Hollow Knight: Silksong Is Chasing Greatness, Not Comfort

The hard part about reviewing Silksong

Hollow Knight: Silksong is not walking into 2025 like a normal sequel. It is walking in with years of clown-makeup memes, Nintendo showcase copium, and the kind of fan expectation that usually crushes games before they even touch your SSD. That matters, because Silksong is not being judged as just another indie metroidvania. It is being judged as the sequel to one of the most beloved games in the genre, full stop.

The good news is that everything publicly shown about Silksong suggests Team Cherry understands the assignment. This is not Hollow Knight with a new coat of paint. It is a more aggressive, more vertical, more athletic spin on the same formula, and that is exactly the right move.

Hornet changes the whole rhythm

The biggest reason Silksong looks so strong is Hornet herself. In the first game, the Knight felt precise, lonely, and almost monk-like. Hornet is the opposite. She is speed, reach, and violence. Her movement has a spring to it, and that alone changes the game's entire texture. Combat looks less like cautious poking and more like controlled chaos, with quick repositioning, aerial pressure, and sharper momentum.

That is a huge deal for a metroidvania, because movement is not just traversal. Movement is mood. Hornet's acrobatic style makes Silksong feel less mournful and more predatory. It should create a faster, flashier loop without turning the game into brainless button-mashing. If Hollow Knight was about enduring a hostile world, Silksong feels like it is about cutting a path through one.

The risk is obvious too. Speed can easily become noise. When you add more mobility, more tools, more enemy pressure, and more boss spectacle, you also risk losing the clean readability that made Hollow Knight so satisfying. Metroidvanias live and die on feel, and if fights start becoming messy instead of demanding, that elegance disappears fast.

Bigger world, bigger danger of bloat

Pharloom looks gorgeous, no surprise there. Team Cherry's hand-drawn art still has that nasty little magic where everything is beautiful and slightly cursed at the same time. The environments shown so far, from mossy caverns to regal citadels, sell scale without losing intimacy. Christopher Larkin's score should do the rest. Few games in this lane understand melancholy and menace this well.

But scale is not always a free win. One reason Hollow Knight worked is that its size felt intimidating but coherent. Every shortcut, every bench, every brutal corpse-run had a purpose. Silksong is clearly aiming bigger, and bigger worlds tend to invite the worst metroidvania sin: padding disguised as mystery.

The new quest structure could help with that. On paper, giving players clearer hunts and objectives is smart. It can make the world feel inhabited instead of abstract, and it fits Hornet better than the first game's quiet drifting. Same with the crafting and tool systems. They add texture, and they might keep progression feeling active rather than purely reactive. Still, there is a thin line between adding layers and adding clutter. Hollow Knight's genius was never complexity for its own sake. Silksong needs to remember that.

Bosses, difficulty, and who this is really for

Let's be real, Silksong is not trying to convert people who already bounced off Hollow Knight. This is still a game for players who enjoy getting smacked around, learning patterns, and coming back sharper. The giant enemy roster and boss-heavy structure look built for exactly that crowd.

That is a strength, but also a filter. If you want a chill exploration-first metroidvania, this probably is not your game. Silksong looks like it wants you locked in. Good. More games should know who they are.

Community response tells the same story. The excitement around Silksong is not fake marketing heat. It is years of earned trust from players who think Team Cherry made one of the genre's modern classics. At the same time, the wait has become so long that anything less than greatness will feel like a letdown to part of the fanbase. That is unfair, but it is real.

Malaysia and SEA check

For Malaysia and the wider SEA crowd, Silksong has one nice advantage straight away: no server ping headache, no live-service nonsense, no FOMO battle pass. This is a single-player game, so the real questions are platform access and price. PC and Switch is a strong combo for this region, because that covers the Steam crowd, handheld players, and the ramai indie fans who still treat the Switch like a metroidvania machine. The original Hollow Knight built a proper local following here because it was affordable and absurdly replayable. Silksong needs to stay in that same value zone. If it lands around the usual indie sweet spot in RM, it is easy recommend territory. If it pushes too high, Malaysian players will compare it brutally against a backlog full of cheaper bangers.

Final take

Silksong looks like the right kind of sequel because it is not chasing comfort. It is chasing escalation. Hornet's mobility, the denser combat, the bigger world, and the added quest-tool layer all point to a game that wants to outgrow Hollow Knight rather than cosplay it.

That ambition is exciting, but it is also the danger. If Team Cherry nails the feel, this could be elite. If the extra systems muddy the purity that made Hollow Knight special, it will still be good, just not legendary. Right now, though, Silksong looks less like overhyped vapor and more like a metroidvania built with a blade at your throat. Memang that is exactly why everyone is still waiting.