Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s Crushing Difficulty Conveys A World In Penance

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 8, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features hollow knight: silksong

Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s Crushing Difficulty Conveys A World In Penance

Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally out, bringing an end to years of fervent online speculation that succeeded at both drawing more attention to the original game and admittedly annoying everyone else who wasn’t interested in the process. And perhaps unsurprisingly, after so much hype, it has already become a phenomenon, with an explosive launch that drew over 500,000 concurrent players on Steam.

So, how does this game, which became so unexpectedly big, square up against even larger expectations? Silksong isn’t a reinvention of what came before, but a product of honing, delivering nearly everything great about its predecessor but with a more confident, sure hand. Well, except for its difficulty, according to some.

The most obvious difference between this game and the first is that you play as Hornet instead of the Knight, a change that brings a new moveset and the loss of playing as a tiny little bug (you’re now a medium-sized bug). After a few upgrades in the opening hours, Hornet becomes nimble; she can dash, run, glide, mantle onto platforms, and perform a downward aerial strike that lets her bounce off objects and enemies to stay in the air. It all grants a sense of speed and options, a combination that makes it easier to dodge incoming blows and punish enemy attacks from full screen. These maneuvers also give you so much horizontal velocity that it’s easy to launch yourself into a pit of spikes. Basically, these tools are powerful, but they don’t automatically make things easy.

Where these elements really shine, though, is in the little nuances and game feel niceties. The dash comes out exceedingly quickly, and you can cancel it just as fast, allowing you to do things like run, switch directions with a jump, and then air dash in the opposite direction. You can cancel your forward momentum on a dime, allowing you to choose whether to perform a normal attack or the slower-to-start and longer-reaching stab attack, which can be executed mid-sprint. When climbing, you can jump in the middle of the mantling animation, allowing you to avoid hazards on a platform or slightly speed up traversal. Everything feels punchy and quick, whether it’s how rapid it is to save via a bench or truly granular details like how, after riding the best boy Bell Beast to perform a fast travel, you’re launched off its back, letting you instantly air dash and saving precious microseconds that you could be spent hitting guys with your needle.

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Hollow Knight Silksong difficulty

The level design emphasizes these abilities as well, with challenging platforming segments that delight in having you perform rapid sequences of downward thrusting attacks to bounce off several objects in a row—it’s quite tricky at first, but soon becomes second nature. In general, these opening hours are fairly unforgiving, with some heavy-hitter optional bosses and areas filled with difficult enemies who will almost certainly mug you for every penny.

But despite the imposing difficulty, the new mobility options offer even more avenues for skilled play. At one point, I was getting shellacked by a burly fire ant mini-boss who was clearly optional. I kept at it for far longer than I should have, until eventually these many failed attempts wore down my stubbornness. I’m glad that I left when I did, because when I returned for this fight later with the ability to dash, it almost felt like I was playing an entirely different game; Hornet’s sprint was perfect for weaving in and out of his massive strikes, letting her behave like a pesky insect as she wore down her opponent with repeated prods and stabs, making it quite clear just how substantial this new skill was. And it wasn’t just this fight, but those on the main path as well, such as one against the fast-paced fencer Lace, which resulted in a well-orchestrated duel that incentivized utilizing Hornet’s dashes and aerial strikes to seamlessly transition between offense and defense.

Honestly, though, the main element that made Hollow Knight special was less its action and platforming segments, but more the sprawling nature of its world design, where a false wall or random hole could lead to entirely unseen locales filled with fantastical sights. Thankfully, Silksong maintains that sense of wonder at discovering the secrets of this setting, with spontaneous trips down passageways leading to fresh biomes and new types of bugs that want to kill you. And once again, the background art and another moody score from Christopher Larkin conjure a sense of melancholy and curiosity towards this broken backdrop. Perhaps most impressively, though, these sights combine with the previously described tough-as-nails action to convey the game’s central theme: religious fervor. The pilgrims of Pharloom are most defined by their devoutness, something they take to uncomfortable extremes.

Silksong‘s story begins as Hornet is captured and brought to this land by members of its church. After breaking free, she decides to climb the same steps as Pharloom’s pilgrims on the way to the Citadel, hoping to find out why she’s being pursued and to put a stop to it. It probably goes without saying, but this narrative is quite critical of organized religion—or at least this particular fictional faith. Pharloom’s religious devotees flock to its peak, with the vast majority either dying grisly deaths or losing their minds along the way.

Then there’s the game’s currency, rosary beads. They’re used for everything from bartering with vendors to activating complex church machinery that’s borderline necessary to proceed. Specifically, you frequently need to slot rosary beads into a machine to access benches, which function as save points. On top of all this pseudo-extortion, you also come across an excruciatingly cheap shopkeeper who conflates trading him beads with paying for salvation. His words and the previously mentioned rosary-operated machines seem at least partially inspired by the Catholic concept of almsgiving, which, in short, was the notion that donating to the church would increase one’s chance of getting into heaven.

