Hollow Knight: Silksong review

written 2025-09-27

Hollow Knight: Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight, and an indie metroidvania that I played in 2025-09. With my high respect for the original and the amount of time between the releases, I had very high hopes. Unfortunately, the game disappointed. I still liked it, but not as much as the original.

It took me somewhere between 30 and 40 hours to get my first ending, and a little over 60 to finish everything.

Excessive similarity

One of the main things that disappoints me is that Silksong is too similar to Hollow Knight. I loved Hollow Knight, but there's more than one valid way to make a game, and I hoped for somthing fresh. Silksong feels more like a Hollow Knight DLC than a sequel. Not only are the core mechanics similar, but also the non-core mechanics, the story, the UI, there's even a lot of the same collectible items and NPCs. I'll go into more detail on these in each section.

Core mechanics

Like Hollow Knight, it has fast player attacks that don't interrupt movement and don't hitstun enemies, and a pogo. It has a special meter called silk that's charged by hitting enemies and can be spent on either healing or damaging spells. While I would've liked to see them experiment with changing one of these core mechanics, these *are* part of why I liked Hollow Knight so much, so no complaints here.

Movement

The pogo is way different: it goes diagonally, which I thought was super interesting. But that's only the default pogo. You can unlock items that change your pogo style; most of them make it more like the Hollow Knight pogo, and I found those far more advantageous for most of the game.

The dash is pretty different: it doesn't interrupt falling, and when used on the ground it continues into a sprint. You even get momentum by jumping during a sprint, and then can dash again during your jump. This is an interesting difference. It's also a small ergonomic improvement since it means the fastest way to move is to hold down the button rather than to press it at intervals.

There's a float ability which limits you to a very slow fall speed. You can start and stop floating as many times as you want during a jump. This is the one totally new movement ability and I quite like it for the amount of control it gives. It also helps cope with the many areas where you have to fall without seeing what's at the bottom, since you can fall slowly.

The wall jump is exactly the same. Fair enough - there are many other ways to design a wall jump (see Sundered, Celeste), but Hollow Knight's is pretty basic, so I don't mind having it again.

The double jump is exactly the same, including the delay before you start rising. I didn't mind that in Hollow Knight, but I find it too annoying a quirk to want a second game with it.

There's a crystal dash equivalent that goes up instead of sideways, but since neither ability has much use outside of area unlocking, I don't find this difference very interesting.

There's an ability called clawline, which is like a Hollow Knight dash, except that it costs 1 hit of silk, but it's also an attack and automatically pogos on enemies it hits, and it has a special interaction with dedicated environment objects where you can hang on them indefinitely (these objects can't be interacted with at all otherwise). I don't like this ability because in practice it's mostly used to design platforming challenges that revolve around these fixed objects, making them very linear.

Overall, the movement has some cool innovations, but not quite as much as I would've liked.

Healing

The healing system is slightly different: it's 3 at a time. Instead of 3 hits to heal 1 hp, you spend 9 (a full meter at first) to heal 3 hp. This creates an interesting dynamic when you're missing less than 3 hp but have full silk, where you don't want to heal because it'd be wasteful if you take damage soon after, but not healing is wasteful if you *don't* take more damage soon.

But I don't really like the mechanic, because it makes healing getting interrupted too swingy and frustrating, since you can lose a bunch of health *and* all your silk in one moment. Silksong also goes out of its way to make this even *more* swingy and frustrating: you always lose your *entire silk meter*, even once it can hold more than 9, whereas in Hollow Knight, you'd only lose the cost of 1 heal at most, and if you were hit early in the animation, only part of that.

Another difference is that you can heal in the air. This is not made clear in the tutorial; I found it by accident a few hours in. It is certainly helpful, and contributes to healing opportunities generally being less scarce in Silksong than in Hollow Knight. Healing is now more often limited by silk.

Overall, the healing is very similar, and the biggest difference is something I think makes the game worse.

Spells

As for damaging spells, I dislike how Silksong changes the balance: they cost 4 silk instead of 3, making them worse relative to healing than in Hollow Knight. I think the game needed to move the opposite direction if anything. Also, many of them lock you in place for longer than Hollow Knight spells, so they're more dangerous to use.

I used spells so little in Silksong that I often forgot the controls for them, so when I did try to use one, I'd accidentally use a tool or something instead.

The fact that there are 6 different spells instead of 3 like Hollow Knight feels like a waste when they're so rarely worth using.

