Hollow Knight: Silksong has finally been released after 7 years of development. I'm a fan of Hollow Knight—like practically everyone else who has played the cute platforming metroidvania indie game—so of course I bought the sequel as soon as it came out, or rather, as soon as Steam servers let me buy the game, since Silksong's release overwhelmed Steam's infrastructure, blocking the game from being purchased for several hours.
After playing it for a while, I'm afraid to say that Silksong is NOT Hollow Knight 2. I believe it will never be able to reach the universal acclaim of Hollow Knight, for several reasons that I'd like to talk about. My main focus on this article are what game design decisions made Hollow Knight what it is, and what made Silksong different from Hollow Knight.
Silksong is a Great "Game"
First and foremost, I'd like to start by saying that Silksong is not a bad game. Silksong is a great game. For $20 you get a game that takes dozens of hours to complete. The world is immense, there is a LOT of artwork both in the characters' animations, the world, the backgrounds. It's an indie game with astoundingly high production values. It feels like Dust: An Elysian Tail, but several times better.
The problem is that while Dust: An Elysian Tail is a "good metroidvania game," it's no Hollow Knight.
Similarly, we can say that Silksong, "as a metroidvania, it's a great game." It checks all the boxes. If you were looking for a metroidvania, this is one of the best ones. But it's still no Hollow Knight.
Let's talk about what went wrong with Silksong, or rather, what game design decisions Silksong made that ended up creating a game so different from the original Hollow Knight.
Silksong is Based on Hornet
It's no understatement to say that Silksong's entire game design plan was right from the beginning "to make a game where you play as Hornet from Hollow Knight."
In Hollow Knight, Hornet is an NPC (Non-Playable Character), and it's one of the boss fights. She appears in one of the first areas of the game. One of the first thing she does is run away from the player, and she runs away extremely fast.
Silksong essentially took the sort of movement that Hornet did in the original game as an NPC and as a boss fight, and built the entire the game around it. You literally play as Hornet. And if you are extremely good at this game, that means, by extension, that the player character fights like a boss.
This seems to have been a central idea in the development of Silksong. In Hollow Knight, the main character is very short, and very different from all the bosses, even the "human-sized" bosses, because they are all taller. In Silksong, Hornet has the same height as some of the bosses, and she has movements and attacks that makes her indistinguishable from the boss she's fighting against.
Personally, I think that this is a glorious achievement. They made Hornet: The Game. That's amazing. Honestly.
Silksong is not as Cute as Hollow Knight
Probably the biggest problem with Silksong is that it's not as cute as Hollow Knight. You can probably shrug the rest of the game design decisions as a matter of preference, but the characters not being cute is a terrible thing.
First of all, the main character of Hollow Knight is cute because he is small. Hornet is taller than the Knight, so she already can't be as cute. Instead, the best you can do is make her look "cool" instead of "cute," and I assume that's what the developers, Team Cherry, tried to do.
The problem is that in Hollow Knight, it's not just the Knight that is cute. A lot of the enemies are also cute. And I truly believe that this is part of the appeal of the game.
When you start the game, most enemies are small cute critters that move slowly and are very easy to defeat. The Primal Aspids are the most hated Hollow Knight enemy, and they are still kind of cute. Even large enemies in Hollow Knight are kind of cute because they tend to be very round and circle-shaped.
A lot of people who play Hollow Knight for the first time love "cute" things like enemies making "fart" noises when they die (I know this sounds weird when you type it like that, but it's true), the cute elephant-shaped enemies in the Fungal Wastes. My personal favorite, by far, is that large moss enemy in the Greenpath that runs at you and scares you away, but if you hit it ONCE, the moss disappears and it reveals that it was just a tiny critter inside, who promptly starts running away from you.
Not every enemy in Hollow Knight is cute. The mantises are not cute. The moss knights are not cute. One thing that these "not cute" enemies have in common is that they are taller, and they can parry. They are knights. Fighters. Not just bugs.
Silksong doesn't have cute enemies. Period. Okay, there is maybe one or two of them. But most enemies are just knights, and not the "round" cute kind, they are the thin serious kind, or the rectangular bulky kind.
You will not find anything cute to look at at this game. It's just danger.
Even "critter" enemies in Silksong are not cute compared to Hollow Knight, some of them just look evil or nasty, and they are also far more dangerous.