Specifically, almsgiving was a type of “indulgence,” a good deed that would lessen your sins. However, as the Catholic Church ratcheted up its emphasis on almsgiving during the Middle Ages, this would eventually draw ire from critics like Martin Luther. His criticism of the clergy selling plenary indulgences was a major part of his Ninety-five Theses, a work that is often credited for kicking off the Protestant Reformation—basically, in many people’s minds, including the guy who sparked one of the biggest schisms in the history of Christianity, this particular type of almsgiving is part and parcel with theocratic corruption.

The fact that the game takes place in a decrepit kingdom ostensibly ruled by the church, where pilgrims (in Catholicism, pilgrimage is another form of indulgence) die or lose their minds trying to ascend, as you are forced to sell a symbol of devotion to the very organization that’s supposed to help you worship, makes the narrative’s stance on this type of extortive organized religion fairly clear. These fees aren’t just a motif but also a significant burden on the player, who has to worry about having enough beads on hand to access basic functionality like saving in some of the later areas; again, the whole purpose of indulgences is to be a self-administered punishment for previous sins. And this pay-to-save functionality isn’t the only way the unforgiving nature of this setting is mirrored in the game’s difficulty; some of these bosses are crushing. Its predecessor certainly wasn’t an easy experience, especially when it came to its nightmarish post-game challenge arenas, but Silksong is hard up front and, at least from what I’ve played, only becomes more imposing as time goes on. It’s become a major point of contention, and the first place where the idealized version of this long-awaited game met its uncompromising realities.

On the one hand, it’s perfectly understandable why the game has received criticism for its difficulty, because as always, it would have been better if there were difficulty options, as this would help ensure more people could experience the game’s other high points; players have essentially already added that themselves with mods that add more lenient save points and decrease enemy damage. Personally, though (and I admittedly say this as someone who enjoys “masocore” games), these challenges feel tough but ultimately fair. Case in point, after getting slaughtered by the first major roadblock-style boss, who fittingly also assumes this role in the narrative as a judge who sorts out those who are “worthy,” I slept on my pummeling and was able to defeat them after considering what I was doing wrong. All of the bosses and foes I’ve faced thus far felt conquerable after a bit of rethinking my approach, which usually had to do with getting greedy with one too many slashes.

However, more than avoiding “cheap” tricks, the game’s crushing difficulty ties in neatly with its overarching portrayal of religious self-flagellation. A consistent theme throughout the first and second acts is that the goal laid out for the pilgrims by the Citadel is virtually impossible; the path to the peak is littered with corpses and former followers controlled by a power dubbed the Haunting. After defeating a certain boss, you open a door that clearly hasn’t been used in decades, implying that no one has successfully made this climb in a very long time; their path to a promised heaven inevitably ends in death. The road to this terrestrial “heaven” isn’t one that the flock is actually supposed to reach, but an impossible goal that causes suffering. Whether out of naivety or intentional self-destruction, the pilgrims worship a religion that demands every pound of flesh. In this way, it feels appropriate that Hornet’s journey is one that often feels similarly impossible, with imposing adversaries and swarms of rabid bugs making this climb an act of self-abasement.

While the game’s overriding stinginess in providing worthwhile optional upgrades or rewards for defeating its big bads (I’ve only received a single extra health pip and most of the equippable pins provide marginal benefits) is probably the place where this forced asceticism feels a bit overbearing, especially compared to Hollow Knight’s more openly gratifying progression, in general, the game’s difficulty feels less like poor tuning, and more like an intentional marriage of design and narrative theming; the punitive gameplay matches a punitive setting.

Just to make this clear, though, giving players the option to engage with this degree of punishment is a fair thing to ask, and as much fun as online gatekeepers enjoying telling those struggling to “Get Good,” folks who don’t want to be crushed to a fine pulp should be able to make their way through this experience as well—believe it or not, being good at a video game does not give you the high ground to be a jerk on the internet. Even if I personally think that an easier version of the game wouldn’t convey its core themes as well, I say that as someone experienced enough in this type of platformer to be able to engage with this climb.

Still, Hollow Knight: Silksong‘s imposing difficulty isn’t an accident. It’s not a mistake that you fight literal symbols of religious judgment who beat you with weapons fitting for an inquisition, as they send you to repeated deaths. It isn’t a fluke that you need to pay for the chance of salvation and to access basic functions like the ability to save. Difficulty is another lever that games can use to convey their ideas, and Silksong‘s thorned trials do just that.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.