It’s a funny thing, waiting years and years for a game only to find out it’s coming out in a fortnight. That’s what happened to me and a few million other people when the small development team at Team Cherry announced the release date of Hollow Knight: Silksong a few weeks ago, giving people only a short time to get ready for the game it had spent years making.
The game’s been out for a couple of weeks now, and I’m still only in its first Act, with no clear sense of how long it’ll take me to beat, or whether I’ll manage to at all. As someone who loved the original Hollow Knight, though, it’s been pretty amazing dipping into a new world map and exploring it as Hornet, a character from that first game who’s now a protagonist in her own right.
The game is stunningly detailed and hand-drawn, just like its predecessor, and you can see how it took so long to make. The developers have been frank about the fact that the scope just kept expanding, with new enemies being added and new areas spilling out of their ideas into the game – all of which takes a lot of time to actually build when you have so few staff members.
Now, though, the game is the subject of one big discourse about difficulty levels, and I can see why. It’s one of the most tough-as-nails games you could hope to pick up right now, certainly relative to its popularity (it’s already sold millions of copies and crashed both Steam and the Nintendo eShop when it launched).
I found Hollow Knight‘s difficulty to be just right, crescendoing as the game concluded and leaving you with the option of some insanely challenging post-game areas to unlock secret endings that I never bothered with. Silksong brings things forward, with even some of the early bosses I’ve cleared taking dozens of tries thanks to punishing patterns and limited options.
It’s particularly harsh to discover how many regular enemies in the world will do double damage if you get hit by them, meaning you can often only take three hits before you die – but you do get used to the threat of death at all times. I’m persevering in the hope that I can find a health upgrade at some point and have an easier time of it, but there’s no doubt it’s been trying at points.
Still, it was always going to be hard for Silksong to seamlessly live up to my imagined expectations (which were basically just for more Hollow Knight but which also ignored my rustiness at the game building up for years). I’m having a great time, but it’ll be an interesting challenge to see whether I can stick with the game and finish it.
