I have been waiting for Hollow Knight: Silksong for the majority of my adult life. I fell in love with the first Hollow Knight game during the COVID-19 lockdown. In between my online classes, I would take out my Nintendo Switch and run through the lands of Hallownest, defeating infected bugs as a small vessel, wielding only a nail. Hollow Knight, released by Team Cherry in 2017, is a Metroidvania game — a genre that focuses on exploration, difficult platforming and fighting. Fans have been waiting for its sequel, Silksong, for seven years, and now that it’s out, I have fallen back in love with the series. 

In this sequel, you play as Hornet, a boss and ally from the first game. Hornet has been kidnapped to the land of Pharloom and must find out why. Overall, the gameplay has been overhauled to make it feel much different from the first. While the fundamentals of combat remain the same, some actions, such as healing or casting spells/abilities, have been changed to require more of a resource known as silk, but for greater healing and damaging benefits. This is because the game is a bit harsher in the damage department. 

Enemies do more damage than in the first game, which some players are unhappy with, but I think it makes sense. This game was designed originally to be downloadable content for the first game. The difficulty was meant to be increased due to the original intention of the game. In addition, Hornet has more abilities to access than the Vessel, the protagonist of the first game, such as tools that allow for more range and abilities to put the hurt on enemies, or rare crests that change the way Hornet fights. Some of my favorite parts of my playthrough have been changing my crests and tools to make my builds stronger and stronger. It allows for a custom gameplay loop that is extremely easy to change as you wish. 

I don’t just want to talk about the mechanics, though, because this game, like its predecessor, is gorgeous. Hollow Knight was known for its atmospheric music and gorgeous area design, and this game lives up to that hype. The music conveys a sense of deep unease as well as wonder. It puts you in Hornet’s shoes as you explore Pharloom and find out more about the reason for her arrival. The area design is gorgeous, while the movement and parkour can be challenging, the animations and gameplay make it so rewarding to master. The actual areas also maintain this deep sense of scale. As you walk through these lands, you feel as if you could never explore them all, seen in the background almost sprawling out. Almost every area reveal had me filled with this sense of awe or elicited a deep breath out of wonder. 

Though I do love these games, I do have a few complaints. The inclusion of fetch quests was odd. A lot of them are too generic to be enjoyable and often boil down to finding X amount of things or killing X amount of enemies. There are so many fun side quests, but I have yet to encounter a fetch quest among them. The system in place to get rewards for these quests is nice, but again, it’s just too generic to be good in my eyes. It feels as if the game wants you to grind resources, which is a choice I don’t enjoy in a Metroidvania. The joy of Metroidvanias is constant exploration, so having to stay in one location to get one specific resource isn’t that fun in practice. However, this can be avoided by just doing something else to get the resources (usually money) that you require. 

Despite these issues, I think this new addition to the series has touched me in the same way it did when I was in high school playing it between online classes. Silksong has transported me into a world I want to delve into, a world I deeply care for and want to learn more and more about. It makes me want to explore and uncover every last thing.