Hollow Knight: Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight, the juggernaut that has haunted discussions about every nonlinear platformer since its 2017 release. Player character Hornet has intimidating shoes into which she must fit her dainty legs and the high expectations of millions of players to fulfill. After several delays and fan eagerness that has reached memetic levels, Silksong is not just the most anticipated indie videogame of 2025, it may be the biggest videogame period. 

Silksong’s story begins some time after the events of Hollow Knight. The Weaver princess Hornet has been captured by a religious sect of insects and brought in a cage to the kingdom of Pharloom. Freeing herself at great personal cost, Hornet learns that someone or something residing in the Citadel at Pharloom’s peak covets her body’s ability to create silk, the delicate material the arachnid Weavers use to set traps and capture prey. Knowing she will be endlessly hunted until her elusive nemesis is destroyed, Hornet sets out for the Citadel to confront them. Her path is waylaid by friendly pilgrims and dead travelers whose bodies are animated into fanatical berserkers by ghostly threads that coil around their bodies. Only by exploring the vast haunted kingdom from bottom to top will Hornet confront its mysterious tyrant, save Pharloom’s people from a terrifying fate, and be allowed to live her life free from the hunter coveting her silk.

As I first begin steering Hornet along Pharloom’s many sidescrolling passages, it can be difficult to recognize what makes Silksong special among the well-traveled company of indie nonlinear platformers. It follows the design philosophy’s familiar strictures closely. Hornet’s initial ability to explore is restricted by her limited physical attacks and basic platforming skills. Through careful and thorough exploration, she finds enemies she can defeat and obstacles she can overcome that protect powerful upgrades. New weapons and more hit points let her challenge enemies with unusual attack patterns and resilient armor. New abilities let her reach platforms that were previously just out of reach. In a literal way, the amount of Pharloom that Hornet explores and the collectibles she adds to her inventory directly translates into her capability as a nonlinear platforming player character.

Silksong being a sequel to Hollow Knight, many of its unique takes on nonlinear platforming mechanics are repeated here. In particular, its mapmaking system returns with zero changes. Instead of automatically building onto a map the first time Hornet enters a room, she buys maps of each region from a traveling warrior-monk named Shakra; this means that before Hornet see an illustrated view of her location, she must first explore unguided until she finds the mapmaker. Even once acquired, Shakra’s maps are only partially completed. Hornet must purchase a quill and fill in the missing spaces herself by sitting down at a bench checkpoint after visiting the missing room. This elaborate system is as effective in Pharloom as it was in Hollow Knight’s setting of Hallownest at making Hornet feel lost in a vast and hostile landscape. Also like Hallownest, each region’s design is distinct enough that though Hornet may feel lost, I am never confused about her location. Pharloom makes excellent use of color and shape to suggest that Hornet stands in a distinct and recognizable place no matter where she journeys in the haunted kingdom.

One of Pharloom’s key settlements is Bone Bottom, a tent city where traveling pilgrims begin their sacred journey to ascend to the Citadel. During Hornet’s first visit to Bone Bottom, one of its temporary residents is constructing a billboard from rock and bone. This board is a wishwall, a place where Pharloom’s pilgrims can post their prayers. When Hornet finds a wishwall, she may peruse its prayers and take it upon herself to fulfill them. 

Wishwalls are how Silksong distinguishes itself as a nonlinear platformer, particularly from its predecessor: Its structure is based on sidequests accepted from wishwalls found in settlements and tracked in a pause menu. These known quantities make Pharloom a much less mysterious place than Hallownest. When Hornet confronts a challenging optional boss, it is not because she stumbles across its lair while exploring a freshly unearthed tunnel. More often, she has accepted a job to destroy the monster from a bug who knows the region well, goes to the area where it has been sighted, and follows its trail like a hunter tracking prey. 

