Review of Hollow Knight: Silksong
Spoilers within.
review on Backloggd
They meant to make more Hollow Knight and they sure did, in kind of a by-the-numbers way. I struggled to connect with a lot of game because of the lack of a sense of wonder, because yknow, I played Hollow Knight. It was great. My impression is that because of scope creep on what was planned as DLC, this never got the reimagining that would have brought that wonder back, and then it just kept growing and growing. There are some great fights - I would fight First Sinner fifty times if they let me; the Dancers were consistently novel; and there are many other fun ones. There are some great zones - Verdania, Mount Fay, and Blasted Steps/Sands of Karak, especially. But it just so rarely felt truly new, and the emotion of everything felt really tamped down until very late with Red Memory.
People really complained a lot about the difficulty unnecessarily. The biggest annoyance to me on that front was how many multi-hit attacks suck you into their active zone which felt like... well, why is it a multi-hit if you're just going to move me so i get hit by all the hits anyways. Grand Mother Silk is also game-harmingly easy - the first time I 'beat the game' (act 2) it was seriously like, huh? that's it? There was also a deflating moment when I first got the Wanderer crest (essentially the HK moveset) and realized, oh, the entire game isn't about reckoning with this really frictional new diagonal pogo moveset and iterating on that, that's just an option.
I don't feel entirely comfortable giving this a raw single score - honestly, in terms of artistic achievement, this is really like a 2 or 2.5 for me. They achieved their goals and made an Objectively Good video game (despite that also pissing gamers off, lol, that's how it is), and then they kept making it for the better part of a decade, and I find that unremarkable. But it is very well-made, and has some trenchant evolutions of the formula. Really, I'm very excited to see what their next project looks like, when they can scope something interesting from the start!
Final time: around 60 hours. Completion %: 84.
Also worth reading: my friend Natalie's 5-star review.