Vados Hollow Knight: Silksong Review

Silksong is one of the greatest Metroidvanias ever made and you can feel the passion of Team Cherry in every corner of its gigantic world. Like the first Hollow Knight, Silksong is an artistic masterpiece with beautiful visuals and fantastic sound design by Christopher Larkin. Compared to the original, Silksong made a bunch of improvements in regards to the more varied look of the environments and Hornet's moveset. At the same time however, they failed to iron out some of Hollow Knights shortcommings, as well as having issues that are typical for the Metroidvania genre. While Hornet eventually becomes quite quick and acrobatic, the game still suffers quite a lot from lengthy backtracking sessions and the occasional runback to a boss that's a bit too long and treacherous (Bilewaters...wtf). The fast traveling system that's 1:1 the same as in Hollow Knight, doesn't help here either, because just like in that game, the fast travel stations don't allow for instant teleportation and instead requires you to always look at where the nearest station is, running there, then picking the one that's closest to you destination and then running there again. Coupled with the newly added sidequests that quite often make you fetch things (for rewards that are VERY hit or miss) the game starts to get quite tedious after a while. Another issue that carried over from Hollow Knight is the fact that the developers thought it should be optional whether or not you see your position on the map, or if you want to properly collect rosary beads (this game's currency). You need to equip charms for both of these rather essential perks, which is pretty disappointing, since they hog slots that could be otherwise equipped with more interesting charms. Lastly, the difficulty of the game seems to be a bit artificial at times. While you can now heal faster and even in the air, bosses and a lot of normal enemies now deal twice as much damage and they are a lot more aggressive, meaning that it's pretty difficult to gain enough silk to heal yourself. Throughout a huge chunk of the game, enemies can kill you in 3 hits, but it takes you 9 hits to get the chance to heal yourself...and if you mess up, you better hope that the runback isn't tedious. This issue gets even worse when you consider that Silksong REALLY likes to throw Gank fights at you, where it's even harder to heal yourself, or that the game doesn't shy away from making you go through platforming segments that aren't far away from Path of Pain levels of torture...and due to how healing works in this game, you don't really have enemies around that can give you back some silk. As someone who played through all of FromSoft's Souls games (this also includes Bloodborne, Sekiro and Elden Ring), Silksong is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than anything they have ever made...and at this point I can't really tell if its a good thing. Git gud is obviously the point of these games, but if part of that experience also comes with runbacks that add to the already copious amount of backtracking, it does get quite tedious. All in all, the game has its ups and downs. I haven't finished the game yet (I'm about 90% done), but my journey was one where I went "This game is a masterpiece" in one minute, to "How did they think this was a good idea" in the next. In the end, it feels like Team Cherry had the mindset of "Just do more" for the entire game. More enemies, more backtracking, more damage, more quests. While it is admirable that they crammed so much into the game, it often left me somewhat exhausted after a play session. It's still a game I'd recommend to anyone who likes Souls-likes and Metroidvanias, but I'd also add that they should bring a lot of time and patience with them.