Fulfilling some wishes feels more like completing a sidequest in an RPG than in a nonlinear platformer. One tasks Hornet with gathering bell fragments. They appear as random drops in a tunnel made from discarded pilgrim’s bells, defying the sense of uncovering carefully designed and hidden collectibles that normally defines a nonlinear platformer. Notably, this is the only wish based on random drops, so it feels more like a failed experiment than a serious mark against the nonlinear design. A wish repeated across several wishwalls is to trek into an area and search for a bug who has wandered away from their settlement. Even the familiar objective of rescuing a collection of helpless beings hidden all across Pharloom in exchange for incremental rewards is presented to Hornet as a fulfillable sidequest.

Wish rewards include many of the upgrades Hornet needs to toughen up for Pharloom’s more difficult challenges, though not all. Most are still earned by exploring the world and uncovering its forgotten corners and deliberately obscured secrets. The real reward for completing wishes is they are the ultimate barrier that stands between Hornet and the real ending to her story. In one of my greatest disappointments with Silksong, the story’s “good” ending and Hornet’s confrontation with Pharloom’s greatest foe is not earned by bringing together disparate puzzle pieces discovered in the haunted kingdom’s darkest corners. It is earned by rigorously checking off every sidequest that appears on every wishwall in the world.

Like Silksong’s structure, it takes a little time for Hornet to distinguish herself as a nonlinear platforming player character. As the story begins, she is weakened from her imprisonment during the long trip to Pharloom and the dire circumstances of her escape. She is stripped of the ninja-like skills she displayed in Hollow Knight and her signature sewing needle weapon is dulled to a blunt rod. Other than jumping and attacking, the basis for every genre protagonist’s skillset, the only skill of note Hornet possesses is Bind.

The basis for many of Hornet’s skills is silk. Tracked as a spool of thread beneath her hit point meter, every attack that Hornet lands against an enemy is converted into a small portion of this material. Once the silk meter is filled, she may expend it to cast Bind, briefly wrapping her damaged exoskeleton in silken threads that restore three lost hit points. Bind is surprisingly flexible. It may be cast while Hornet is in midair or clinging to walls, though this is such an unusual concession that I often forget and wait until she is on solid ground before trying.

Silk is also used to power some of Hornet’s other offensive abilities. Her ability to explore Pharloom is restricted until she learns to throw a projectile made of silk at an otherwise-impassable obstacle. The remaining offensive silk skills are hidden around Pharloom, tantalizing yet optional, running the gamut from bursts of area damage to a rushing, localized strike to a simple and devastating counterattack. These abilities all cost less than Bind but still drain a portion of precious silk. Every time Hornet uses her silk to deal damage, it may prevent her from applying a heal she desperately needs a moment later.

Hollow Knight players will find Hornet’s ability to use silk to heal her wounds and wield damaging abilities similar to the Knight’s application of void power during their adventure. It is when she progresses beyond her silken abilities that she begins to distinguish herself from her predecessor. The most interesting of Hornet’s platforming skills is a dash that propels her forward with a sudden burst of speed that may be sustained into a sprint, letting her zoom across Pharloom’s many elongated zones with ease. Unusually for a nonlinear platformer, this dash gestures at the existence of physics. When Hornet uses it in midair, she arcs downward, and when executed close to a platform’s edge, she will plummet off its side no matter how furiously I mash the jump button. Hornet needs some space before attempting any spectacular long jumps following a dash.

Hornet’s remaining acrobatic abilities do not push as much against familiar platforming boundaries. A new cloak crafted by a grouchy tailor lets her float and ride on pockets of thermal energy. Later, she learns to hurl her needle through the air then pull herself to it using a silk strand. It takes me a while to accept that the needle doesn’t need to impact a surface or enemy for this maneuver to succeed; it will happily pierce the nothingness at the edge of its range and support Hornet’s weight as she pulls herself to it. And once again echoing Hollow Knight, Hornet learns how to double jump, but in a purposeful subversion of nonlinear platforming conventions, it’s one of the last skills she learns instead of one of the first.

Before her promotion to Silksong’s player character, Hornet was a recurring boss in Hollow Knight with a distinctive skillset. The tools she used there were lost during her time in captivity while transported to Pharloom. She quickly finds a blacksmith to reforge her silk-bundled blade traps, tools lifted straight from her Hollow Knight boss design. If I choose, Hornet may complete her entire adventure in Pharloom using her Hallownest moveset. This is not her only option. Thoroughly exploring Pharloom adds more than a dozen new tools to Hornet’s repertoire, including multiple varieties of throwing knives, nails she can scatter beneath her enemies’ feet, a drill that lets her channel Link by thrusting downward into an enemy’s skull, and drones that hover near Hornet and attack any enemies that wander nearby.

