Hollow Knight: Silksong Review

As I gaze upon the artwork of Hollow Knight: Silksong, I can’t help but marvel at the beauty and craftsmanship of it. Unique and interesting creatures, gorgeous backgrounds, and fluid animations all create this atmosphere of a downtrodden, exploited world. But for me, there is more to a game than how it looks. Art is in the experience. How the act of playing the game makes you think and feel, how it relates to the world beyond. Through play and engagement, some meaning can be conferred.

Publisher: Team Cherry

Developer: Team Cherry

Platform: Played on PC

Availability: Released September 4, 2025 on PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PC, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2.

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For Hollow Knight: Silksong’s part, it has without question elicited emotions within me. Fear, excitement, elation, joy — these are some of the emotions one would expect when playing a game like Hollow Knight: Silksong. Yet no such feeling has arisen; instead, I have almost exclusively felt boredom. Every run back to a boss, every platforming challenge, and every repeated trek through a zone became tiresome. If you take a path not meant to be seen at a specific point in time, you simply come to a dead-end with no way to intuit or understand what is missing or must be done — you are only rebuffed and cursed to wander elsewhere. And so the journey continues as you meander through new and equally complex and hazardous zones until a new tool or ability allows you to go back to your prior dead ends for continued exploration. 

This is typical for the genre of course, and does present itself as an accumulation of effort or accomplishment to be celebrated. The journey through the world is perilous, perhaps even more so than fighting any single boss Hollow Knight: Silksong throws at you. Yet there is very little fanfare when you do beat a boss, opening the way to the next zone. Seldom did I feel elated or joyful when my foe burst into silk. Instead, I mostly felt relief that the segment was done with, and hoped that the next area would be less aimless. I was never granted such relief. As the game progresses, zones get more intricate and the backtracking becomes even more frequent, and moments in-game start to blur. There never really feels to be a moment to reflect on events as you are playing, save the minor reprieve of a wayward bench. 

Beyond the backtracking, the ways in which the systems interact often leads to minor frustrations. Losing to a boss or field enemy means not only the possibility of losing your rosaries, but the loss of any other resources spent, such as shell shards to repair your tools. Shell shards are replenishable, but it is not a quick process to do so. Hollow Knight: Silksong gives you a plethora of tools to make use of that alter the gameplay flow in interesting or inventive ways. Tools that lay traps or give you ranged options, tools that make your attacks stronger or let them inflict status upon an enemy — the tools are abundant and useful. Yet the resource related friction here means you have to be very careful with their use, and disincentivizes experimentation and play in a game that is ripe with opportunity to do so. In a best case scenario, you consistently have enough shell shards to use your tools on the bosses and mini-bosses without having to grind out shards for repair, but to do so means you must never use them outside of those arenas, relying only on a single basic attack and a small selection of silk skills to carry you through dozens of hours of already monotonous gameplay. Over time, those minor frustrations coalesce into major grievances with how my time is being spent, products of a severe lack of balance in the experience of playing the game.

Hollow Knight: Silksong is an astonishingly beautiful game in motion and all other aspects.

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There’s a sort of religiosity required to play this game to completion. Opposed to the elaborate pomp and ceremony associated with many religious practices today, playing Hollow Knight: Silksong is more akin to self-flagellation. To inflict upon oneself pain and suffering over and over in order to bring oneself closer to God. Here, it is to suffer the repetition and failures and boredom of the act of playing so that one may say that the task has been completed and that some insight has been gained or purpose gleaned from the endeavor. In this respect, I seem to have fallen to the role of the sinner. I feel as if I have been unwillingly flogged, gaining no such wisdom for the trouble, and instead punished for some unknowable crime. Rather than gaining an appreciation of the game through the effort, I have inherited an aversion.

The likening to religiosity is no mistake. Many NPCs throughout Hollow Knight: Silksong are pious to the point of absurdity, making their way through lava caverns and poison swamps to ascend to the holy Citadel, only to be further pressed upon by those in the position to do so. Shopkeepers strewn about to extort their faith, enemies looking for their next victim, and a god whose silk controls their very thoughts — the world they live in is unkind. And yet they continue to pray. 

Perhaps this is where my lived experience comes into play more than any other facet of the interpretation of Hollow Knight: Silksong. I already have an intense aversion to religiosity, and playing something that evokes such imagery and feeling through both its story and gameplay necessarily gives rise to memories of Sundays spent sleeping in pews, of being forced to do something or be somewhere I did not want to be. 

It is true that I was not “forced” to play Hollow Knight: Silksong. There was no gun to my head, my feet were not held to a fire, and eternal damnation was not on the table if I didn’t finish it. But I did feel obligated, in some respect. The start of the game didn’t feel particularly offensive to me in any way. With exacting and immaculate level design, varied approaches to combat and exploration being viable, and tight controls, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a true feat of engineering. Everything just works. And in those early hours, when everything felt new, each new dead-end felt a little more intriguing. Easy enough to put a pin on it and come back later, I would think. As the game rolled on, and those pins and alleyways began to pile up, I just got tired of it. There was nothing keeping me here save the desire to say I had done so. That didn’t feel healthy, so I put it down just a few days after release, close enough to the end that I could just finish it at any time.

...playing Hollow Knight: Silksong is more akin to self-flagellation. To inflict upon oneself pain and suffering over and over in order to bring oneself closer to God.

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Yet the months passed and still Hollow Knight: Silksong would continue to pop into my thoughts. Generally not in a positive sense, but it was there all the same. I felt a tinge of shame that I had not brought myself to complete it. I felt apart from the overarching conversation surrounding the game. I felt like I didn’t have a voice because technically I had not beaten it, despite being there at the end. In order to relieve myself of that shame, I had to pick up Hollow Knight: Silksong once more, though I did throw out any ideas of completing act 3. This was in itself an absurd adherence to traditional norms and customs surrounding video game participation (especially in the critical space). The irony of this is not lost on me. I was hoping — praying — that completing the game would grant me more insight, bestow upon me some truth that I had missed. That by going through its entirety, the time I spent doing so would be deemed worthy.

It didn’t take long to roll credits on Hollow Knight: Silksong this time around. Just a short walk and a few attempts is all I needed. No meaning had been gleaned, no value for the time and effort had become apparent — I felt just as bored as I had all those months ago. That is where my pilgrimage ended. It’s hard to say that my faith in the game was broken as I was never one praying at the altar for it, but I am a bit let down by it all.

Verdict

Hollow Knight: Silksong is undoubtedly a beautiful game. Gorgeous artwork in the character sprites and the backgrounds breathes life into the world, music both haunting and melancholic permeates the air. More than any other positive aspect, Hollow Knight: Silksong seems to be a feat of technical prowess, a true masterwork of engineering where all the pieces work exactly as intended. Despite this, it remains one of the most tedious and boring games I have played in a very long time. It is a true shame those perfectly functioning systems don’t work together better to create a more rewarding experience.

Image Credits: Team Cherry