3/5 ★ – beemancer's review of Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Silksong is pretty much the closest a game can be to being a masterpiece while instead providing a terribly frustrating experience. There's going to be a pretty large divide in opinions on this game, and not just because the original Hollow Knight's legion of rabid fans is too pot committed to recognize even the smallest flaw in the game. Silksong is incredibly frustrating and at times unfair in its runbacks and traps, and whether or not you are able to enjoy this experience is going to depend on how you personally respond to these sorts of situations. A lot of streamers will likely have high praise for the game for the same reason they played Getting Over It or Only Up or any other punishing experience - these things can be much more fun when you have an audience to share in your suffering. But if you play alone, you may or may not find Silksong to be your cup of tea, which will be hard to accept because the game's core is excellent and you will WANT to like this game, even if you don't. This review is going to contain some spoilers regarding the sorts of movement techniques you can unlock throughout the game, which I'll provide warning for at the start of the paragraph. Let me start with some of the reasons this game is amazing. The visuals are stunning - the prominent outlining hearkens back to a style associated with Newgrounds flash animations, but it's so much more than that. The way things are layered to give a light feeling of claustrophobia is fantastic. The game is significantly more colorful than the original Hollow Knight, but the world still feels dark and unforgiving. There isn't a single area in this game that I ever felt relieved to be in. It's great to see Team Cherry realize they could create this atmosphere without resorting to washing out the color. This allows the areas that do need to be a little "more gray" (tee hee) to actually stand out. The character design is awesome - I hate bugs, but these things are just removed enough from the real thing that they feel like denizens, and not pests. Hornet is especially well designed. Her appearance is so simple but incredibly stylish, and does a few things I think are very important. Fans of Hollow Knight will notice one distinct difference between her original design and the one we see in Silksong - the cloak went from a pale maroon to a vibrant crimson. This causes Hornet to almost always starkly contrast the environment. No matter how gloomy the area is, Hornet is always on screen so there will be one spot of red. Notice how the first area is coated in a green moss - this complementary color was not an accident. I think this really helps me from feeling mentally exhausted looking at some of the grayer and browner caves for long periods of time. That's not the only way she provides contrast, either. Most of the bugs in this game crawl and scuttle and clumsily float through the air, but Hornet is ALWAYS elegant. The way she runs, attacks, jumps, and even the way she speaks are all done with this grace that few other bugs have the privilege to exhibit. In a world where everything kinda sucks, Hornet is kind and tries to help her fellow bug, at least as long as it doesn't impede her own goals to do so. She is different from the other bugs, and that gives the player the feeling that she's better and special and awesome. I'm a fan of Silksong's kind of storytelling. The story is mostly lore-driven, with only a few cutscenes to be found. Nothing is spoon-fed to you, it's a weird world of bugs and you're kind of just in it. I appreciate that Hornet is not a silent protagonist, and she explains herself to other bugs in a way that is respectful and clear and logical. She avoids conflicts by telling other bugs she's not a threat, as long as they don't strike first, and she asks important questions that I as a player am also curious about. This is the kind of storytelling that video games are the perfect medium for, and I'm here for it. The world is connected well and cohesive, despite being quite varied. It didn't really feel unrealistic for areas to transition to one another. The music is good, but I'm not in love with the soundtrack. By that I mean I never really stopped to go "woah this is a banger," but the music did a good job of keeping me immersed in the world. A lot of the tracks are very ambient, but the boss themes pick up appropriately. The level design is mostly good, especially the platforming sections (asterisk for later). Enemy placement was sometimes sadistic, but in a way that provides an appropriate challenge. There's a lot of "Mega Man" spike placement, by which I mean spikes that are just below you off screen when you need to go down. The game lets you look down, but this game is very fast-paced and you don't really want to stop to do that so sometimes you're just gonna land on a spike or an enemy below. The areas never felt like they were pointless, they are threats and challenges on their own. There's a lot of hidden stuff, but it doesn't always feel rewarding. Some entire areas are hidden in places that are basically invisible, leading you to try to jump through and attack every wall. Some walls also have breakable objects on them, but aren't themselves breakable - so you hit