Hollow Knight: Silksong

This page will get a score. It does not have one yet, because fourteen hours into a game most people take forty to finish is not a position from which to hand out numbers.

What can be said this early is that Hornet changes everything. She is faster than the Knight, she heals faster, and she can cross a room in ways the first game never allowed — and Team Cherry has clearly rebalanced every encounter around that fact rather than letting the extra mobility make things easier. Enemies commit to longer combos. Arenas are taller. The first genuine wall arrived at hour three, which in Hollow Knight took closer to ten.

What I am watching for

The first game's real achievement was the middle third, where the map stopped being a series of corridors and became a place you had opinions about. I am not there yet. Right now Pharloom reads as a sequence of very good rooms rather than a world, and whether that resolves is the question the score will turn on.

The other open question is difficulty communication. There have been two occasions where I spent forty minutes on a boss that, it turned out, I was not meant to reach for several more hours. The game does not gate that, and I am not sure yet whether that is confidence or carelessness.

The tools are arriving faster than expected

Three of the crest variants — which reshape Hornet's whole moveset rather than adding an attack — have turned up by hour fourteen, and each one has been substantial enough to make me replay areas I had already cleared. That pace is much quicker than the first game's, where charms accumulated slowly and most were passive.

Whether that holds is one of the open questions. Front-loading your best systems is a risk; the first Hollow Knight's late game worked partly because it kept giving. I will note here if the second half runs out of ideas.

Notes so far

Deaths

97

Bosses beaten

6

Map completion

~34%

Updated as I go. If the score changes shape before it lands, that will be recorded here rather than quietly fixed.