Hollow Knight: Silksong released on September 4th, 2025. The six-years-delayed sequel to Hollow Knight, the critically acclaimed metroidvania, Silksong has taken the world by storm in the two months since its release. There is debate between those who prefer Sliksong over its predecessor, and those who prefer the original. This article will represent both of these perspectives in a dialectical format.
Key:
My generally pro-Silksong opinions will be italicized.
My generally pro-Hollow Knight opinions will be plain text.
DISCLAIMER: If you, the reader, plan to play Silksong in the future and do not wish to be spoiled on the game’s mechanics, sequences, and story, please play Silksong before reading this review.
Platforming
Let’s get this out of the way. What Hollow Knight lacked in platforming (and it was rather lacking in platforming), Silksong has in spades. Between Cogwork Core, Mount Fay, and the climb to the Surface, Silksong has the complex platforming that Hollow Knight lacked. While Hollow Knight does have some light platforming (and some challenge near the end of the game), it barely makes use of the Knight’s moveset except to block off certain areas in the typical Metroidvania style.
While Silksong certainly has more platforming sections than its predecessor, Hollow Knight’s platforming takes a quality-over-quantity oriented approach. Ultimately, I think Silksong’s main failing is its lack of focus. While Silksong’s scope in terms of platforming is massive, it often feels like each platforming section stands on its own rather than contributing to one experience. On the other hand, each platforming section and environment that Hollow Knight throw’s the players way feels directed towards a single experience. This culminates with Hollow Knight’s White Palace, an extremely difficult platforming section near to the end of the game, which is required in order to access the game’s true ending. This moment truly feels climactic and intense, and its absence in Silksong is definitely felt, especially towards the end of the game where many of the quests boil down to fast traveling to certain locations without much of a challenge.
I completely agree with your point that a mandatory endgame platforming challenge’s absence is felt in Silksong. This is a bit understandable, given how people absolutely abhorred the White Palace at release, especially because there wasn’t any easy way to reduce the challenge until a year later (unlike, say, Silksong’s Bilewater, which has a hidden bench and a special tool elsewhere in the map to help with the boss encounter), but, nonetheless, I would be happier with a White-Palace esque challenge in the game. The climb to the Surface’s vertical corridors come pretty close difficulty-wise, but the sequence is unfortunately much shorter. However, despite Silksong being lacking in this regard, the platforming sections largely feeling like standalone sequences is a result of them being more involved than Hollow Knight or Silksong’s areas without intense platforming, not because they were each mistakenly made less cohesive. The platforming sections feel separate from the rest of the areas in the same way the boss fights feel separate from the rest of the areas — there’s really no way to make a platforming sequence feel like just another part of navigating the area without making it substantially easier, just like there’s no way to make a boss feel like just another enemy without limiting its HP and moveset.
Silksong’s more varied moveset (with the addition of the Drifter’s Cloak, Clawline, and Silk Soar), more refined and precise movement, and greater emphasis on down-slash “pogos” over obstacles and enemies gives it the opportunity to have more frequent and more demanding platforming sequences (rather than just areas that require light platforming to navigate) than Hollow Knight. However, the new game lacks an equivalent to one of Hollow Knight’s most iconic sequences, the White Palace, in favor of shorter platforming sections spread throughout the game. While these platforming sections offer more of a challenge than Hollow Knight’s, they also somewhat detract from each area’s atmosphere, as the focus becomes more on getting around than on the beautiful environments on display.
Boss Fights
In all honesty, I did not find Silksong’s bosses’ highs quite as high as Hollow Knight’s. The game’s best (Last Judge and First Sinner) bosses are the level of the Sisters of Battle from Hollow Knight, which, while quite good and in my personal top 5 for the game’s bosses, are certainly not the game’s best (which, for me, is Nightmare King Grimm).
However: Silksong avoided a major problem with Hollow Knight’s boss fights, which I believe is a component of Silksong’s overall high difficulty. There were almost no bosses in Silksong which I could say felt under-designed. Even the more simple bosses have enough flashiness and aggression that they don’t feel too simple. There was nothing nearly as egregious as Release Nosk (or, for boss design in general, Update Nosk, really; even completing the boss fight couldn’t make Deepnest feel entirely complete) in Silksong.
Ultimately, I think that Silksong and Hollow Knight approach boss design in different ways, and therefore expect different things from those bosses. What I mean by this is that when Hollow Knight adds a boss, it comes with a set of expectations: It should reward the player with something tangible, it should have a unique mechanic, and it typically concludes a player’s journey through one section of the map. In Silksong, it often feels as though bosses were originally meant to meet those same expectations, but once those were all added, the developers still felt an obligation to add even more. Bosses like The Last Judge and Sister Splinter felt like Hollow Knight bosses, but others such as Disgraced Chef Lugoli, Second Sentinel, and Palestag fit none of these requirements.
Let’s not forget that Hollow Knight had an entire gallery of very simple, completely optional one-off bosses with basically no rewards in the form of the Warrior Dreams. You did need the Dream Essence from them to unlock the true ending, but you would get much more than you needed between the Warrior Dreams and dream variants of prior bosses. While the dream variants were all fun fights, and some of the Warrior Dreams had interesting gimmicks, there were altogether more of them than would make fighting all of them rewarding in the sense of game progression. The more interesting of these fights weren’t necessary to complete, but served as an extra optional challenge late in the game. Silksong’s NPC fights (e.g. Shakra and the Second Sentinel) basically serve this function: they’re an extra challenge at the end of a certain questline, and, while they do lead to tools and additional NPC interactions, the fight itself is often more rewarding (with the notable exception of the Pinstress). Additionally, Hollow Knight also had several short, out-of-the-way boss fights like Flukemarm and the Brooding Mawlek which were technically unique, and did technically have rewards but were altogether not very fun to fight and could easily be avoided. Silksong’s fights like this (e.g. Palestag and Chef Lugoli) may be some of the weaker fights in the game, but they are generally better than Hollow Knight’s. In particular, the Father of Flame feels like it directly builds upon Flukemarm’s boss archetype by, while still being a large, stationary boss that attacks mainly via tracking projectiles, having more involved attack patterns and a more difficult means of damaging the boss.