the wall once, hear the break and get excited and keep swinging, only to find yourself attacking solid rock. I don't really want to attack every single wall in the game to find entire zones that don't have entrances displayed on any map until you find them, but here we are. There's also some unfair traps, which are placed in a way you'll either think is funny as hell or extremely frustrating depending on what kind of player you are and how far you get set back. Normal enemies have a little too much health in the early game, most enemies take 3-6 hits to kill and many can fly, dodge your attacks, and throw projectiles. They can get a little tedious to deal with at times, but I do think this is better than them being so easy that they aren't threats at all. The bosses are probably the highlight of the game for me. They are challenging, but extremely fair and enjoyable to learn. The hitboxes are surprisingly lenient, I never wondered how something hit me, instead I would wonder how I manage to avoid something. You need to make pretty clear and solid contact with an enemy or projectile to get hit. The bosses only have a few attacks, and they are always clearly telegraphed. They definitely require you to learn the moves and take your time on the first few attempts, but they aren't really trying to deceive you as a player. The couple of bosses that feel worse usually have additional enemies summoned in - these enemies act independently of the boss which just makes the fight stochastic in a way where victory is locked behind the enemies randomly acting in a way that is actually manageable because sometimes their combined movement patterns are just unfair. While we're on the subject, the game is plagued with these enemy gauntlets, sequences where you fight a bunch of regular enemies in a row. They're all pretty miserable at best, and incredibly frustrating at worst. This paragraph is going to contain light spoilers regarding unlockable movement techniques, skip it if you want to be completely surprised when they show up. Movement in this game feels pretty good. A hear a lot of talk absolutely lauding the game over it's brilliant movement, but I don't quite see it. Nothing I've acquired through the end of the main story is particularly innovative in the space, and a few of the techniques are a little janky. When things work, Hornet's kit is really smooth, but there's just a lot of little issues. Her base down attack goes diagonally and has a very tight hitbox, which is annoying because many controllers put the left thumbstick in the comfortable resting position. It's pretty easy to accidentally tap left or right when inputting down + attack during tight platforming sections and end up careening in the wrong direction. Sprinting is awesome, but if you hit a wall you bounce off your noggin. This is a cool interaction, but sprinting is pretty important in boss fights and it turns out there's walls on both sides of almost every boss. You also can't jump for about a quarter second after sprinting, causing you to speed off cliffs. You can wall slide, but if you try to quickly drop down a ledge to slide down the wall you'll instead grab it and pull yourself up. When you try to intentionally grab a ledge, you may find the height you need to reach is a little pixel perfect and you'll sometimes just not grab it even though it feels like you're high enough or because you were mid float or something unintuitive like that. The double jump is really slow and floaty, and once you get it performing the actual float mechanic becomes much more awkward. Most of these things are very fixable: make boss walls not bonkable, make ledges only pull you up when you push jump and let me push down to transition to a slide, give me 4 more pixels to grab a ledge, etc., etc. There's some others, but all these things are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things but become annoying enough during tight platforming sections that not every death feels like it's my fault. I'll also note that the starting moveset is embarassingly bad. You have actual nothing, you're just walking around and jumping. I understand Metroidvanias want to have a sense of progression, but the first few hours of the game are spent with what feels like an incomplete character, like they subtracted from Hornet's kit instead of adding to it. End of spoilers. If that was the end of the review, this game would probably be 5/5 stars. But there's a few larger problems (that are also VERY fixable, even post-release) that are so intrusive on the experience that they can make the game miserable for a lot of players. I think these horses have been beaten pretty severely to death at this point, but I gotta mention them. First, the game is insanely difficult. That's fine, but there's no accessibility options in the game at all, and that just shouldn't fly these days. Some people are gonna struggle to the point of misery trying to do these bosses and platforming sections. There's nowhere near enough checkpoints in the game. When I think of other precision platformers, like Celeste, I Wanna Be the Guy, or Super Meatboy, they're split into very manageable chunks so you don't slide backwards. There's a lot of modern day games where you can lose a ton of progress and start over, like Jump King and a slew