Hollow Knight: Silksong (2025)

Well now, the first ending took me five days to complete, and the rest took an additional ten. I did take my time with some sizeable breaks here and there, but I’m done for now. Below are all my ending achieved so far. Steelsoul and speed runs will wait until another time.

A really wonderful read. I really love the perspectives that Aftermath is publishing.

A Condition Took Away The Use Of My Hands. Silksong Helped Me Rehab Them

If doubling back bothered me, I would not be able to live in my own body, which flares and tears sometimes without warning. You can live life with this sort of condition in a state of grief, in constant fear of movement. Or you can celebrate every gain, knowing that you might not be able to consistently replicate it. The story of my guiding Hornet through the Marrow over and over — to collect supplies, fulfill Wishes, or simply uncover her dead body — is the same story as my fight to open a fucking jar. This fight started in May 2024 and, depending on which jar you ask, is still ongoing. I lived a year of having to decide whether it was more worthy of my limited stamina to hold my husband in a tight embrace or unclasp cold, tightened takeout containers to heat us up a meal. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I am no stranger to weakness that, with the benefit of hindsight, is actually immense strength.

It is pleasurable to finally pick my failures, and just as pleasurable to experience the joy of success. It’s also true that Hollow Knight’s failures are exceptionally funny. The series always had a mean streak: The Soul Master has a final round of fighting after a convincing fake out. Mirabelle the banker scams you out of Geo. Silksong’s miserly dramatics have only gotten funnier to me. Enemies that dodge your attacks more effectively? A booby-trapped bench that hurts you at a moment you really could have used healing? I have spent hours laughing, crying, laughing over the absurdity of getting stuck outside my own apartment, while holding the keys, because the gate is too heavy for me to open. Life has a mean streak.

I love this game.

Here's something I have learned that made me realize what about this game makes me feel this way about it.

Experience is very important in this game. Specifically, experience playing Silksong. This sounds obvious on paper, but I was rewatching my own videos of taking down various bosses, and the common thread between each video was I remember thinking "I'm getting so good at this game" when I found the groove and ended up winning. However on rewatches, it looks like I have no idea what I was doing. In some cases those bosses were only beaten 4-5 gameplay hours ago, and yet it still looked like I'd never played the game before.

Every hour of playing Silksong makes you WAY better than you were an hour ago. I wouldn't say it's a logarithmic scale of improvement, but every hour fine tunes you, the player, to be better. It doesn't feel like it in the moment, but each death makes you a tiny bit better. All those failures iron out kinks in how you play, they fix your bad timing, or make you shift how you hold the controller, or where you look at the screen, even when you don't realize it.

That feedback loop is a part of why I love this game so much. Each time you fail, you don't know it at the time, but in some weird, screwy way, you got a teensy bit better in a way you don't even realize. Then, you surprise yourself when you hit some dodge perfectly, or read an enemy attack pattern more predictably.

Once this concept clicked for me, I no longer get frustrated when I get killed, because I view it as "I'll do that better next time", and once in a blue moon, I actually do!

Dropped this game after uninstalling and reinstalling it. I'm close to finishing ACT 1. But the punishing difficulty, the obscure nature of not knowing if you're in the right area or not, god, I hate this game.

I love the art direction and attention to detail.

I hate the lack of iframes, blocking, I hate the collision damage, I hate how big it is, I hate the random patterns of gauntlet fights.

I enjoy difficult games, but not Silksong. Dropped.

I knew Mark Brown would make a video about Silksong, but didn't expect one this soon. Mind you, it's a mini, so it's not a deep dive in to the game's design like he did in his Boss Key episode on Hollow Knight. He brings up ideas he's talk about before in terms of difficulty, so ideas will be familiar to some, but it's still worth a view.

Minor spoilers, although he doesn't show anything beyond Act 1.

A lot of what Brown says here does touch on why I feel conflicted about the game, because despite the fact that I am loving my experience, I do want people who find it harder than I do to experience it's story. But he does point to many of the little tweaks they made to the game that are intended to mitigate some of the difficulty, and these are the things that keep me feeling like there are ways around some of the things people are butting up against in frustration.

I've explored a handful of areas, beat a couple bosses, and gained a few abilities and so far am pretty pleased by what feels like a very deliberately gradual increase in difficulty and mechanical complexity.

New enemies and types of obstacles are interested in various combinations as you explore in ways that challenge the player 'fairly.' I don't feel too frustrated when I make a mistake and feel like I learned something to apply in future scenarios. The inclusion of the dash movement adds a layer to Hornet's kit during boss fights that I find daunting yet satisfying when I can find the mental focus to use it well. I feel like her options could border on overwhelming, but that I'll get used to them over practice, and by playing at times where I'm less mentally fatigued from a long work week.

So far I think the seven years of polish and tweaking done by Team Cherry on this project is pretty evident.

The more I hear about this game, the less K want to play it. It seems that the devs dug their heels in all the specific parts of hollow knight that I didn't like and added a few more. There's long runbacks, currency fuckery and today I saw a video that mentioned that some skills consume shards, which is like Bloodborne vials but for attack instead of healing.

So I guess the answer is that yes, Team Cherry does want you to farm trashmobs for currency -both of them. I don't.

My kid passed me a wicked stomach bug and I've been reduced to a lethargic trainwreak fading away in a chair the past couple of days. I am worried about two things: a) I will die of dehydration or not eating, and b) I will survive, but I have lost my muscle memory to play Silksong.

Now sure which one I'm more afraid of happening. Last time I got a stomach bug I was playing 7 Days to Die and all I would see when I closed my eyes was gameplay footage. It got to the point where even after I was healed up, seeing gameplay put me in a very strange state, like I was put right back in that terrible feeling of a high fever. I hope that doesn't happen with Silksong because that game is too damn stressful to associate with more stress!

This is going to be one of those games where I'm constantly posting updates, and depending on the day, what color shoes I have on, the moon phase etc. I'll be positive, negative, or somewhere in between. I am really enjoying Silksong, I just may have forgotten just how punishing these games can be.

One thing that's becoming obvious is how rare the currency actually is, at least compared to how much you need to open up fast travels and benches. I made it through a very long and laborious, high-risk area, looking for a bench, somewhere, anywhere.. and ended up dying. Woo boy, ok, let's hope I can make it back ---- aaaand 500 rosary beads gone. Completely devastating. On the third try (now that the beads were gone) I make it back up, and finally arrive at both a bench and a fast travel node, but, I cannot open either, because I need 140 beads to crack them open :| Now THAT is punishing gameplay right there. All that work and I can't even go back until I retreat, kill a ton of stuff, then go back through that hell hole and unlock it!

I finally did, and it felt good, but man I think that ate that entire night of gameplay. When you get so sidetracked on making up for mistakes it can take the wind out of you, but at the same time the very next night I felled 3 bosses, so you get somewhat paid back for your persistence, and hey, that's what it's all about.