Hornet’s tools, while powerful, may not be used freely. She may deploy a limited number of each tool before they must be replaced at a bench checkpoint using shell fragments, a new resource that drops from Pharloom’s bestial bugs. This system does a good job placing a greater value on Hornet’s most useful offensive options. It’s tempting to scatter a battlefield with blade traps or nails, but if Hornet could overcome the fight without them, it’s probably not worth spending the fragments to replace them later. This encourages the use of tools only when they’re absolutely needed. 

The system’s downside is when Hornet gets stuck on a particularly difficult encounter or boss fight, it’s possible to use up her entire fragment stockpile replacing her tools—and there’s still no guarantee that this cost will result in a beaten boss. This creates a frustrating situation of having to walk away from the boss for twenty or thirty minutes to grind more fragments. I only encounter this situation once in my time with Silksong, but the knowledge that repeated failure will eventually be punished with a boring grind only makes an especially grueling fight even more frustrating.

The final twist to how Hornet behaves as a player character are her crests. Discovered in abandoned cathedrals throughout Pharloom, equipping a crest to Hornet radically changes how she performs. At their most basic levels, crests are how Hornet equips the many trinkets she receives for her heroic exploits. Items equipped to a crest provide a persistent, passive bonus. A compass marks her location on the map. A purple pouch adds a poison effect to her tools when they strike enemies. A predator’s decapitated talon increases the reach of Hornet’s needle. Each crest supports a different combination of silk abilities, tools, and trinkets, creating interesting and unique loadouts for a player to exploit.

The advanced effect crests have on Hornet’s performance is how she fights. Each crest changes the speed, angle, and range of her needle attacks. This, more than any other element, is what sets Silksong’s player character apart from Hollow Knight’s. The Knight’s attacks are utilitarian, too simple to be misused and too rigid to be applied creatively. Hornet’s crests eschew the one-size-fits-all approach, granting her a breadth of attacking styles to choose from. Not every player will immediately appreciate the strengths of every crest. This will encourage an explosion of alternate strategies among players and allow greater satisfaction in replaying Silksong multiple times.

In order to reach Pharloom’s summit and confront the force that covets her silk, Hornet must first deploy all of her combat skills, tools, and crests in dozens of titanic boss fights. These encounters are Silksong’s highlights. Bosses come in a wonderful variety of shapes and sizes. Many are huge creatures that try to crush Hornet beneath their bulk. Others match her in size and try to surpass her with skill, matching her needle with strikes from their own tiny, sharp implement. Some bosses leap through walls and dig through floors, trying to surprise Hornet by striking from unexpected angles. Others try to beat her with agility, dashing back and forth across the screen, never leaving the space and always behaving in an unpredictable manner.

What every boss fight has in common is they may at first seem unfair, or perhaps even impossible. What they usually require is a change in tactics. Bosses approached with impatience and aggression will gladly punish Hornet for every panicked poke and plunge. When they are treated with patience, their patterns studied, and their tells identified, even a boss that sweeps Hornet from the battlefield with terrifying ease in their first encounter will eventually succumb. Often there is only time for one attack during a boss’ window of vulnerability. Trying to claim two or three hits before the window closes is usually what transforms a boss’ inevitable defeat into their inglorious victory. Bosses are challenging, and sometimes even infuriating in the intricacy of their movement patterns and the density of their attack strings, but every one has a moment of weakness Hornet may exploit to keep the fight fair.

No discussion has consumed fans following Silksong’s launch more than the question of its difficulty. I try to take a more nuanced approach to the question of “is a videogame too hard?” There are many parts of Silksong, particularly the boss fights and several rooms that pit Hornet against a marathon of enemy waves, that take me quite some time to learn well enough to help her overcome them. Despite these challenges, I’m not so quick to say they are too hard. Instead, it is other elements of Silksong’s design that makes these especially difficult obstacles feel disheartening to challenge again and again.

