In the Flesh: Hollow Knight: Silksong

The first thing anyone’s going to think about Silksong is that it’s hard. Gruelingly hard. Punishingly, brutally, relentlessly hard. Rush or fuck up your timing against even the simplest enemies and the game won’t just rap your knuckles, it’ll break your fingers. Taking a boss on the first try happened to me only twice during my hundred-hour playthrough, both times purely due to a stroke of luck. The learning curve begins about where Hollow Knight left off, explained by Team Cherry as a mechanical representation of the fact that the player character, Hornet, is significantly faster and more experienced than the first game’s nameless protagonist. Once you figure out the demanding pace of the game’s combat, that feeling comes across in spades. Hornet is swift, mobile, deadly, and precise, and mastering her skillset transforms Silksong from a frustrating punishment box into a kind of extended acrobatic dance with death. There’s an incredible satisfaction in touching that feeling.

But there’s another purpose to the game’s already widely remarked-upon difficulty. Pharloom, the broken and silk-haunted world in which Hornet’s adventure is set, is falling apart. Possessed bugs and wild insects kill pilgrims on the road and maraud openly through settlements. The halls of the mighty citadel toward which those same pilgrims make their progress are dead and empty, echoing with the songs of ghosts. You are the last remnant of a dead master race, the Weavers, which betrayed its creator, the otherworldly Grand Mother Silk, and was in turn hunted down and largely destroyed by her. This conflict rests on a bedrock made up of the compacted remains of countless others. Crust King Khann’s militaristic court, the dark magic wielded by the reclusive slug witches, Skarrsinger Karmelita’s legions of brutal ants. Pharloom has known war for as far back as the historical record goes. Why would life here be easy?

It’s a creative decision which asks a lot of the player, but the world itself is more than enough reward. Lovingly hand-drawn bug people created by artist Ari Gibson populate a landscape of strange, idiosyncratic structures and hidden caverns, of early industrial-era artifice and obscure religious sects. The veiled bugs of the Citadel are wonderfully iconic, their world a labyrinth of filigree and mirrored marble, tattered cobwebs and gilded machinery. The Sands of Karak are likewise realized with loving attention to detail, a desiccated ghost reef infested by biting anisoptera and the ghosts of savage crustacean warriors. Nothing is phoned in. Nothing is marking time or padding out the game. Where else are you going to see a court of birdlike junebugs pass sentence on a half spider, half caterpillar wandering ronin?

Composer Christopher Larkin’s ethereal score and the game’s wonderfully odd and sibilant nonsense-speak voice acting further layer this sense of the strange and the unknown. Distinctly voiced characters bark short phrases in a garbled conlang. Bells boom and clang. Gates rattle. Machinery groans and grinds. Pharloom is alive and moving even in its death throes. An early moment in which Hornet emerges from a buried chapel to the sight of dozens of insects taking flight from a secluded field inspires such a burst of joy and excitement that even the game’s most melancholy corners feel tinged with hope. Unlike Hollow Nest, which includes very few living characters and ends on a decidedly bleak note, Silksong is concerned with the question of the future. Will Hornet rule over the ruins of Pharloom? She has the instinct for it, she confesses. Will she step aside and let others rebuild? Will they be any wiser than the Citadel’s administrators who greedily stepped in to replace the Weavers and fell victim to the siren song of eternal life by way of silk?

This feeling of hope persists through the murderous final boss fight of the game’s secret third act, in which Hornet first defeats and then saves the life of a void-haunted Lace, another of Grand Mother Silk’s creations. Silk herself grants Hornet the last of her power to give the two bugs a chance to escape, a nonverbal change of heart which might be read as surrender in the face of the future’s inevitability or else a spark of newfound understanding — in the wake of Lace’s intervention to free Hornet in an earlier encounter — that her creations are not her extensions, but her children, and their lives are their own to live. Whatever the cause, there is a quiet grace in it as exciting in its way as any of the game’s showpiece boss fights or fiendish platforming gauntlets, and as discipline and silent observation will see the dedicated player through Silksong’s most brutal challenges, so will the game’s story reward patience, contemplation, and analysis.