Silksong is much Harder than Hollow Knight
In Hollow Knight, a lot of enemies had very basic attacks, and many of them are simply "mindless." They either walk in a straight line forward and back like a Goomba, or they just fly toward you slowly, or they just fly diagonally until they bounce off a wall. Most enemies only have one attack, e.g. the elephants in Fungal Wastes only spew acid at you, and if they miss, they can't do anything.
In Silksong, most enemies can do 5 things. Everyone can parry. Everyone has a helmet that protects them from being hit from above. They can jump at you, or attack in a straight line. Some enemies can attack you even if you are in a different platform above them. And some of them can hide inside the ground. It's like every enemy is a mini-boss, and a lot of basic enemies have similar moves to real late-game bosses from Hollow Knight.
One of the most frustrating things in this game is that a lot of flying enemies can "back away," which means if you jump and try to hit them, they actually just dodge it. There is one flying enemy in this game that is so large that its flavor text in the hunter's journal says that it shouldn't be able to fly with wings so small. And that enemy ALSO dodges. It's ridiculous. Primal Aspids never dodged. They're one of the hardest basic enemies in Hollow Knight and the only thing they do is spew 3 bullets at once instead of 1.
In Hollow Knight, a large number of enemies pose almost no threat, and they only exist to let you strike them. If you strike an enemy, you gain "soul," which lets you heal. This means the game cycle goes like this:
- You enter a new area without knowing what the enemies do and you lose health.
- You strike safe enemies to gain soul and heal the health you lost.
- Repeat.
Meanwhile, in Silksong, although there are similar healing mechanics, every enemy is a threat and even the enemies intended to be used to farm "silk" that is used to heal are threats.
In particular, a lot of basic enemies in Silksong deal 2 damage instead of 1. You start with 5 health, which means if you take 3 hits, you die. A lot of these enemies deal 2 damage as contact damage, which means if you land on a bad position after getting hit once, there is a good chance you will lose another 2 health because you'll touch the same enemy again, meaning a single mistake does 4 damage all at once.
But that's not all.
In Hollow Knight, it takes only a few hits to farm enough "soul" to heal a single health point (called a "mask" because it's represented by masks). In Silksong, you heal 3 masks with a single heal, but it requires more hits to have enough "silk" to heal. Consequently, you have to defeat MULTIPLE enemies without taking hits at all in order to actually heal in this game. This is not an exaggeration. Since so many enemies deal 2 damage, that means if you take 1 hit, you only heal 1 mask, but if you take 2 hits, you are healing less than the health you lost farming "silk."
To make matters worse, because Hollow Knight's protagonist is small, that means its hitbox is also small, making it easier to evade projectile attacks. Hornet is taller, which means her hitbox is larger, which means it's easier to get hit by projectiles, many of which do 2 damage.
An unique mechanic of Hollow Knight is that if you strike an enemy, there is a "knockback" effect and you slightly move backward. This sounds like a bad thing, but because your sword is much larger than you, it means you can safely hit an enemy walking toward you a few times because each time you move slightly backward. Silksong has the same mechanic, but now the sword feels much smaller, and there is a lot less knockback, and the enemies are also faster, which means that you are going to take hits even from enemies that do nothing but walk on the floor like a Goomba just because you mistimed an attack.
Considering these factors, in most of the game, you don't fight. You simply run away. If you fight enemies, you will lose more health than you can heal, so if you want to reach the other side, you need to simply avoid fighting as much as possible to have enough health to fight the boss.
The icing on the cake is that in Silksong a lot of bosses have a "phase 2," which is when you deal enough damage to a boss that they start using other moves. There is only a very few bosses in Hollow Knight that have multiple phases.
These things combined mean that Silksong is a much harder game than Hollow Knight. It has a much higher skill floor. You can play Hollow Knight as a casual gamer. A lot of people play Hollow Knight as their first metroidvania these days, and some of them start the game without even being able to hold the jump button to jump higher. These people wouldn't have an enjoyable time with Silksong. The difficult in Hollow Knight slowly increases from area to area, with basic enemies having more complex attacks with every area. In Silksong, they are already extremely complex and punishing in the second area, and only get more complex later.
To put it in perspective. In Hollow Knight, the fast travel system is before the first (or second) boss, the False Knight, and although the False Knight deals double damage if they hit you, the whole fight is actually extremely easy once you learn "the trick" to avoid getting hit. In Silksong, the fast travel system is after the first boss, and this boss is already far more difficult than the False Knight, mainly because it moves faster.
