Hollow Knight was harsh but fair. Silksong, its long-awaited and long-delayed successor, is harsh and nothing else, and that difference is the whole of my complaint.
Let the record show, before the apologists assemble, that I knew what I was buying. One does not purchase a Team Cherry Metroidvania expecting a gentle stroll through a bug-themed petting zoo. One purchases it expecting to be beaten, repeatedly and with some enthusiasm. I accept the beating. What I do not accept is a beating administered by a referee who has quietly left the building.
I am roughly halfway through the game, pursuing 100% completion before the first DLC arrives, and I have yet to see the credits. Consider this, then, an interim report from the trenches rather than a final verdict from the summit. The trenches, I assure you, are informative.
The Standard Hollow Knight Set
My first Hollow Knight run was entirely blind. No wiki, no guides, no YouTube, no whispered counsel from friends. It felt like an adventure in the old sense of the word: hard, occasionally humiliating, and enormously rewarding to finish.
The difficulty in that game had a particular texture. A boss or a platforming gauntlet would provoke the time-honored reaction of “oh, fuck this,” and yet one kept going, because one could see the path. It sucked, but it was achievable. When I failed, the failure was mine, and the game was careful never to let me believe otherwise. That is what fairness means in a hard game: punishment proportionate to the offense, and a clear route to acquittal.
The Arithmetic of Suffering
The trouble starts with simple math. In Silksong, ordinary enemies hit for two masks of damage. Not bosses, not armored brutes, but creatures that look like mice. Hollow Knight reserved double damage for its heavy hitters, which is how a damage system communicates threat. When a rodent hits as hard as a warlord, the system has stopped communicating anything at all.
The other side of the ledger is no kinder. Early-game mice, frogs and small birds absorb around four needle strikes apiece. In the first game, four hits was what you paid to kill something genuinely dangerous. Meanwhile, the needle upgrade arrives deep into Act One, far later than its equivalent in Hollow Knight, so your damage output stays stunted for hours. You hit like a wet noodle, and the noodle is fighting rodents in plate armor.
A Hoarder’s Economy of Silk
Silk is the resource that fuels both Hornet’s healing and her special moves. On paper, Bind is generous: it works in midair and restores three masks. In practice, when every passing vermin takes two masks off you, three back is a rounding error. You are never fully healed and never able to breathe.
The predictable result is hoarding. The counter, the needle throw, the area attack and the rest of Hornet’s silk kit sit unused, because spending silk on offense means having none for Bind when the next ambush arrives around the corner. A toolkit you are afraid to use is not a toolkit. It is a display case.
Worse, certain enemy-dense or platforming-heavy stretches practically demand that you cheese for silk: step out of the room, whack an enemy, retreat, repeat, until the meter is full enough to risk going forward. In all my time with Hollow Knight, I never once had to farm enemies for soul. When a game teaches its players to grind like this, it has told on itself.
Benches, Runbacks, and the Long Walk of Shame
In Hollow Knight, bench placement was a language. A bench just ahead meant you were about to be in some deep shit, and the game was kind enough to warn you. Only two or three runbacks were truly atrocious, and even those came with a remedy: the Dreamgate, set with the Dream Nail, let you warp back to the doorstep of fights like Soul Master or the Traitor Lord without the trek.
Silksong has no such mercy. Benches sit far from the places you are most likely to die, and the walk back is long enough to reflect on every choice that brought you there. Areas like Sinner’s Road and Bilewater seem built expressly to troll you, and in Silksong the trolling is no longer the exception. It is the policy.
Then there are the benches that are themselves the joke. In Sinner’s Road, I came upon a bench that had to be repaired, and the only way to repair it was to cross a hyper-dangerous stretch first. Die along the way, and you wake up at the nearest working bench, which is not in Sinner’s Road at all but over in Greymoor. So you walk back through Greymoor, back through Sinner’s Road, back through the gauntlet, all to earn the privilege of a place to sit down.
Once, I found a bench that kills you for sitting on it: a trap bench, which must be disarmed before it will let you rest. There are other trolls besides, which you will avoid only if you have read a guide or been warned in advance. Hollow Knight never once pulled this. The closest thing it had was the paid bench, and paying for one, sometimes with barely enough Geo, felt like a small reward rather than an ambush. A bench in Hollow Knight was a promise of safety. In Silksong it is a punchline.
The Bosses Are Fine. Getting to Them Is Not.
In fairness to Team Cherry, the bosses themselves are not the problem. They are harder than Hollow Knight’s, considerably so. I have died to ordinary Silksong bosses about as many times as I died to Grimm, one of the first game’s genuinely brutal fights. Not even his Nightmare King form, which I also beat, but the original. In Silksong, nearly every boss sits at that altitude. But none of the ones I have faced has been unfair. Hard, yes. Cheap, no.
