Hollow Knight: Silksong Makes You Earn Every Inch of Its Haunted Kingdom

Hornet's moveset is the whole reengine. She is quicker off the mark and more mobile in the air, with a run, a nimble aerial float, and a grappling hook that turns traversal into something closer to momentum management than careful hopping. Combat leans hard into that speed. You are meant to stay on top of enemies, weaving needle strikes and silk arts, and the game punishes the timid far more sharply than Hollow Knight ever did.

That punishment is the defining topic of Silksong's reception, and it is real. Enemies hit harder, ordinary encounters carry more threat, and the boss fights lean into long runbacks, the stretches of hard platforming and awkward enemy placement you must clear again every time a boss puts you down. A single fight can cost you ten minutes of tense re-approach before you even land another attempt. For some players that friction is invigorating. For others it curdles into resentment, and both reactions are fair.

The diagonal pogo, bouncing off enemies and hazards at an angle to cross gaps, is a recurring flashpoint. It is central to several challenges and genuinely fiddly to execute under pressure, and it is the clearest example of Silksong asking for a level of precision the first game mostly reserved for its optional endgame. The learning curve is not gentle, and the game is largely unapologetic about it.

When the systems click, though, the movement is sublime. Chaining a dash into a grapple into a downward strike and out again, all while a boss telegraphs its next sweep, produces the kind of flow state metroidvanias promise and rarely deliver at this tempo. The kingdom is enormous and densely interconnected, layered with hidden routes, tools, and upgrades that reward the compulsion to poke at every wall, and the moment-to-moment traversal is a joy once Hornet's vocabulary becomes second nature.

Structurally it is a true Team Cherry world: minimal hand-holding, a map you piece together through exploration and the occasional purchase, and progression gated by abilities you unlock in an order the game only loosely enforces. Quests and NPCs give the sprawl more shape than Hallownest offered, and there is a staggering volume of content here, easily rivaling and often exceeding the original in scale.

The cost of that ambition is friction. The difficulty and the long runbacks mean that dead ends and failed boss attempts eat real time, and the sheer size can leave you unsure whether you are stuck by design or simply underpowered for the region you have wandered into. Silksong asks for patience and rewards it, but it asks a great deal, and it will lose some players in the asking.

Team Cherry's hand-drawn craft was never in doubt, and Silksong is a visual step up in scale and variety. The new kingdom spans lush, overgrown heights, decaying industrial depths, and quiet ruined chapels, each rendered with the same painstaking detail and eerie stillness that made Hallownest feel like a place with a history you were intruding upon. The animation, especially Hornet's, is fluid and expressive in a way that sells her speed before you even press a button.

Christopher Larkin's score returns to do quiet, devastating work. The music understands restraint, holding back to let ambient dread settle and then swelling precisely when a boss arena snaps shut or a vista opens beneath you. Sound design carries an unusual amount of the game's information, the click and hiss of enemies telegraphing attacks you learn to read by ear, and the whole audio landscape reinforces the sense of a beautiful place that would very much like to kill you.

The atmosphere is the throughline that ties the difficulty to the wonder. Every hostile screen is also a gorgeous one, every brutal runback threads through environments you would happily stop and stare at if they were not actively trying to end you. That tension, between the beauty of the world and the cruelty of surviving it, is exactly what the first game did so well, and Silksong sharpens it to a finer, crueler point.