Horizontal Movement is bad for Metroidvanias
Hornet has a lot of horizontal movement, and I mean A LOT. I'm not sure if it would be an understatement to say that Silksong is the platformer with the fastest horizontal movement ever made. You can dash. You can run. If you jump and land at the ledge of a platform, Hornet will quickly climb the platform. If you jump during the climb animation, she uses the ledge to jump much higher than normal. It's a game with a LOT of movement.
Hollow Knight, in contrast, barely has any movement. The Knight walks, or rather, runs slowly. This is mainly because he is so small to begin with. Even after you get the dashing ability, the Knight doesn't move very fast.
Naturally, the movement speed of the main character affects the skill floor of the game. Because the Knight moves slowly, the enemies also move slowly so that the player has enough time to move away. This has the bonus of granting the players enough time to see and understand what is happening on the screen, and to react appropriately.
Meanwhile, in Silksong, everything happens so fast that you need a much faster reaction time just to dodge things. In both games, enemies will "telegraph" their attacks. For example, if an enemy has two attacks, one that hits you on the floor, and one that hits you if you jump, you need to make the right decision or you'll get hit. To allow the player to make this decision right, the enemy will make a different pose based on whether they'll attack on the floor or on the air, and then you just react to that pose. In Hollow Knight, a lot of the enemies are much larger than the Knight, so their telegraphs are very easy to tell because they're just big in general, In Silksong, many enemies are around the size of Hornet, which not only makes this harder to see, but now they also attack faster.
However, the main problem with the increased movement speed in Silksong is not that it makes the game even harder. It's that it makes the metroidvania aspect of the game much worse.
As you may be aware, "metroidvania" is a portmanteau of "Metroid" and "Castlevania," two games where you explored a non-linear world mainly using a map that let you see which rooms you hadn't visited yet. It's no understatement to say that the main goal of a metroidvania should be to complete the map.
Since the map is the guiding light of the player, the last you would want to do as a developer is to place something required to beat the game in a hidden room that doesn't show on the map. This is also true if the game has "secret" endings. If you need to get in a secret room to beat the game, then you HAVE to tell the player where that room is without the map. For example, in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, you need to equip both the silver ring and gold ring to get inside a hidden room in the game. The flavor text (item description) of the rings literally tell you to wear them at the clock room, meaning the player has the opportunity to figure this out without the map. That's just says how important the map is in this genre. When the map isn't enough on purpose, there has to be something as good as the map to guide the player.
What makes metroidvania truly great is how non-linear exploration can be. In traditional platformers, you could only go forward. In a metroidvania, there are several paths that you can take, and a lot of these paths eventually connect together.
The reason why Hollow Knight is such an excellent metroidvania is that EVERYTHING is tightly connected. One of the first areas of the game, the Forgotten Crossroads, has so many passages to it that the player can return to the crossroads by accident three different times in the same game. And every time he'll think something like "wait, this is the first area of the game! It connects together!"
A lot of areas have multiple methods you can use to reach them, and you are given the choice extremely early in the game. Much earlier than a lot of people think.
Most people play Hollow Knight like this: first you do the tutorial area, which is obligatory, then you head to the Forgotten Crossroads, then you beat the False Knight, and you get the ability required to proceed to the Greenpath area.
It's very important that areas in a metroidvania are locked behind abilities, and not just behind locked doors. That's because when you see a locked door, that looks like a locked door that you can enter if you have the key. Meanwhile, in a metroidvania, there are certain places that you can reach with an ability that don't even look like they are places you can go at first glance. Notably, there are some places in the Crossroads that to some players appear to be places you need to come "from the other side" to reach them, while in reality you just need to get the dash ability to reach them. In this aspect, too, Hollow Knight stands above the rest of metroidvanias. That's because there are several abilities that are common in platformers, like wall jump, dashing, etc., so if it looks like you can get to one place using those abilities, you can figure "I just don't have the ability yet, I'll probably get wall jump later." However, in Hollow Knight there is an ability called Isma's Tear that lets you get through certain areas that are hidden in plain sight and you would never realize it without getting the ability first. Even in the Forgotten Crossroads there is a spot you can get through using this ability, and when you go to the room in the first place you would never imagine that there is a hidden area there. You need to get the ability first, and then you re-explore the area, and then you think "wait, can I... oh, I can!" It's amazing. That's what makes metroidvanias great.