Across Pharloom, Hornet discovers benches. When she sits on one, it becomes the checkpoint to which she returns whenever she runs out of hit points. This system necessitates at least some retracing of her steps in any situation following a death. In the case of bosses, these benches seem to be specifically placed to have long and sometimes elaborate platforming sequences placed between them and the boss’ arena. The deeper into Pharloom the boss is buried, the more elaborate these sequences become. 

The labor created by crossing these spaces never feels necessary or valuable. Losing to a boss is part of the learning process. Having to master an extraneous set of platforming obstacles feels like padding; it adds nothing to the process of learning the boss’ mechanics other than time and additional difficulty unrelated to the actual fight. If I were to become so frustrated with Silksong that I quit playing, it would be the result of these bench runbacks and not the difficulty of the bosses themselves.

Another noteworthy aspect of difficulty is Hornet’s pogo jumping maneuver. When Hornet strikes downward from midair and impacts an enemy or environmental hazard with her needle, the blow will propel her upwards like she is bouncing on a pogo stick. Many of Pharloom’s most intricate platforming sequences include long pogo jumping segments that must be perfectly executed. Pogo jumping effectively takes a great deal of practice and the difference between a player just beginning to play and one who has explored every corner of the haunted kingdom is measured by their mastery of this technique. Significantly, the most obnoxious runs from bench to boss involve a lot of pogo jumping.

A more general element of Silksong’s difficulty is how its enemies are designed. Right from the start of her ascent up Pharloom, Hornet encounters an alarming number of enemies capable of dealing two hit points of damage, meaning she has half the effective hit point total her meter claims. This is especially painful early on, when her five hit points translates into a mere three hits against most powerful standard enemies and bosses. Hornet must earn two hit point upgrades—requiring eight well-hidden collectables in total—before she may take even one additional blow against these heavy-hitting foes. Hornet’s frailty is worsened by the few frames of invincibility granted to her upon taking damage. It is very possible for her to be pinned in a corner by a powerful enemy and take two or three hits in succession from contact damage. This decimates her hit points, if not outright killing her.

I like to counter enemies’ strength with my own in most videogames. The way Silksong’s weapon upgrades are made precludes this strategy. In the first two-thirds of the adventure, Hornet is eventually able to catch up with tough enemies by seeking out upgrades for her tools and weapons. The nest of red ants in Hunter’s March are formidable opponents when Hornet first arrives in Pharloom, but after upgrading her needle and finding a bladed boomerang, she is able to cut through their dense hit point meters with greater effectiveness. This dynamic is repeated several more times as Hornet progresses on her quest. It changes in the final third as she approaches the real ending, when enemy hit point meters grow still thicker while Hornet’s weapons can become no stronger. Completing some of Pharloom’s most difficult sidequests to upgrade Hornet’s needle to its highest level doesn’t just feel wise, it feels necessary to reclaim all the ground she loses to her enemies’ creeping power levels—and against the heroine’s greatest foes, it still doesn’t feel like enough.

As a sequel to Hollow Knight, one of the most talked-about indies of the 2010s whose influence casts a shadow on every nonlinear platformer released in its wake, Silksong meets expectations. At its core, it is a similar videogame to its predecessor. Since it began development as a free addon for that videogame, this makes sense. It makes a few key choices to stand apart from its older sibling. Though the wishwall system is inferior to Hallownest’s mysterious and well-hidden puzzle pieces, it still encourages Hornet to explore every corner of Pharloom. Hornet particularly shines as completely unlike her predecessor through a huge number of customization options. Once again, the bosses steal the show. Players looking to challenge themselves against devious, powerful, but ultimately fair opponents should look no further than Team Cherry’s masterpieces. Silksong’s only elements that give me pause are some overly punishing requirements put upon players when Hornet dies and some questionable balance related to enemy damage and hit points in the endgame. Maybe these will be ironed out over time. Maybe these are exactly how the developers want Silksong to be. In most other cases, “meeting expectations” would be a dismissive recommendation. When expectations are this high, meeting them is no bad thing.