HOLLOW KNIGHT: SILKSONG —
WORTH EVERY ONE OF THE 3,000 DAYS

Somewhere around hour six, clinging to a wall above a pit that had eaten forty minutes of my evening, I realised Silksong had already done the impossible: it made me stop comparing it to Hollow Knight. Pharloom is not Hallownest with new wallpaper. It's a meaner, faster, more vertical place, and Hornet — all momentum and needle-flash — is the reason it works.

Where the Knight fell like a stone and fought like a fencer, Hornet moves like a rumour. She sprints by default. She mantles ledges the Knight would have bounced off. Her healing is a desperate, all-at-once manoeuvre that rewards aggression instead of corner-hiding. Every returning instinct from 2017 gets politely dismantled in the first two hours, and the game watches you relearn with something like affection. Something like.

THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

Combat is the loudest upgrade. Silk — the resource Hornet spins from hitting things — powers healing, tools and her strongest attacks, which turns every encounter into a small economy. Spend silk to survive, or hoard it to end the fight faster? The game keeps rephrasing that question for forty hours and never repeats itself. Crest builds (think: stances with opinions) reshape her moveset dramatically enough that our second playthrough felt like a different, equally correct game.

And the bosses. Team Cherry has always designed bosses like arguments — here they're full-blown debates. The mid-game duel that shall remain nameless (spoilers, plus trauma) took me nineteen attempts, and on the nineteenth I understood every previous death had been my fault. That's the Silksong trick: it is brutally hard and almost never unfair, and the difference is the whole game.

"It is brutally hard and almost never unfair — and the difference is the whole game."

PHARLOOM, TOP TO BOTTOM

Structurally, this is a climb — the map runs upward toward the Citadel the way Hallownest ran down into the dark, and the ascent gives the whole game a pilgrim's momentum. Towns actually feel inhabited this time. Quest boards hand out errands that sound like busywork and reliably turn into the best detours on the map. The soundtrack — strings that fray exactly when you do — is Christopher Larkin's finest work.

Complaints? Two real ones. A handful of late-game gauntlets stack instant-kill hazards past the point of argument and into the point of spite. And some tool ammo economies mean the most interesting gadgets stay benched — why experiment when the needle always works? Neither dents the whole. They're the kind of flaws you list because a 9 needs footnotes.

THE NZ$30 QUESTION

Six years of "is it out yet" memes created expectations no game should survive. Silksong survives them the old-fashioned way: it's simply better than it needed to be, at a price that reads like a typo next to this year's hundred-dollar releases. Team Cherry could have charged triple and apologised for nothing.