But you actually don't need to go to Greenpath in Hollow Knight. You can instead defeat the other boss in this area, the Gruz Mother; find Sly, who is the merchant, which returns to the town before the Crossroads when you find him; then you find a room before the False Knight that is completely dark and you can't see anything in it; then you find the fast travel system and use it to go to the only location you can, which is the town; then you go talk to the merchant because he wasn't there before and you see that he sells a lantern for a very high price (1800 geo); and then, some people, ACTUALLY, would spend a whole hour farming geo at the start of the game to get the lantern and check the dark room instead of going to the first boss, and then they'll end up in Crystal Peak instead of Greenpath, and from the only place you can go is to the Resting Grounds. You can get the Dream Nail in Hollow Knight before you get the dash, before you get Vengeful Spirit that you need to go to Greenpath, before you even fight the False Knight!
I think that it's important to understand that this wasn't necessary. The 1800 geo requirement will make most players avoid this choice to begin with. In fact, you would think that nobody would actually try to do this unless they already finished the game. But the fact that this is possible, and the fact that new players have actually done this, is what makes Hollow Knight so wonderful. Some people just played the game completely different from you, in a completely different order, and that's glorious. Some people find the dreamer in the Deepnest before they get the dream nail. Some people actually listen to Quirrel's advice and go to the city upgrade their nail before fighting the Mantis Lords. Some people defeat the Mantis Lords, enter the Deepnest, and nope right out of it. Others decide to go in. It's wonderful. It's just wonderful.
That to me is what makes Hollow Knight great.
Silksong has none of that.
At the very start of the game you get the main quest, that tells you to go a place at the top of the map. This means that's where you HAVE to go: up. But the real problem is that there is only one route up.
There is only way to get to a location called Greymoor, which is several hours into the game. From there, there is probably only one way to get to the next required location.
In other words, Silksong is linear. It's extremely linear. Disappointingly linear. It's less of a metroidvania and more of a platformer where you can go right and left. Perhaps that's a bit too harsh, but one of my favorite elements of Hollow Knight is completely gone from Silksong.
Most of the "alternative" routes that you can find in this game you unlock AFTER you reach the area, and they aren't locked behind abilities. Instead, they are breakable walls that you can only break from one side, and from the other side they don't look special at all. You still have locations you can only reach after unlocking abilities, but they aren't alternative routes, they are the only route.
I believe that the main issue with Silksong's design is the horizontal movement. Think of Castlevania: SoTN and Hollow Knight for a moment. The characters move slow. Why is that good for a metroidvania?
If the characters move slow horizontally, their ratio of horizontal movement to vertical movement is closer to 1:1. This means that the ROOMS are closer to square-shaped.
If the character has more horizontal movement, the rooms become wide rectangles.
Why is this important? Because with square-shaped rooms, you can create a maze. That's part of what makes metroidvanias great: the map looks like a maze. If every room is a square of same size or composed of multiple squares. This means when you look at the map, you can actually tell where the HIDDEN rooms are from the fact there is a hole in the map. At least this is how Castlevania worked. The map was so tightly packed with rooms and corridors that connected to each other, that every blank square in the map looked suspicious.
Think about this for a moment. If the rooms fit in a grid, that means a completely isolated room has four edges (2 walls, ceiling, and floor) that could be potentially breakable leading to other rooms. In most cases, the ceiling and the floor aren't breakable. If you look at the map and you see a hole between two rooms, it's very likely that you can break a wall on either of the adjacent rooms and that will reveal a hidden room in that square.
Hollow Knight isn't as tightly packed as SoTN, so you can't really use the same technique. Its map is more arbitrarily-shaped. However, because the Knight moves slowly horizontally, the map is still looks like a complex, interconnected maze, with various paths leading to the same rooms.
In Silksong, none of this is true. Most of the map are long corridors so that Hornet can run. If you do some platforming, you get on an upper area, which is ALSO a long horizontal corridor! One of the first areas of the game has literally 3 corridors one on top of the other. Everything is either connected by long horizontal corridors OR long vertical areas.
This is a problem for a metroidvania because, as we already know, "hidden rooms" are likely on the walls. If everything is corridor, that means the corridor will end on a door to another corridor. Metroidvanias benefit more from "tower areas" that you slowly climb, or diagonal rooms where you enter from one side and leave by going up or down so there is a wall at the opposite side. There are still plenty of hidden rooms in Silksong, but it's impossible to tell where they are from map, because the map has immense gaps in it, since everything is much wider now.
