I held off writing this until I'd actually finished the game. Forty-three hours, two endings, and a respectable but not completionist 92% completion later, here's where I land: yes, the wait was worth it. With caveats.
Hollow Knight came out in 2017. Silksong was announced in 2019. It went into a kind of indie-game hall of mirrors for the next five years, with no release date and frequent jokes that it would never come out. It came out. It was nominated for awards at the Golden Joysticks. People are playing it now. So am I, and so was almost everyone in my Discord for a solid three weeks.
What it is, briefly
Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight, sort of. You play Hornet, a side character from the first game. The kingdom is different. The combat is faster, more aggressive, more focused on movement than the slow-and-deliberate first game. The art is gorgeous in the same hand-drawn style, but with new color palettes and a much wider range of biomes. The soundtrack is, I want to say, the best in the genre right now.
If you haven't played the first game, this is not the place to start. Silksong assumes you've internalized the conventions of Hollow Knight — the lack of a quest log, the obscure NPC interactions, the willingness to die a lot — and builds from there.
What's better than Hollow Knight
The combat. Hornet is dramatically more fun to control than the Knight was. The dash, the wall jump, the various silk-based traversal tools — the game has a movement vocabulary that makes traversal itself feel like a combat encounter. Even the simple act of going somewhere on the map is engaging in a way the first game's traversal wasn't.
The bosses. There are more of them, they're more varied, and the difficulty curve is more reasonable. The first game had a few bosses that felt like checkpoints rather than encounters; Silksong's lower-tier bosses are still genuine fights, and the upper-tier ones are some of the best 2D boss fights I've ever played.
The world. The first game's map was a coherent single space. Silksong has a more vertical, more biome-driven structure that rewards getting genuinely lost in. The discovery loop — find a thing, find what unlocks the thing, come back later — feels tighter, with shorter distances between meaningful payoffs.
What's worse, or at least uneven
The story. I know, I know. Hollow Knight wasn't telling a story you could summarize either. But Silksong's narrative is even more elliptical, more reliant on environmental storytelling and obscure NPC dialogue, and it didn't quite land for me the way the first one did. The first game's main themes hit me; the sequel's I had to read about afterward to understand at all.
The pacing of the first quarter. The opening few hours are deliberately slow and underpowered. I think it's working a thematic angle — Hornet is far from home, low on resources — but it costs the game some momentum. Multiple people on my Discord bounced at hour four and I had to talk them into giving it another two. It clicks at hour six. Five years of anticipation deserved a faster on-ramp.
Some of the difficulty cliffs feel less calibrated than Hollow Knight's. There's a mid-game boss I died to twenty times and a late-game one that took a single attempt. That spread isn't necessarily a flaw — different players will hit different walls — but I felt the design hand more in Hollow Knight's curve.
Is it the indie game of the year so far?
For me, yeah. I haven't played anything in 2026 that operates at this level of craft, and the long development time shows in the right ways — every system feels considered, every area feels intentional. The fact that it didn't crash a single time across forty-three hours and shipped on every platform at once is itself a quiet flex.
It's not a flawless game. It is, however, the rarest thing in modern game development: a long-anticipated sequel that didn't have to compromise its own vision, didn't get watered down by feature creep, and arrived with the same focus and confidence as the original. I'd pay for the soundtrack alone. I bought the soundtrack already. I'm listening to it right now.
If you're considering it
Play Hollow Knight first, or replay it if it's been a while. Silksong assumes mechanical fluency that the first game taught you. Trying to acquire that fluency in Silksong directly is going to be brutal, and not in the fun way.
If you bounced off Hollow Knight, you'll bounce off this. The genre conventions haven't softened. Some have actually hardened. This isn't a game for everyone; that's part of why fans like it.
If you loved Hollow Knight and have been waiting since 2019: it was worth the wait. Block off a weekend. Bring snacks. The game earns the time you give it.