🎼 After 8 years of waiting, Silksong is finally here. Long-time devotees of Hollow Knight and Team Cherry rushed to buy one of the most anticipated games of the decade, breaking almost all online gaming stores for over an hour. Less than two weeks in, Silksong is already fourth on Steam’s top-selling and most-played charts, hitting some 580k concurrent players at its peak. Where was this review last week when Silksong dropped, you ask? Our resident gamers couldn’t put down the controllers, keyboards, and joycons long enough to write it up.

Its immense popularity is highly unusual for an indie game. Australia’s Team Cherry is made up of just three main developers, who started working on Silksong in 2018. They may have really (really) taken their time, but the result is a well-rounded masterpiece that puts many AAA games with 100-500 person developer teams to shame.

Players follow the titular Knight’s half-sister Hornet, kidnapped into the distant Pharloom Kingdom by soldiers of a mysterious monarch. True to her reputation as the resident badass, she wipes out the kidnappers, wielding her trusty needle and red cape to fight her way up to the Citadel and face her enemy head-on.

The story is a thinly veiled critique of blind faith. Pilgrims entangled in the Citadel’s web of silk make the harsh ascent up, with many losing their lives and/or minds to the holy journey. They mock Hornet’s skepticism and rage against her quips, refusing to believe that they’re in the grip of a cruel god who lures them in to feed on their husks. Like the first installment, the game rarely reveals its lore in an explicit way, but hides it in loose notes, subtle conversations with friends and foes alike, and evidence of past ages found in ruins and abandoned cellars.

The gameplay is a huge step up from the original. Hornet’s movement is silk-smooth (pun intended), featuring sprinting, gliding, back-flips and wall jumps, to name a few. Combat elements are tightly woven together, with the new system shifting focus from upgrading your firepower to experimenting with an endless combination of needle slashes, weaver skills, and mechanical tools, adding a much-needed strategic element to Hollow Knight’s combat.

Visual and audio design is where Silksong really shines. The handcrafted 2D world is a manifestation of genuine artistic vision, taking you from Shellwood’s lush green forests where leaves are conducted by the wind, to fiery underground mines, the royal courts of the Citadel, Mount Fay’s freezing summit, and Bilewater’s muck-filled water (spoiler: water-themed levels are never beating the allegations). Meanwhile, the immersive sound effects are underpinned by another orchestral soundtrack from Christopher Larkin that rivals or even tops the award-winning soundtrack of the original.

The only catch? It’s a little bit
 evil. The game can be very challenging from the early stages, not to mention Act 2 (which almost gave us a mental breakdown). Walls and floors are out to get you, and even smaller enemies can drop you dead in seconds if you’re not paying attention. Exploring certain areas was a living nightmare, with platforming sections that make the aptly-named Path of Pain from the first installment feel like a walk in the park.

Although the early game was slightly balanced in recent patches (after we suffered the full brunt of it), we would still recommend playing and mastering Hollow Knight to better grasp the game’s design logic in the more-friendly Hallownest before you hop into the far more treacherous Pharloom.

💯 Rating: 9/10 on Steam.

⌛ Hours of gameplay: 25 hrs for the main story, 50-70+ hrs for completionists.

🔁 Replay value: 10/10 — the game has five endings (that we know of).

đŸ‘Ÿ Platforms: Steam for PC, Playstation, Switch, and Xbox.

đŸ’” Price: USD 7.99 for the game in Egypt, USD 19.99 in other countries.

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