Silksong Regions are Boring Compared to Hollow Knight
Another problem with Silksong is that the regions' artwork are much less impressive compared to Hollow Knight. This is actually ironic, because they clearly spent a lot more effort on them in Silksong than in Hollow Knight. This includes the background music that plays when you enter a region. Everything is very forgettable. It "looks" great and checks all the boxes, but something feels missing.
One reason for this problem could be, again, Hornet's horizontal movement speed. Since you dash through everything, you don't really have time to enjoy the background art, but I believe there is more than that.
First of all, Silksong has way too many more regions than Hollow Knight. At first glance, these are all rather large regions compared to Hollow Knight. But when you look closer, that isn't true at all.
The problem is the complexity of each region.
As I mentioned previously, a lot of the areas in this game are long, horizontal corridors. This means that in many cases you can simply start running from the left side and leave the region from the right side. All you need to do is go through 3 to 5 corridors and you have crossed the region. Every room is extremely large, and it's either a horizontal corridor or a vertical area. Consequently every region only has a few rooms.
Perhaps the biggest issue in Silksong is that the background is a blurry mess.
In Hollow Knight, most backgrounds were layers of illustration, and there was one location that was a building that was rendered in some sort of 3D or parallax effect, and the background was kind of blurry.
In Silksong, that's literally every location.
You can barely see the background artwork because it's all so blurry. At the end of every room you have this 3D effect on the wall.
It's technically impressive, but it feels extremely ironic to me. When I see this effect, the message I'm getting is that Silksong is trying to be "not just a 2D metroidvania." It has cool 3D background effects. It has blur. But I want just a 2D metroidvania. I want Hollow Knight, I want Metroid, I want Castlevania. These games have just 2D backgrounds.
I find a similar problem with the background music. In some areas, you can barely hear the background music because there is also so much environmental noise. The floor trembles, the camera shakes, it's like a volcano is exploding somewhere.
Maybe I'm just old and cranky, but I think it's really interesting how, to me, it feels like the more "modern" you make something, the more processing and effect you add, the more irregular you rooms look in the map compared to simple squares in a grid, the more it seems to backfire. At least in my opinion. There are experiences you can only deliver when you keep things simple.
You're Cuter When You Don't Talk
Another point to consider is that, in Silksong, the main character talks.
Of course, Hornet HAS to talk, since we already know she is able to talk, from the fact she talks in Hollow Knight. It would be rather awkward if she suddenly became a silent protagonist just because she is the protagonist now.
The problem is that if the character talks, they can talk in a way people don't like. If you want to make an universally liked protagonist, you have to keep the protagonist mute, so they don't say anything that makes your players think "oh I don't like people who talk like this, I don't like this character."
In fact, one important detail you can think about in the design of these two games is the flavor text that describes all sorts of things.
Think about it for a moment. You are the Knight. You never say a word. Then look at an item, and the item has a description. Whose words are describing the item? In this case, it's important that the description sounds objective, right? It must be a narrator describing the items. Otherwise, it will be like the protagonist is describing them, and through the item description you can infer the personality of the main character, and if you can infer their personality, you can dislike their personality.
In both Hollow Knight and Silksong, there is an item you can get that lists descriptions of all enemies in the game, and if you slay them a number of times, it unlocks additional descriptions. In Hollow Knight, the additional description are in the words of a character called "the Hunter." They are not the Knight's words. In Silksong, the additional description is actually in Hornet's words. From these descriptions you can tell how Hornet thinks, e.g. in the description of one enemy, she says she would like to touch the enemy's fur. Someone is probably going to draw fan art of this because of this one line in the journal.
There is again something ironic about all of this. The original Hollow Knight was a game with barely even hints of a lore. Fans spent seven years speculating about all sorts of things from the little text they had access to in the game. In some cases the text was changed from one version to another, leading to even more speculation.
By contrast, Silksong is a game that was created entirely based on a single character, and seems determined to flesh out this character as much as possible. You will learn all about Hornet, whether you want to or not.
My personal opinion on this is that if you aren't creating a mute character, you need to create a character with truly inspiring lines so that it's at least worth reading. I have a very high bar for what counts as "truly inspiring" compared to just platitudes in fiction, which makes making a mute character the easier path to take. Silksong can't have a mute character, she probably won't clear my bar either. A bit unfortunate.
