Hollow Knight: Silksong review – beautiful, thrilling and cruel
Metroidvanias are the games where I’m allowed to get stuck in several places at once. Head upwards and there’s a boss that I can’t beat. Try going down the stairs instead and there’s an environment that kills me just for stepping into it. Left and right are dead ends that I don’t have the tools to navigate yet. Stuck on all four points of the compass! That’s a Metroidvania.
Hollow Knight: Silksong review
- Publisher: Team Cherry
- Developer: Team Cherry
- Platform: Played on PC/Switch 2
- Availability: Out now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Oneand Xbox Series X/S. The game is available on Game Pass.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is a Metroidvania. It’s a Metroidvania with rare poise and – this is crucial, even after a recent patch – a fearsome sense of conviction. It casts you as an elegant and swift-spirited bug, a hornet, who’s been kidnapped and left to explore the kind of close-up worlds of wonder and horror that Robert Hooke once revealed with his microscope. What a place, or series of places! Down in the moss and dewy earth, the merest ant is suddenly a monster, while a bedbug is a hulking battletank bristling with weapons, and bristling with bristles.
Let’s pause here for a second, before the carnage begins, and just ponder how beautiful this hand-drawn universe is. Here are grottoes, caverns, and passageways carved from the living earth. Here are complex factories filled with spinning saw-blades and steam vents, and abandoned coastal towns scaled for inhabitants no bigger than the lint that gathers at the bottom of your pocket. Here are cursed churches and battlements and palace attics and whole communities that seem to live inside addled jewelry boxes, their streets encrusted with loose gems and shards of copper and solder, the mineral air thick with petals and pollen. All of this complemented by a score that’s haunted, playful, and endlessly beckoning: the perfect soundtrack for a collection of spooky short stories you’ve stumbled across by accident in a wonky old bookstore.
It’s all filled with life, too. As with the first Hollow Knight, Silksong’s world is fairly rattling with shopkeepers and cartographers and all kinds of neglected artisans and explorers. They’re filled with charm, and the art style’s fully able to switch things up from one area to the next. All of this without warping the game’s own sense of internal coherency. There’s always something of Mucha to the swoop and curve of branch and brass in this place. There’s always something of Méliès to the flickering world and its alien inhabitants, all glimpsed a touch more sharply in the gentle iris of grainy light that surrounds the hero. If there was ever a game to play on a magic lantern, it’s this one.