What spoils them is the runback. Hollow Knight usually kept a bench near the arena, so you could size up a boss, conclude “all right, I can beat this, it’ll just take time,” and get to work. In Silksong, a nearby bench is the rare exception. The usual arrangement is a platforming section between you and the fight, which you must clear without taking a single hit, because one lost mask on the way in can be the difference between victory and another long walk. So the cycle becomes: die, walk, get clipped, die, walk again. By the tenth trip the reaction is no longer “I can do this.” It is “man, fuck this.”
The fights themselves are long, too. Played well, a Silksong boss takes five or six minutes, the cost of a protagonist who still hits like she is underpowered. Five minutes sounds modest until you put it in sequence: the runback, four minutes of fighting, death, the runback, four minutes of fighting, death. That is not a challenge. It is a humiliation ritual.
The defense, inevitably, is that runbacks train you to use Hornet’s abilities. Surely the rest of the game can do that. When I am stuck on a boss, I want to fight the boss. I will gladly sharpen my platforming in a fresh area, where it feels like exploration, rather than on the same stretch of floor for the fortieth time.
Poverty as a Design Pillar
Everything in Silksong costs rosaries, the game’s currency, and you never have enough of them. Being broke in Hollow Knight was a verdict on you: you died carelessly, spent impulsively, or were saving for something. That is the good kind of scarcity, the kind that rewards planning.
Silksong’s scarcity is the other kind. It never feels like strategic rationing. It feels like a toll booth on every road, staffed by someone who has read your bank statement. The defense offered is that Pharloom is a different world with a different economy. Fine. A different world can still have a different economy that isn’t designed to keep the protagonist perpetually skint.
Sadism, Itemized
The platforming frequently asks for near frame-perfect execution. I am not a game journalist who cannot clear the Cuphead tutorial; I am a reasonably competent player. But a casual-to-decent player is plainly not who these sections were built for, and a single slip is punished with all the restraint of a Victorian magistrate.
Then there are the enemies parked squarely in your jump path. Not enemies you bait out of the way, which would be a puzzle, but enemies simply stuck there, so the only way past is to eat the hit. Perhaps there is a clever solution and I am too pea-brained to find it. If so, the game has hidden it very well.
Hidden is the operative word. In Mount Fay, there is a section with falling pillars that you must touch so they topple into the icy water and give you somewhere to stand without freezing to death. Nothing in the game hints at this. You either stumble onto it or you look it up.
And Bilewater. The community’s hatred of Bilewater is not hysteria; it is earned. The area is designed to punish, offers no meaningful reward for the punishment, and stands as the purest distillation of everything wrong with the game’s philosophy.
The cumulative effect is that I, a lifelong refuser of no-clip, god mode and exploits, have had to consult guides and YouTube videos to get through sections of Silksong. I have walked away from the game out of genuine frustration, not the productive kind of “let me think about this boss and come back.” I do not believe that is laziness on my part. I believe it is the design.
Pain Without Payoff
The obvious rebuttal is that Hollow Knight was sadistic too, and that I am remembering the summit while forgetting the climb. I concede part of it. Hollow Knight had the Path of Pain, which I never attempted, and Unbreakable Strength, which costs 15,000 Geo and a great deal of patience. I am also chasing 100% this time, which means walking into the hardest corners of the map on purpose. I do that because in the first game I missed things like Sharp Shadow, an easily missed upgrade that would have made several bosses and platforming sections far easier. I did not want to repeat that mistake.
But look at what Hollow Knight’s sadism paid. The Path of Pain is entirely optional and ends in a lore cutscene. Unbreakable Strength is arguably the best charm in the game. The suffering was rare, it was opt-in, and the reward matched the price. Silksong is full of miniature Paths of Pain, and at the end of them you find a flea, a single rosary, or a bit of craft metal. That is the real difference, and nostalgia does not explain it away: Hollow Knight charged a lot for something great, and Silksong charges a lot for pocket change.
The trolling fails the same test. A trap bench is funny in a YouTube reaction video. It is not funny when you have just finished a long trek on one mask and die to the thing that was supposed to save you. I play games to relieve stress, which I admit is an odd thing to say about a deliberately hard game. Hollow Knight managed it anyway. Silksong mostly adds to the pile.
A Confession, Without Honor
It has come to this. When I sense death approaching, I pause, quit to the menu, and reload my save. I wake up resting at a bench, with no corpse to retrieve and no penance to pay.