Nail arts

We have nail arts again (special melee attacks learned from NPCs with super long charge time), they work exactly the same as in Hollow Knight, and are just as useless.

Crests and tools

Crests are a new mechanic that I partly dislike, but this time there's a good side.

Crests are like different fighting styles you can swap between at a bench. Each one changes the behavior of some of your moves, and also has a different set of tool (charm) slots.

Tools are divided into red, blue, and yellow. Red ones are consumable weapons like throwing knives (which we'll get to), blue ones are what I think of as Hollow Knight charms (passive combat effects), and yellow ones are more exploration-foused passive effects, like the compass and the money magnet.

The default crest has 2 red, 2 blue and 2 yellow slots. One has 1 red, 2 blue and 3 yellow, one has 2 red, 0 blue and 2 yellow, etc.

I appreciate that the exploration-focused tools don't compete for slots with the combat ones like they did in Hollow Knight, so you don't have to unequip your compass to go into a boss fight and then re-equip it after; it's a small quality of life improvement.

What I dislike about the crest system is that by default only some of their slots are unlocked, and you have to spend a scarce item to unlock more slots for a specfic crest. This encourages you to play with only a couple of crests instead of trying them all, since you won't have enough of this item to fully upgrade them all.

I also dislike the low number of blue slots. In Hollow Knight, with a full set of charm notches, you could equip about 5 charms at once depending on which ones, and that afforded a ton of playstyle options. In Silksong most crests can only get up to 2 blue slots (you can also unlock 1 global blue slot).

That blue tools don't have different slot costs also causes balance issues, because they're not nearly equally valuable. Some, like the quick healing tool, are almost strictly better than others, like the one that makes you not take damage if you're hit while healing (but it still cancels your heal and costs all your silk). In Hollow Knight this was fine because Quick Focus costs 3 notches and Baldur Shell costs only 2.

As for the red ones, I generally dislike consumables, especially when not returned on death, because I never want to use them because it might be a waste. In other games with this type of consumable, like Dark Souls, you can mitigate this problem by only using consumables when you're close to winning. But in Silksong you can't even do that, because you can't see enemies' health, so you don't know how close you are to winning!

And there are about *20* different red tools, which is really sad since I never use most of them. If only they'd spent that effort on making worthwhile content instead.

Non-core mechanics

Map

The map system is exactly the same: you have to buy a separate map of each area, buy a quill and rest to update them, and buy and equip a compass to see where you are. There's even a Cornifer equivalent NPC who sings when nearby. But the implementation has *regressed* slightly: it's less precise about filling in where you've been. If you've been in a room at all, the entire room is filled in, which makes it hard to know if you've actually fully explored it or not.

Upgrades

You upgrade in exactly the same way, by finding or occasionally buying rare items that increase your max hp, silk capacity, or weapon damage. I'm not complaining about the system but I am disappointed that its exact details are so similar. Mask shards are even called the same thing and are still 4 per set. Pale ore got renamed to pale oil but that's it.

Not only do they work the same way, pale oil even has the same balance issue: the weapon upgrades make too big of a difference, so the devs have to scale enemies' health based on your weapon level so that they make a smaller difference. This is so stupid, if you're having to increase enemies' health to balance player's weapon upgrades, just make the upgrades smaller. It's even literally the same damage values as Hollow Knight for each weapon level.

Also, this time the NPC that you have to bring the pale oil to is much more hidden, I didn't find him until way later than I was supposed to when I had enough for 2 upgrades.

Other collectibles

Silksong has an equivalent of grubs, as well as historical relics and a Lemm equivalent NPC to sell them to. It even has simple keys (a set of 4 interchangeable keys, each one time use, that can open a set of doors scattered around the world). Again, all of these were fine ideas in Hollow Knight, I'm just disappointed that we have the exact same things again.

Fast travel

We again have 2 different fast travel systems, equivalent to the stag and tram (one a beast that goes through tunnels, the other a technological device). They still have the quality of life issue that you can't go between one and the other, even though there is a place they both connect to, so you often have to go through both to get somewhere.

Enemy design

Normal enemy design is probably the only area where Silksong is significantly better than Hollow Knight. There's far fewer enemies that just walk toward you and deal contact damage, and more actually dangerous and interesting ones. There's even a ton that, the first few times I fought them, felt like a *duel between equals*. They have multiple moves, significant health, can dodge and block, and are cunning enough to sometimes kill me 1v1 even after I knew their patterns. That's awesome.

There are a couple of enemies that I dislike because they move erratically, which combined with contact damage, makes it nearly impossible to attack them safely. But the average quality is much higher.

