Tech: Hollow Knight: Silksong

I enjoyed the original Hollow Knight even though I never got around to finishing the game, so like millions of other people, I picked up the hotly-anticipated sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong. What followed was 55 hours of the most wondrous, most arduous Metroidvania I've ever played:

Silksong follows Hornet, a supporting character from the original Hollow Knight, as she is literally dropped into a strange new bug kingdom full of deadly creatures, treacherous terrain, and forgotten mysteries.  Who kidnapped her? What do they want? And what is the strange force zombifying most of the kingdom's inhabitants? The only way to answer these questions is to claw your way to the top of the labyrinthine Citadel and confront whoever (or whatever) is up there...

Developer Team Cherry famously spent about 7 years working on Silksong, and it shows. Every inch of this fictional insect world feels like a real, lived-in location, with its own aesthetic, denizens, and lore. Even 40 hours in, when most Metroidvanias would be long over, the game was introducing new biomes and bosses, and bringing new events and quests to prior areas.  It felt like it would never end, in a good way.

But oh, those bosses. Silksong began life as a Hollow Knight DLC, so it implicitly assumes that you have played through the first game. That means even early fights are tough, palm-sweating affairs, with multiple phases and summoned "adds" to complicate things. While the second half of the game gets a lot easier as you power up your character, I feel like many players will simply not have the patience or dexterity to deal with the challenge; for example, the final Act 1 boss one took me over a dozen tries to beat, including a frustrating "runback" that tacked on a minute or so of platforming before each attempt.  

It's really a shame that Silksong doesn't have the difficulty adjustment settings of other hard indie games like Celeste or Cuphead, so while I did love the game, I must score it accordingly.

Rating: 91/100 (subtract 15 points if you hate having to re-try bosses over and over again)