Frustrating Mechanics: Silksong is All the Bad Parts of Hollow Knight?
One incredible thing about Silksong that I noticed, and maybe you noticed as well, is that Silksong employs mechanics that were found in Hollow Knight, except when Silksong does it the result is worse.
In essence, not only the parts that I enjoyed in Hollow Knight are gone from Silksong, but, ALSO, the parts that I did NOT enjoy in Hollow Knight are more present than ever in Silksong.
Taking 2 damage from enemies is an obvious one. Enemies parrying, too. The blurry 3D background. The breakable walls that look like normal walls from the other side.
In Hollow Knight, there are only two "quests" in the entire game.
In the first quest, you have to deliver something to a location without taking damage at all. This is a bit of a challenge, but it's only one time. If you fail, you have to go all the way back to the character that gives the quest, which is very frustrating. Fortunately, at the end of the game you have an ability that lets you quickly go back to the quest giver, which makes this challenge far less frustrating.
Silksong has multiple of these delivery quests, and a lot of them are even longer than the one in Hollow Knight. You can take multiple hits, but one of them ALSO has a time limit.
The other quest in Hollow Knight, and probably the worst one, is a quest that makes you go to multiple places that you have already been to in the map. As an "explorer" type of player I can't stress enough how much I don't like this quest.
The problem to me is this: I play the game to explore the world. If there isn't anything to do in an area after I already explored it, I don't want to go back there. The only reason I want to ever go back to an area in a metroidvania is to try to find where I can use an ability to access a hidden room or a new area. I don't want to go back there just because a quest-giver told me to. That's just not... fun.
From the game developer's perspective, that can feel a bit of a waste. After all, you have created such a large map, and yet you can't ever reuse it. I can tell why you would want to use a quest to make players go back to an area that they have already been to. But I'm not sure if a player would want to do that after they have already explored that area.
In Silksong, there are SEVERAL quests like this. They are in multiple types. One is a mini-game where you hunt someone by following their tracks. The "tracks" appear when you take the quest, and they are indicating by a shining spot on the floor. Another type tells you to hunt enemies by slaying them, and you have to slay a number of enemies before clearing the quest. There are some quests that combine both ideas.
As a player, I just don't like how this is designed at all. It feels like the sort of quest that just wants to waste your time.
Here's how I think these should be designed.
If there is a quest to slay enemies to get items from enemies, e.g. wolf pelts, and you need to deliver X items. I should just be able to start collecting the item whenever I slay a wolf, even if I haven't taken the quest. This means if I have slayed X wolves already, I already have X pelts before the quest even started. I don't need to go around slaying wolves just because someone told me to. If the quest is about slaying enemies in a particular location, the enemies should already be there, and I should be able to do that before I even take the quest. That's because I feel like these quests only help the player if the player hasn't been to a location before. If they have already been there, and the quest doesn't feel like an extraordinary challenge, then what is the point if not waste the player's time?
Similarly, for the tracking quests in Silksong, I honestly think I should just be able to start tracking things even if I'm not sure what I'm tracking. In other words, I should enter a region and see random tracks, and I should just be able to check them and follow them before I take the quest. That feels far more natural to me than having to accept a quest first and then going to where the quest tells you to go. I simply don't like the game telling me to go places. That's not a game anymore, that's a chore.
This article must also mention: the traps. Oh my God. The traps.
And the paid benches.
In Hollow Knight, you paid to unlock fast travel, but there was always a free bench next to it. Sitting on a bench fully heals the main character and sets the respawn point. In Silksong, you have to pay for both the fast travel and the bench. If you don't have enough money, that means you can still take the fast travel to go to a location where you already unlocked a bench, sit on the bench in another part of the world, then take the fast travel BACK to where you were, so what is the point of this? Waste time? Frustrate players? Annoy? Irritate? Is it just to feel unfair?
To pay for benches you use a currency called "rosaries." However, not every enemy drops rosaries. Some enemies only drop shell shards. The enemies that drop rosaries are the humanoid types that have complex attack patterns. Remember when I said that fighting enemies isn't worth it most of the time because you'll just lose health so you should just avoid fights altogether? The game forces you fight anyway so you can afford a bench. Most enemies only give you a few rosaries and benches usually cost 80 rosaries, so you're going to have to be forced to fight a lot, or you'll need to find hidden rosaries in secret areas to be able to afford all these benches.