I would also like to elaborate on that final expectation, which I would say is most important in creating fun bosses. In Hollow Knight, even when bosses were fairly simple, each boss had its own specific playstyle and incentivised the player to use different strategies against it. The same is decidedly not true for Silksong. I like to think of boss fights as a spectrum between bosses that you must react to, or bosses you must position yourself strategically around. What I mean by this is that either a boss tracks you down, telegraphs a move, then does it in a way that there is exactly one way to avoid, or a boss is indifferent to where you are, just tossing out projectiles or enemies or hazards that have many responses, but you must think on the fly, and obviously there is a lot of middle ground. However, while there is all that middle ground, Silksong doesn’t spend too much time there. Almost every boss sits at one extreme end of this spectrum which I think makes it extremely repetitive. Just to get my point across, here are some examples of bosses that are entirely reactive: Lace, Phantom, Widow, Seth. and there’s even more that are positioning: Moss Mother, Bell Beast, Savage Beastfly. There are extremely few bosses that don’t fall in these strict categories, where Hollow Knight has so many. Ultimately, this leads to repetitive, boring fights you feel like you’ve already seen.
[I can’t really respond to this in an “in-character” way. Per my co-writer’s own definition of “reactive boss” (boss whose attacks specifically target the player) vs. “positioning boss” (boss whose attacks are based on the stage orientation or boss position rather than player position), Phantom is not “entirely reactive,” nor is Widow (who especially does not fit this archetype) or the last Lace fight. On the other hand, Savage Beastly is not “entirely positioning,” nor is Bellbeast (its burrowing attack targets the player’s position). I repeatedly brought this up with my co-writer, who insisted that it didn’t matter that his definitions didn’t fit the examples he gave because his analysis of “position” and “reactive” bosses was “more feelings-based” and that he knows a positioning or reactive boss when he sees one.]
Overall, Silksong’s bosses are more consistently designed towards a certain set of player interactions than Hollow Knight’s, and there are just as many spread across the game’s map. This is both a blessing and a curse for the game: while Hollow Knight’s bosses were more of a mixed bag than Silksong’s are, Silksong doesn’t have as many unique, standout bosses as its predecessor. Nonetheless, its bosses are still fun to fight overall, they simply don’t (yet) include fights as good as Hollow Knight’s best.
Characters
Silksong’s character writing both in many ways surpasses and retroactively builds upon the writing of the original Hollow Knight. While Hollow Knight did the best it could with a silent protagonist and little conversational dialogue, Silksong shows exactly why those limitations were, in fact, limitations. The choice to have Hornet actually speak with other characters, without player prompting, works wonders to flesh out both her and the denizens of Pharloom. Additionally, the overarching story of the game, particularly the introduction of Grand Mother Silk as a foil character to the Pale King, serves to strengthen Hollow Knight’s themes about parental love and childhood.
I think centering this conversation around character completely misses the point of both Hollow Knight’s and Silksong’s story. In both games, no characters are dynamic, no character is significantly changed by the events of the story besides death, and no internal conflict within the main character is ever even presented, let alone resolved. How, then, is there a story to these games? For both games, the story takes place in the background. While the player traverses through the world, we get to learn about all of the events of the story which have already occurred. By the time the end of the story rolls around, that story is concluded, but notably it doesn’t center around the main character. In this sense, I’m a big fan of both Silksong’s and Hollow Knight’s stories, but I do believe Hollow Knight’s is better executed and more unique.
Ultimately, Silksong and Hollow Knight are both stories told in disjointed, open-ended ways. Both games primarily tell their stories through dream and memory sequences, and don’t focus on dialogue as much as a typical game. Additionally, neither game focuses on the protagonist: It could be said that the Hollow Knight, rather than the Ghost, is the main character of Hollow Knight, and Lace, rather than Hornet, of Silksong. However, this doesn’t mean that the game’s characters do not have emotional journeys and aren’t well written. Ultimately, both games have interesting characters and stories, each with their own merit and unique differences.
Conclusion
Hollow Knight was a magnificent game with a now-iconic artistic style, distinctive environments, and some of the most challenging boss fights in the genre in spite of a very simple enemy design philosophy. However, it was also a game with a lot of dead ends — fights which were unique but underdeveloped, large swaths of the map left mostly empty of interesting encounters, and a movement system whose limitations prevented the game from having involved platforming until the very end, after the player had gotten use to the imprecise controls. Silksong remedies most of these problems, but in exchange, the game loses some of the mystery and wonder of simply wandering through a sprawling map without knowing what lies ahead, and, in contrast to Silksong’s well-designed but somewhat redundant-feeling encounters, Hollow Knight’s inconsistency was what made some of its best ideas stick. Notably, Hollow Knight was basically incomplete at release, and was updated over the course of several years with new characters, bosses, and abilities. Silksong appears to be following a similar path — Team Cherry is fatally allergic to not working on Silksong, and, even after the six-year wait for its release, they’re reportedly still hard at work on the game. It remains to be seen how the game’s final state will look, but it will certainly merit revisiting in the future.
