silksong

23 Oct 2025 - digitalily

A bit later than I’d originally hoped for, but as of a few weeks ago I finished my playthrough of Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game which has been anticipated for a little while to say the least.

I mostly kept away from all things Silksong prior to its release. I had seen the trailers as they came out, and seen the speculation surrounding every major gaming news event about whether a release date would finally be announced, but while I thought Hollow Knight was a great game, I didn’t end up getting too deep into the fandom, so while I definitely was beginning to wonder when this thing was ever going to come out, I was spared the main pain of the hype train. Getting the actual final trailer and the release date reveal was really fun then, and it was even more fun seeing the wider response to this- games that had release dates previously set get pushed back a few weeks so as to not get totally overshadowed by a release so large it broke several storefronts including Steam, which to me is absolutely wild.

There was definitely a bit of a learning curve with Silksong, and I found myself getting frustrated with the weird down slash angle and the notorious double damage sprinkled all over, but I came to find that the main problem wasn’t the game (though I have some nitpicks about balance in the end), but the fact that my controller which I was using over Blutooth had horrendous input lag. There’s a point in the game where you get a certain side quest to deliver an item across the map, and if you take damage, the time you have to do it is reduced, and if you fail, it’s back to the beginning. There was a particular jump about halfway through or so that I kept being unable to hit on my controller, until I had a thought. A week prior I had to fly across the country for a couple of days and had been playing the game on my Steam Deck on the airplane and was thinking ‘wow the Steam Deck’s controls feel so much better to use,’ but didn’t fully connect the dots until later, where I realized that it wasn’t the ergonomics of the controller that made it feel better, it was the 0 input delay. After switching to a wired controller then, I immediately cleared the side quest in question on my first try- after which I rushed to complain about the self inflicted pain I’d dealt with until now on Discord, during which I experienced a game crash that necessitated I run it again, which I also cleared immediately without issue. After that, I switched to just playing wired on my pc and it was a night and day difference. Combat felt so much smoother, and eventually closing out everything to 100% the game was a much more delightful process. A few bosses/arenas still took quite a few retries, but not having to account for lag made those experiences feel much more fair. The best part is that my original Hollow Knight run had something similar, in that I played most of the game on a fight stick before eventually relenting on some difficult challenge and switching to a normal controller. I guess for some reason I just can’t help but sabotage my own experience with these games.

Silksong nails its atmosphere, much in the same way its predecessor did, and the music is a huge part of this; the music for the Choral Chambers and Bilewater in particular are standout area themes for me. Seeing the world change over time as well as you complete more side quests and advance the story is also very satisfying- the journey of Sherma in particular is excellent for this. The final cutscene is also fantastic payoff from the first game. It’s a rare thing for a game to really live up to the hype and expectations, especially for a game that started as a DLC and has been in development for seven years. There was an interview released just before release where Team Cherry talked about the development process, and in essence just said that they were taking so much time because they were just genuinely enjoying the process of making the game that much. You can feel that, for sure. As I said previously though, there are nits I’m willing to pick- the way shards generally work for one, but these things are so minor in an otherwise exquisitely crafted game, they really don’t end up tarnishing the experience. All in all, I’m very excited to see what’s in store for Silksong in the future, and what Team Cherry will eventually follow it up with.

That’s all for now- ‘til next time!