game that I will be discussing here.
Turns out you didn't beat the Silk Mother at the "end" of the game and she's being held in the void by Lace, who sacrificed herself when you tried to bind the boss to the trap you made while unlocking Act 3, underneath Pharloom causing havoc all over the kingdom so you have to delve down into the void to actually beat her.
To do this you to have to go down into the Abyss, only to find out you then can't go any further, and have to quickly flee with a new power where you throw your needle up and then shoot towards it. It's a really cool power and there's some beautiful moments during the fleeing section. Eventually you get out and find the person that helped you make the trap which was actually all a trick that was worse for the Silk Mother than just killing her. Then, you're given the quest to go and fight three Old Ones, to harvest their hearts, who are old monarchs who used to rule Pharloom long before Silk Mother. So you have to go find them and kill them to harvest their hearts.
Those fights are hard as fuck, particularly one where you have to go through at least 5 gauntlet sections that each have at least 5 waves of very strong enemies with a ton of shifting environmental hazards and only then do you get to face the boss at the top of this tower. And there's no bench all the way through it (at least I couldn't find one). This section is rougher than the rest of the game entirely.
Once you get all the hearts and use them to go through Hornets memories to get this special flower that will help her dive into the void safely in order to free Pharloom. You learn a decent amount about Hornet during delving into her memories but you also lose all of your build during this time so if you hate the diagonal dive down then you're gonna have to just deal with it here which is fucking BS.
When you get the flower, you can then dive back down into the Abyss and then down into the void. After a beautiful cutscene you make it to the bottom and have to fight Lost Lace to be able to both free her from the Void and let the Silk Mother finally perish. You beat Lace and free her, grab her, and try to ascend out of the void. That doesn't work and you get stuck only for the Knight from the first game to appear and save you and Lace. Then you wake up, find out that Lace is alive, she laughs, and credits.
**End Spoilers**
The Ending - Reaction
It's really cool to have a secret Act 3 and unlocking it was a lot of fun. The actual ending though? I enjoyed the beauty of it. I enjoyed the experience because I had my mods, but I know I would have been pissed otherwise. The feeling of beating it was still wonderful and all but I didn't like that Hornet had to rely on someone else to save her despite being plenty powerful. That sucked and felt more just forcing in a cameo that wasn't necessary. But I might have felt differently if I had played the first game all the way through.
I think this was probably the best ending the game could have possibly had. Freeing Pharloom was awesome, I even felt some emotions during the final cutscene. It was beautiful even if I had criticism. Although that last section, and really all of Act 3, was a massive step up in difficulty despite being the "true ending" which I don't think was necessary despite there being a "reason" behind it. But that's about Act 3 not the ending as a whole.
The Conclusion
Scoring Hollow Knight: Silksong is probably one of the most frustrating times I have had reviewing games in over the course of the last year. Not because I didn't enjoy it, I actually enjoyed it a ton...after I modded it. Instead it's because the game has so many things I have problems with as a whole when it comes to game design that I feel make it frustrating to figure out a good score. But that's what I have to do because that's how reviews generally work. With that, an important note is that not having the accessibility settings (and economy tweaks) that I believe it should have causing me to have to mod them in means there is a cap on how I will score it (and also makes the score higher than would be if I played without). If it had those settings its score would be even better. And maybe they'll add them one day. But right now, this is what I've got.
Silksong is an experience that was made with love and care and you can really tell the Devs adored what they were making, but they got too secretive causing their game to have far more difficult and punishing mechanics than it needed or made sense, but if you can mod it then you should absolutely play it, the games mods fix so many of the issues that exist and make the game feel significantly less punishing while still allowing some level of difficulty. The game has so much going for it but it should be re-balanced or have accessibility settings added so you don't have to mod it. If you want to wait to see what accessibility settings they might add to the game then I'd say that's reasonable, but just keep in mind those aren't guaranteed. If not and you desperately want to play it and you have a PC or steam deck (or some other mobile PC) to play it on, here's a list of the mods that I installed from Nexus so you can have the kind of improved experience I did:
All Enemies Drop Rosary Beads (and Shards)
No Bench Restrictions - Equip Everywhere
Always Have Compass Effect and Always Have Magnet Effect (Pulls shards too) so you can free up your charms and actually have interesting builds.
Easy Deliveries - No Delivery Damage on Hit or Fast Travel
Automatic Health Regeneration (This one really helps with learning difficult platforming sections.)
Also don't be afraid to use a program that lets you cheat, I used Wemod (Windows only) when I got so frustrated I just wanted to give up and that also helped me enjoy the game when I would have just dropped it otherwise.
Good luck, and maybe try one of the other crests because while that diagonal dive one at the start is cool, it's much harder to deal with.
Meow,
Cat
