Shuanshuan Hollow Knight: Silksong Review

Hollow Knight: Silksong is a beautiful Metroidvania, with smooth and satisfying controls. There are many platforming sections and boss fights that are truly peak. As with Hallow Knight and most Souls games that have minimalist style of storytelling, I don't really get the lore behind everything but understood the gist of it enough to accompany the gameplay. What stood out most to me was actually how charming Hornet is as a character. The world is expansive and detailed, exploring each map, navigating through their quirks for the first time is a great experience. That said, there are some truly antiquated designs and missing QoL features across the entire game that prevents it from being a true masterpiece. From frustrating boss run-backs, pointless pre-boss warm-up fights, un-skippable animations, etc. the developers show an utter lack of respect for a player's time. The traversal / fast travel options are pretty limited and makes re-visiting previous maps tedious. At the end of the day, for $20 this game is a treasure and most players can find immense joy for 10 - 20 hours before they decide to drop it, so I'd easily recommend most players to buy and try. However, for people who are looking to commit to completing this game, be warned that unless you have a ton of time to waste on monotonous and even frustrating things, I'd recommend waiting for a possible patch for better QoL features. It's really a shame I can't bring myself to give this game a higher grade because my playthrough was marred by so many frustrating moments. I'm no stranger to difficult games, and I can retry bosses for 5 hours straight in other games (i.e. Malenia in Elden Ring, Eigong in Nine Sols) and never feel frustrated. But a 40 min boss in Silksong would frustrate the heck out of me because 10 of those minutes would come from monotonous or annoying runbacks.