of Rogue-like experiences, but usually the misery is implicit to the game and consensual with the player. Here, you can't adjust difficulty of enemies or skip platforming sections you're struggling with or get much help on bosses (except like, one? AFAIK). If you aren't good enough the only answer is to get better, which is probably not good enough for people who want to experience this beautiful game but aren't that good at this sort of thing or for people who are disabled. Celeste is considered a very difficult game, and the existence of its Assist Mode has not diminished that, but it is labelled with the following message: "Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode." Team Cherry has failed to learn these sorts of lessons from other developers, or willfully ignored these lessons. It's almost insulting that after you beat the game you unlock an even harder difficulty, but they didn't think maybe you'd like to go the other direction. Next up is the runbacks. This is probably the most brought up issue. Almost every boss and enemy gauntlet has a runback. Most are 30 seconds or less, but these feel at best really pointless because you can avoid every threat with ease once the shortcuts are open. There's a few runbacks that even after you find the sneaky shortcuts are insanely brutal, full of debuffs and hard to avoid enemies and long platforming sections. A lot of people are simply breaking over this problem, which is a shame. I Wanna Be The Guy is a fan platformer that came out decades ago and spawned thousands of clones, and even that incredibly difficult precision platformer had a lot of checkpoints and an easy mode that gave you even more checkpoints. There needs to be a concession somewhere here, but it doesn't have to take away from the experience of the people who WANT this sort of brutality. Last, the economy. There's two kinds of currency in this game, rosaries and shell shards. Shell shards feel quite pointless, because they're mostly used to refill your consumable items. These consumables are already limited in the number of uses they have between rests on the bench, so this currency just means you need to stop to farm them during long series of boss attempts when you run out. It doesn't really add anything to the game because the tools are already limited use, they don't need to be double limited. Rosaries on the other hand are used for everything. You lose them on death unless you recover them, they only drop from about half of the enemies, and you never know when you'll need them. Some maps, benches and fast travel stations need rosaries to be used, meaning you might do a long difficult section and when you finally get through it to the next bench you're too much of a brokie to use it. This is awful because sometimes there aren't enemies on that route to farm for rosaries, and most enemies only reset when you rest. To top it off, these things are marbles. They spill out of enemies and off of rosary strings on the ceiling and just roll everywhere and fall off ledges. They're annoying to pick up without using a tool slot for the vacuum effect. Neither currency is that hard to farm, but you do run out of both quite easily. This is very annoying, but since they're easily farmable it still feels like "oh boy it's nothing" when you find a secret passage and there's a bucket of rosaries tucked away in there instead of a mask shard. Since they're so farmable, the shops' high prices are just a nuisance instead of a serious decision point. Compare this to shop items that require craftmetal, one of the game's limited resources. I have to pick and choose what to craft and buy when it requires this, which feels good, but the rosaries and shards add next to nothing of value to my experience. So, how do you get through these barriers if they're such a problem? Well, I'm a PC gamer, so I just installed mods. After about 15 hours, I had had enough and installed a few fixes. I didn't want the game's bosses or platforming to be easier, but I used mods to basically have infinite money so I wouldn't have to farm and another mod to set waypoints so I didn't have to do the runbacks. Ultimately, this did make my experience a little easier, because some of the runbacks are long enough that it's difficult to get to the boss with full health and ammo under normal circumstances. But, those two mods alone made my experience incredibly enjoyable. Now, since I could control where my checkpoints were, lethal traps went from being horrible setbacks to being hilarious, because they really are placed in a way that's very clever and devious. I became part of my own audience, instead of people watching me be miserable, I was just watching Jane Pilksong be miserable. That's the importance of accessibility options, if I had bought this on Switch and didn't have these options I probably would have quit because the game didn't respect my time. This game is enormous and full of remarkable tiny details and somehow only costs $20, and it is literally one potential patch away from being one of the greatest games of its kind (except Flipwitch). I really hope Team Cherry gets the message and makes some sort of adjustment so everyone can experience the things this game has to offer, because the things that are good way, way outnumber the things that aren't.