Like in Hollow Knight, Silksong has a mechanic where you lose all your money if you die, but you can recover it by going back to where you died. Unlike Hollow Knight, in Silksong you die in 3 hits to enemies that deal 2 contact damage, and you're probably going to lose health even to the most basic enemies that are supposed to help you farm silk to heal. Even if you get a health upgrade, that is only going to upgrade your HP from 5 masks to 6 masks, so you're still going to die in 3 hits. This means you're going to lose a lot of rosaries.
Silksong is needlessly mean and evil-spirited toward the player. I'm not joking. This isn't an understatement. This is the objective reality.
I can't speak specifics without spoiling some parts of Silksong, but I'll say that if you complete the map, you'll realize that some of it can only be described as "not cool." You'll be somewhere, and something will happen, and you'll just think "that's just not cool," and you'll feel that way several times in this game. It's not a prank, or funny, or anything like that. It's just plain "not cool, why do you have to be like this?" It's just not cool.
One of the first signs that this game has something wrong going on it is that some enemies deal 2 damage at once, but there are also several enemies that deal 1 damage, except if they hit you, you get attacked twice, so you take 2 damage either way.
I have some theories for why this happens.
My first theory is that Team Cherry heard everyone saying that Hollow Knight was "Dark Souls-like" and decided to make Silksong even more "Dark Souls-like" by putting traps everywhere and making the player just feel like the entire game world hates them. I'm not sure if that's how Dark Souls actually feels because I never played it, but it's what I imagine.
My second theory is that Team Cherry actually just hates Hollow Knight fans and wants them to suffer. That seems unlikely, but I'm throwing the idea out there just in case.
My third theory is that the game is needlessly cruel and unfair for thematic reasons. Since the pilgrimage that is a central theme of the game also feels needless cruel and unfair, maybe the whole game is supposed to feel like that.
In any case, Silksong just goes way too far with the uncoolness in some parts. I've actually thought out loud "are you serious?" in some of the most disturbingly uncool parts of the game. It reaches cartoon villain levels of evil-ness in some parts.
Silksong is Sad
Both Hollow Knight and Silksong are rather "sad" games, but I feel the sadness in Hollow Knight is fundamentally different from the sadness portrayed in Silksong.
In Hollow Knight, sadness is about things gone. The entire game is about a kingdom that has decayed and ceased to exist. There was this marvelous kingdom, built to last eternal, and now you are witnessing the remnants and ruins of the civilization.
It's profound because everyone is already gone. It's already over. It's already too late. It's been lost already. Only corpses and the eldest or immortal remain.
Meanwhile, Silksong is about a kingdom that seems to be in a bad shape currently. You meet many living, sane bugs. They're either suffering to death, living in fear, or are slaves to their labor. That's just sad. What a miserable place.
That's what I feel is a key difference between Hollow Knight and Silksong.
In Hollow Knight, it's sad, but it's wonderful. It's full of wonder. You "wonder" how this kingdom looked like in its prime. How these deserted stag stations felt like when they were bustling with bugs coming and going.
In Silksong, it's sad, but because it's miserable. You aren't wondering anything. You're seeing the bad things happening in front of your eyes.
All the whimsy of the first game has been replaced with misery.
I haven't finished the game yet, so maybe if you do finish it, you save the world. But I'm not sure if you'll save the world in a way that's satisfying enough.
Closing Statements
Like there are dozens of different ways to play Hollow Knight, maybe there are some people who actually prefer the way Silksong is designed. It's a matter of taste. What I intended to highlight with this article is that, "if I were creating Hollow Knight 2, these are the things that I would NOT do."
As I mentioned, despite the criticisms I have written in this article, Silksong is not a bad game. It would be ridiculous to say that. Silksong is a great game. It's not cute, but everything is beautifully animated. It's not much of a mystery maze exploration game, but the combat system is insanely cool, you literally play like a boss. I'm not sure if there is any other game where you literally use the same attacks that a boss would. The entire game is massive, and it's only $20. It's by far one of the best metroidvanias ever made, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
It just doesn't feel anything like Hollow Knight, and I can't help but feel disappointed by this fact.
My only hope is that, now that Silksong is released, game developers can look at the differences between these two games and if they want to make a game like Hollow Knight, they will know what makes Hollow Knight Hollow Knight, and what makes Silksong not Hollow Knight, and they'll be able to take this as a lesson of what kind of game they want to make.