Review
The long wait was worth it, though the game makes you pay again.
Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel that the three-person Australian studio Team Cherry spent more than six years finishing, is a dazzling and punishing descent that demands more from its players than it needs to.
Written by CONTROL
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Hollow Knight: Silksong began as a promise on a Kickstarter page in 2014, when it was meant to be a piece of extra content for the first game. Team Cherry announced it as a full sequel in February 2019, and then went quiet for so long that the wait became an internet genre of its own. When it finally arrived on September 4, 2025, it cost $19.99, it knocked several digital storefronts over, and more than five million people played it within three days.
The studio never grew beyond its three core members, and the result shows that a small team can still make a very large game. Its hero is Hornet, the needle-wielding princess from Hollow Knight, who has been captured and carried to a new kingdom called Pharloom. She is faster and more acrobatic than the knight who preceded her. She lunges on a diagonal, grapples across gaps and climbs toward a citadel at the top of the world. Pharloom is drawn in the same inked, melancholy style as Hallownest, and it is more varied, with bells, pilgrims and industrial ruin.
Mercy is in short supply
The trouble is the price of every mistake. Many enemies take two masks of health per hit from early in the game, and healing, which Hornet does by binding herself in silk, restores three masks at once but leaves her exposed while she does it. The effect is a game in which a single misjudged jump can undo a minute of careful play. Some of the walks back from a resting bench to a boss are long enough to feel like a penalty for having tried. The currency, called rosaries, is spent on tools and upgrades, and it encourages a grind that adds little.
Players who love difficulty will say that this is the design working as intended, and the best boss fights here do reach the old ecstatic pitch, in which a pattern that looked impossible becomes a dance. However, a hard game and a hostile one are different, and Silksong too often mistakes the second for the first.
It remains a work of extraordinary craft, and it is sold at a price that embarrasses most of what surrounds it. Its world is dense with secrets, its music is lovely and its movement is a pleasure in itself.
The verdict: Silksong is a remarkable game that asks for more patience than it has earned. Players with the stomach for it should buy it without hesitation, and everyone else should expect to fall many times.