Hollow Knight: Silksong

Released in September 2025 by Team Cherry, who both developed and published it, Silksong arrives after one of the longest waits in indie gaming. It has come out of that wait looking like a game nobody was rushed into making — and like a game that knows exactly which parts of its predecessor to keep.

Hornet plays nothing like the Knight

You're Hornet this time: quicker, more elegant, and built around aggression rather than the Knight's deliberate defence. The platforming has been sharpened accordingly, and it's the clearest step forward in the whole game — the movement is precise enough to support challenges the first game wouldn't have asked of you, and the areas built around it are the best in either title.

Combat follows the same logic. It's faster and more demanding, and the game is unapologetic about expecting you to keep up. Where Hollow Knight let you retreat and think, Silksong tends to reward pressing your advantage, and boss fights are the better for it. Nearly a decade of iteration shows in the feel rather than in any single new system.

The world is still the point, and it's still horrible

What Team Cherry has always done better than almost anyone is scale. Everything in Silksong is drawn at the size of an insect's world — a bedbug is a hulking armoured thing, a stretch of moss is a forest, a workshop is a cathedral of saw-blades and steam. The hand-drawn craft is extraordinary, and there's a genuine personality to it that's easy to underrate because it looks effortless.

It's also charmingly mean-spirited in a way that will be familiar. The format is best described plainly: go up and there's a boss you can't beat, go down and there's an environment that kills you for stepping into it, and left and right are dead ends you don't have the tools for yet. Being stuck on all four points of the compass at once is the genre working as intended, and if that sentence reads as a warning rather than an invitation, believe it.

Where the sequel shows its seams

The one recurring reservation is structural rather than mechanical. Silksong holds so closely to the shape of the original that the element of surprise is thinner this time — you recognise the rhythm of a Hollow Knight game almost immediately, and the discoveries land as refinements rather than revelations. That's an odd thing to complain about given how good the original is, but it's the honest read on why some people came away slightly less transported than they expected.

The pulse

Reception has been very strong with one live argument attached, and the argument is about difficulty. The game shipped demanding even by this series' standards, and the conversation since has been shaped by patches — including changes to early content and the tuning of certain encounters. The consensus that formed is that this is a rare sequel with real poise: harder than its predecessor, better playing, and confident enough not to explain itself. If you never played Hollow Knight, the near-universal advice is to go back and do that first. Silksong stands on its own, but it's a continuation, not an alternative.

Should you play it

Yes, and especially if you played the first one. The combat and platforming are the best Team Cherry has produced, the world is worth exploring for its art alone, and the wait has clearly been spent on the right things.

Two caveats. Start with Hollow Knight if you haven't — not because Silksong requires it, but because it's the better introduction to a design language this one assumes you can already read. And go in knowing it's a hard game that has been argued about precisely because of that, so if you bounce off difficulty rather than rise to it, this is a poor place to test the theory.