Over a year after its release, Hollow Knight: Silksong is still one of my favorite games released in 2025. After doing everything there was to do in Hollow Knight, I grew more and more excited for the release of Silksong. In fact, even though I wasn’t waiting as long as the average fan, the three-year wait time was enough to make me extremely impatient.
Somewhere in my photo album is a video of me reacting to the release date announcement, completely in disbelief that the game was real and actually happening. Then on September 4th came the first “boss fight,” as fans have un-affectionately dubbed it: trying to actually buy the game at the same time as the whole world. I eventually succeeded, plugged my laptop into the TV in my living room, and played.
I didn’t play Hollow Knight blind. Back then, I couldn’t buy games myself, so I would watch playthroughs of them to experience the story. Because of this, I was excited to play a Hollow Knight game completely blind, much like I was excited for Tears of the Kingdom. After so many years of hype building up, though, I was afraid that the game would crumble under the weight of the expectations put on it. One year later, it’s obvious to see that it didn’t. Even to this day, Hollow Knight: Silksong is still one of my favorite games released in 2025.
While there are still discussions about Silksong‘s often overwhelming difficulty, I am personally of the opinion that it wasn’t as bad as people say. It was difficult, but that was the point: much like its predecessor, it is meant to be a challenge to overcome, rather than one that is borderline unfair. I do believe that some of the balancing patches released since launch have been for the better, but the overall difficulty wasn’t too much. That isn’t to say all critiques were invalid (after all, some of these led to patches that improved the game). It is to say that sometimes what the game is looking for is a different approach.
In the first few days, there was a lot of controversy around the number of enemies that could deal double damage and the difficulty of the platforming, but these were knee-jerk reactions in my opinion. The double damage is there to balance the fact that Hornet can heal more at once, and the platforming can be made easier through the Crests system, which changes Hornet’s attack.
A lot of people assumed that Silksong would be far more like Hollow Knight than it actually was, and so assumed that any deviation from this was a flaw. But it wasn’t a flaw; it was Team Cherry trying to do things differently and add more new mechanics to make the game distinct from its predecessor. Many players that found the game too difficult didn’t engage with the Crests or Tools system. This left them stuck, of course, even when the game was offering them many different approaches to the difficulty ahead.
Speaking of different approaches, I vividly remember gasping when I saw that Hornet actually spoke. The Knight in Hollow Knight is a silent protagonist, so this was yet another change to Team Cherry’s formula. Ultimately, it was for the better. Hollow Knight’s story is very vague and hard to decipher, which made digging for extra lore to put the full picture together very entertaining. It did mean that most players missed out on the whole story, since they hadn’t put it together through playing normally.
Silksong changes this. The story is right in front of you the whole time in the sense that it is much clearer and much easier to follow. This isn’t better or worse than Hollow Knight’s approach, it’s just different. That said, I do personally prefer Silksong’s storytelling. Plus, there is still a reward for exploring deeper—Act 3. The Acts system is another indication that this game’s narrative was more central to development than it was in Hollow Knight. I heard rumblings of Act 3 from, of course, speedrunners who were already trying to get to the “true” ending as quickly as possible. I didn’t know how to unlock it, though, and I didn’t search it up. Instead, I asked a friend for hints, and unlocked the Act.
I remember being sad when I beat the game because suddenly there’s no more Silksong (until the eventual Sea of Sorrow, of course). That just proves how great the game was upon release, as I immediately tried to do everything possible to get more content out of the game. Despite the difficulty, I completed as much of it as I could. Upon tackling a second playthrough, I did a different route into Act 2—yes, there’s multiple ways in—and discovered even more new things upon this second playthrough.
Silksong is still, not only one of my favorite games of last year, but also the game that holds some of my most fondest memories in the medium to date. Of course it still holds up, maybe even better with the benefit of hindsight and analysis. Hopefully, when Sea of Sorrow eventually releases, the download process won’t require another “boss fight.”