In Hollow Knight, dying meant your shade waited where you fell. Sometimes it was badly placed, but you could bait it toward you and deal with it on reasonable terms. I died, it was my fault, I went and got my shade. It sucked, but it was my bad. Silksong’s cocoon, the remains you must strike to recover what you lost, has a talent for settling above lava, icy water or spikes. One hit is all it takes, but landing that hit often means taking damage, and now you face the next stretch with fewer masks, at the end of a runback that was already too long.
So I quit out instead. I am not proud of it. I wanted to play this game with some kind of honor, the way I played the first one. But Silksong has made honor the expensive option, and it has trained me, a player who never touches exploits, into a save-scummer.
I am not alone in this, and the evidence is in the guides. Watch enough Silksong walkthroughs on YouTube and you will hear ordinary players, not speedrunners or professional streamers, advise you to pause, quit and reload once you reach the end of a long section, simply to avoid walking back. Hollow Knight solved the same problem with design: the end of a long trek usually rewarded you with a shortcut, a new traversal ability, or a door that opened back toward civilization. Save-quitting existed, but as a speedrunner’s trick, not as standard advice for a first playthrough. When the community’s best practice is to step outside the game to skip the game, the game is training its players to play it the way it was not meant to be played.
A Word to the Apologists
The standard defense runs as follows: Hornet is not the Knight. She is tactical rather than brute-force, her moveset is different, and the game should be judged on its own terms. I grant the premise. Hornet’s acrobatics are excellent, and I can pull off most of them.
But “tactical” is not a synonym for “underpowered,” and a different moveset does not explain why a frog needs four stabs. Nor does “it’s a different world” explain why that world’s economy is engineered to keep you broke. These are not arguments about identity. They are excuses for tuning, and the tuning is the problem.
The broader community has a shorter answer still: get good. Post a grievance on Reddit or any other forum and the replies arrive on schedule, two words long, and the post gets buried as “controversial.” When I went back to read about Hollow Knight’s bosses after my blind run, that community felt supportive; people explained, encouraged, and shared strategies. Silksong’s feels defensive, perhaps because people are defending their purchase, though at twenty dollars it is hardly a mortgage. But “get good” is not a rebuttal. It is a way of declining to have the argument, and when this many players raise the same complaints, the complaints deserve a hearing.
Credit Where It Is Due
None of this is a complaint about craft. Silksong looks gorgeous, and the soundtrack is incredible. The bosses are memorable, even when the memories are mostly of dying to them. The tools are a genuinely cool idea as a successor to Hollow Knight’s charms and spells, though, like the silk skills, they go underused because every shard spent feels like a shard you will need later.
As a successor to Hollow Knight, as a world and a story, Silksong earns its place. The underlying narrative is good and coherent, and it fits the universe. Pharloom feels deeper and more alive than Hallownest: half the things you whack turn out to be destructible, and the creatures are genuinely funny. There is real humor in this game. If I am honest, that humor, that world and my own stubbornness are the main things keeping me at it.
The art and the music are not the problem. The problem is the machinery underneath them, which turns a beautiful game into a pain in the ass.
Who Was This Built For?
I am not a game designer. I am a guy with a job and responsibilities who likes to play video games. So take this as a theory from the cheap seats.
After Hollow Knight’s release, Team Cherry kept adding harder content, culminating in the Godmaster update, a boss-rush gauntlet of hell built for the most serious and advanced players. Around it grew a spectator culture of people beating every boss without taking a single hit, and audiences watching in awe. My suspicion is that Team Cherry looked at that crowd, along with years of fans begging for a sequel, and concluded that difficulty was the thing people wanted most. So they turned it up, adding hazards and punishments without the careful tuning that made the original fun.
The result is a game calibrated for the hitless crowd. Hollow Knight was something most ordinary players could finish blind, and I did. Silksong seems to have forgotten that ordinary player exists. Difficulty was never the whole appeal of Hollow Knight. Fair difficulty was.
Verdict
Difficulty is a contract. The game agrees to be hard, and in exchange it agrees that the player can win through skill and persistence. Hollow Knight honored that contract to the letter. Silksong keeps the first half and treats the second as optional.
I will finish it. I am stubborn, the DLC is coming, and 100% completion does not achieve itself. But I cannot recommend it the way I recommend its predecessor, without caveats and with enthusiasm.
I felt like a masochist for returning to Hollow Knight too, but it was a different kind of masochism. Hollow Knight was a hike up a mountain: hard, dangerous, beautiful, and when you reached the top and told people about it, they said “wow, I might try that someday.” Silksong is walking barefoot across hot coals with no camera rolling, for no views and no reward, purely to say you did it. And when you tell people, the response is not admiration. It is “why the hell would you do that?”
Hollow Knight I finished out of love. Silksong I am finishing out of spite.