Hollow Knight: Silksong Review — Nintendo Switch / PC

The first hour of Silksong tells you everything about its intentions. Where Hollow Knight opened with a slow descent into a dead kingdom, Silksong opens with a fall, a capture and an escape — and from that moment Hornet never stops moving. Her sprint, her mantle, her needle-and-thread traversal: this is a game built around momentum, and it changes how every room, every fight and every secret is designed.

Pharloom is a kingdom of silk and song, arranged vertically where Hallownest sprawled downward. The climb upward gives the whole game a different emotional shape — you are ascending toward something, not excavating a grave. Along the way the game layers in towns that actually feel inhabited, a quest board that turns wandering into purpose, and a crafting system for tools that quietly replaces the old charm system with something more flexible.

Combat that sings

Hornet fights like a duelist. Her needle has reach and speed, her healing is faster but riskier than the Knight's, and her crimson silk abilities give every encounter a rhythm of spend-and-recover. Bosses are the showcase, as expected — there are more than thirty, and the best of them (we won't spoil which) rank with the finest the genre has produced. Difficulty is real but rarely unfair; nearly every death reads as a lesson.

What surprised us most is the generosity. Silksong is enormous — comfortably larger than its predecessor — and it keeps producing new ideas deep into its final act: new movement tools, new enemy grammars, whole optional regions with their own moods. The soundtrack, again by Christopher Larkin, carries the ascent from mournful strings to something close to triumph.

Small snags in the silk

Not everything lands. A few late-game gauntlets spike sharply enough that we suspect they will be patched, and the tool crafting economy is explained so lightly that some players will ignore an entire system for twenty hours. Neither comes close to dulling the whole.

Silksong had impossible expectations attached to it, and the quiet miracle is that it meets them by changing the subject — less dread, more velocity; less mystery, more music. It is the rare sequel that feels inevitable in hindsight and surprising in the moment.