There’s No Place for Serenity in Hollow Knight: Silksong

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | September 12, 2025 | 2:15pm

Video Games Features hollow knight: silksong

There’s No Place for Serenity in Hollow Knight: Silksong

Bellhart is meant to be a sanctuary. “This settlement welcomes all who step the holy path,” a sign reads before you set foot on its main hall. “May you ease your shell within, that your strength renewed can carry you higher.” But reality couldn’t be more different. Bellhart doesn’t welcome you with the needle drop of a grandiose orchestral score and the humming of its inhabitants. Instead, it’s their echoes of lament that engulf the hall. The people who methodically spent their lives tending to worn-out pilgrims longing for rest are roped in by silk weaves, dangling in the air. Their dry throats and sore bodies won’t allow for pleas of help, only a shared cacophony of dread and hopelessness.

“Haunted Bellhart,” reads the text on the screen. You pay a fee of rosary beads to activate a decrepit bench to rest and save your game. As you start to explore the town’s outskirts in search of the weaver behind this macabre display, every failed attempt brings you back to this bench and the sounds around it. In one instance, I saved the game on the bench and closed it. When I returned later that day, I was greeted with a black screen. Gradually, an image began to form, and I saw Hornet front and center, trapped by the same weaves as the people around suffocated her. No matter where you are, the haunting persists. The sanctuary of a save point is broken even without your actions.

Hallownest, the kingdom where Hollow Knight takes place, has no shortage of dread and tragedy. The first few hours are purposefully deceiving, masking the kingdom’s mistakes and their effects on the inhabitants by posing its presentation as yet another action-adventure game. While some of the initial areas are eerily silent and devoid of color, others are the complete opposite. It’s a balanced mix that pushes the player to give in to comfort. Even amidst constant fighting and tricky platforming sections, the ambiance leads to a strange serenity. It’s only during the second half of the game (which can vary wildly depending on the routes you take) that Hallownest begins to pull the curtain. You begin to feel pity for the “foes” you encounter, most of them still bound to a sense of duty, serving a decaying kingdom. An important fight culminates with an enemy hurting himself, fighting against an ancient sickness that has plagued everyone. After one point, the starting areas are no longer familiar, tranquil corners and corridors to sprint by. The enemies succumb to this plague, too, and the whole area gains a newfound hostility that also has a bittersweet underlying subtext.

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Hollow Knight: Silksong is constantly playing around this subversion, haunting its own sense of serenity from the early stages of its story. After you complete the first main objective, which tasks you with ascending to the Citadel, the main entryway is an elevator. With gold ornaments and a gargantuan scale that takes up most of the screen, you step in and hit the lever. It begins to ascend, the rays of light coming from above providing a moment of respite to exhale. The climb, however, suddenly turns into a descent. The elevator moves downwards and gets repeatedly stuck, and after hitting the lever again, you break it. A whirring sound accompanies you as the machine plunges into the depths below. The promise of ascension, both metaphorically and figuratively, is immediately broken.

Pharloom, the kingdom where Silksong takes place, is vastly different than Hallownest. It’s one that’s interwoven by religion, with Hornet’s journey being possibly the most rebellious pilgrimage happening. In a way, it informs the game’s difficulty with a sense of penance. You’re forced to spend rosary beads at every turn to unlock benches and acquire tools and incomplete maps. Moreover, you’re constantly challenged. Almost every area I’ve transited so far has had an arena room with waves of enemies trying to stop Hornet’s venture. The environments themselves, with their difficult platforming and abundance of traps, also feel hostile.

But Silksong’s subversions play a different role. They aren’t there to add to the difficulty or to jump scare the player. Rather, Silksong in its entirety feels haunted. The further you plunge into Pharloom, the more you want to leave. But Hornet can’t. You can actually take a path west even before the end of Act 1 and reach the edges of Pharloom. The caverns from where you were brought here by force are wildly open. Currents of wind make Hornet’s red dress weave. Yet, she firmly stops in place when you get closer. “Something at this kingdom’s height still hungers for me,” Hornet says. “Were I to flee now, I would again be pursued. Until I find the source of that hunger, and slay it, I will not be free.”

Making progress in Silksong requires determination. Stick with it long enough, and you’ll be rewarded for your efforts, trading in frustration for fleeting, euphoric satisfaction. With enough time and practice, it’s possible to get past every hurdle. But this more mechanical challenge is almost superfluous. Silksong places its attention on its setting, a decaying place left forgotten, driven only by empty dogmatic promises and the goodwill of the few left. As the player, we decide when Hornet’s journey begins and where it stops for a break. But moments such as the curtain pull of Bellhart evoke a newfound uneasiness; there’s no place for serenity, and the only traces of hope are barely functioning, falling to their knees at the slightest nudge. Failed combat attempts are nothing compared to how the kingdom can wear down its visitors, gradually pushing them to let their guard down and give in, becoming another thread embedded in Pharloom’s history.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.