Boss design

Unfortunatly, boss design is an area where Silksong is not significantly better than Hollow Knight. It's still very much quantity over quality, with over 40 bosses but only a few that I found really interesting. Many are just boring with only 2 or 3 attacks. Some have cool ideas but are under-fleshed, with not enough health, not enough variety, or both.

Telegraphs

Silksong is much worse about making enemy telegraphs intuitive. Lots of enemies and bosses you just have to get killed by a few times to figure out what pose means what attack. Worse, many of these enemies are fought only as the last wave of an arena or otherwise far from a bench, so it takes a long time to get that experience.

Double damage

Silksong has far, far more things that deal double damage than Hollow Knight. Most bosses, many normal enemies, and even many environmental hazards. I think this is the main reason why it's so much harder, and I also think it's really poorly balanced and inappropriate. It means your 5 starting hp is really only 3, which means tries at many challenges can last mere seconds. This makes the unintuitive telegraphs and bad bench placement extra frustrating.

I think I may know why they did this, other than just wanting to make it harder. Hollow Knight did have a problem with the soul economy that made it nearly impossible to die in exploration, which was that 3 hits on an enemy could heal you 1 hp, and your invulnerability-on-hit was almost long enough to land 3 hits, so you could kind of just tank everything and heal as fast as you take damage. In boss fights and arenas, healing was balanced by needing to find a safe opportunity, but that's not a factor in exploration.

But doubling enemy damage was obviously a bad solution. Some better solutions could've been:

Make it so you can't attack (or can't gain soul from attacking) during your invulnerability-on-hit

Make healing cost more per hp healed

Not technically double damage, but there's something even worse in the game: an environmental hazard that inflicts a status effect worth 3 or more damage.

Bench placement

Silksong is also much worse about having benches close to challenges. Very many of them require a 1-minute run (I counted) to get back to. I'm actually not sure if the bench placement is worse or if I just notice it more because of how much harder this game is, and how often tries at challenges are very short due to the prevalence of double damage and unclear telegraphs. But I *think* the bench placement is worse.

Relatedly, there are several bosses that require you not only to run a long way back to the arena, but to fight some waves of normal enemies before each try.

Level design

There are a couple of level design frustrations that weren't in Hollow Knight. One is that there are a lot of dark areas where you have short vision range. There is no lantern, and often you have to fight or do platforming in these areas.

There are also many Getting Over It-style level designs, where falling once can cost you a ton of progress, and some one-way passages.

Trolling

Silksong has a *lot* of Dark Souls-style toxic trolling (where the game either kills you with something you couldn't have foreseen, or raises your hope only to disappoint). Hollow Knight had only one instance of this (Soul Master fakeout victory), but Silksong has several bossees with fakeout victories, lots of high-damage traps in exploration that can't be reasonably foreseen, and several fake benches, including some that can instantly kill you if you sit on them.

Undiscoverability

Silksong's world design is much worse than Hollow Knight's in terms of discoverability. Both games have hidden passages, but Hollow Knight's *usually* had a subtle visual indication, like a wall looking slightly cracked if it's breakable. Silksong has some of those, but also has many that are completely invisible. I tried running into and attacking almost every wall and still missed a bunch of ones that are *required* to finish the game.

Sometimes you're told that an objective is in area A, but you *cannot* get to it from anywhere in A, you have to enter from area B and then eventually reach a part of A completely disconnected from the rest of A.

I had to look up where to go to proceed with the story countless times in my playthrough, which I never had to do in Hollow Knight (except once for general direction to get a certain ending).

Misc

A couple of issues that don't have a clear theme:

Button mashing is now a thing. There are enemies with Dark Souls-style grab attacks that you have to mash a button to escape.

Random critical hits are now a thing, for some reason.

Grind quests are now a thing. Many quests are of the form "kill N of X type of enemy".

There is a boss who *heals* if you don't hit it during a certain animation, and without visible health or any other way for the player to know this, that is egregious. There's also a boss who heals *all the time*, approximately as fast as you can damage him. That's even more egregious.

Story

The story is almost exactly the same: a once-great kingdom destroyed by a mind curse caused by an imprisoned god turning everyone mindless and hostile. Much of the story is about getting 3 things needed to access this prison. The easy ending involves freeing someone in order to defeat them and take their place. I'll admit the true ending differs, but I'm very disappointed that most of the story is this similar, especially when Hollow Knight's story already felt like a clone of Dark Souls's.