Hollow Knight Silksong Review: My First Trip To Pharloom
I came to this Hollow Knight Silksong review without ever setting foot in Hallownest. I played souls-like games before, but this is the first game that sat unplayed in my library for years. So, Pharloom is the only kingdom I know, and Hornet is the only bug I have ever controlled. The Silksong difficulty players keep arguing over hit me with zero muscle memory to soften it.
Team Cherry built a sequel that assumes you already speak the language, and I had to learn every word of it from the first bell. I picked Hollow Knight: Silksong up well after launch and saw the credits without ever feeling like an expert.
Below, you'll find what the climb through Pharloom feels like when you arrive with nothing.
Hollow Knight: Silksong Review Summary
Hollow Knight: Silksong launched on 4 September 2025 and expects competence from minute one, with no difficulty slider to soften it.
The first four or five hours are the filter. Plenty of early enemies hit for two masks off a five-mask bar, benches sit far apart, and Hornet's toolkit is nearly bare.
Once the crests open up, the game splits into several different games. Reaper, Wanderer, Beast, Witch and Architect each rewire her needle and her tool slots.
Bilewater and Sinner's Road are the two stretches I would cut, and obscure quest triggers gate more progress than they should.
Team Cherry has the free Sea of Sorrow expansion lined up for 2026 and has not named a date.
Pharloom Taught Me Through Punishment
Do you need to play Hollow Knight before Silksong?Well, My first hour on the map was humiliating. I died to Moss Mother in the Ruined Chapel three times before I understood that mashing the needle gets Hornet killed and that her downward slash is a real attack and not decoration. Nothing tutorialises this. The Marrow drops you into a bone tunnel full of skulls, Bone Bottom gives you a bench and a wishwall, and the rest is on you to work out.
Double damage is the part first timers feel hardest. Hornet starts on five masks, basic bugs take one of them and the bulkier ones take two, so three mistakes in a corridor end a run that began fifteen minutes ago. Skull Tyrant caught me in that loop for an entire evening.
Something clicked around the Deep Docks. I stopped treating each room as a corridor to survive and started treating it as a puzzle with a correct order, clearing the ranged bugs first and using the ledge grab to reset spacing. Lace was the fight that confirmed it. She punishes greed, rewards patience for about four seconds, then punishes patience too, and beating her felt earned in a way no boss in a modern game has felt for me.
I still think the opening gate is too tight. A newcomer has to absorb the movement, the healing economy and the enemy damage at once, with the best tools locked behind the wall. Plenty of people I know put it down in the Marrow and never came back.
Hornet Turns Movement Into The Reward
Hornet moves like nothing else I have played. She sprints, wall jumps, double jumps, grapples to hook points, glides, grabs ledges and heals in mid-air, and every one of those verbs arrives with a room built to teach it. Getting from a bench to a boss door stops being travel time and becomes the part of the game I would replay on purpose. Mount Fay's icy climb reads as a platforming set piece first and a combat arena second.
The healing design is what sold me on the combat. Silk fills as you land hits, and binding spends it to restore three masks at once. Running away to recover does nothing for you, so a bad fight turns into a hunt for one safe opening. That single rule makes Hornet aggressive in a way her predecessor apparently never was.
Bellways carry you between the main hubs once you find them, and the Bell Beast hauls you around like a very patient dog. Fast travel opens later than I wanted and the network has gaps, so backtracking on foot is part of most sessions. Walking the old routes is how you spot the doors your new tools have opened.
Crests Let Me Rebuild My Hornet
Crests are the system that turned this from a game I respected into one I loved. Each crest changes Hornet's needle attacks outright and hands her a different arrangement of red, blue and yellow tool slots. Reaper gives her wide sweeping swings and pulls extra silk from kills. Beast trades finesse for life stealing aggression, and Architect spins the needle like a drill and lets you craft tools from shell shards.
Swapping crest is closer to swapping class than tweaking a loadout. I ran Reaper through the middle act for the silk generation, then moved to Witch for its reach against bosses that kept me at arm's length. Memory Lockets buy you extra slots, so the later builds get silly. I finished with a red slot loadout built around thrown pins.
Tools are the other half of that equation, and they are what saved my Act 2. Throwing pins and bombs refill at benches at a cost in shell shards, so an offensive build carries a running cost and a reason to keep clearing rooms. Once I understood that shards are ammunition rather than savings, my whole relationship with the economy changed and I stopped hoarding.
The bosses respond to all of it. Cogwork Dancers, Trobbio, Father of the Flame and the Last Judge each hit differently depending on what you brought, and a wall that looks impossible with one crest can crumble with another. Searching the map and learning a pattern get you past a fight here, and the crests are where that promise lands.
Wishes Keep Pharloom From Sprawling
Pharloom is enormous and the map works on Hallownest's old rules. Shakra sells you the chart for each area, and until you buy it you are drawing the place in your head. Arriving somewhere unmapped is the only time a modern game has made me pay attention to landmarks.
Wishes are the quest layer, posted on wishwalls in Bone Bottom, Bellhart and Songclave and tracked in the Tasks menu. Some are small errands. Others run across three regions and tie into characters like Garmond and Zaza, who keep turning up in places they have no business being. They gave my sessions a rhythm that aimless wandering would not have, and clearing a wishwall before moving on became my routine.
The system's weak point is what it tells you. A handful of the requirements that gate the late game are never explained, and I hit the Citadel with no idea which NPC thread I had left half finished. A single line in the Tasks menu would have fixed it.
Two areas dragged. Bilewater's poison water and Sinner's Road's trap corridors both stretch a solid idea past the point where it is fun, with long walks back and enemies designed to chip away at you. Team Cherry has patched at the edges of that pain, and patch 1.0.29926 on 18 March 2026 cut the Last Judge's death explosion from three damage to two. The structural stuff stayed as it was.
Is Hollow Knight Silksong Worth Buying Right Now?
Yes, with one condition: give it five hours before you judge it. Everyone I know who quit did so inside that window, before the crests opened. If you want one that treats you like an adult and rewards you for it, nothing else in the genre operates at this level.
The state of it is excellent. Over 7 million copies had sold by December 2025, and the version you install now is stable across the PC, PlayStation, Xbox and both Switch generations. It is on Game Pass too, the lowest commitment way to find out whether the opening wall is your kind of wall.
Newcomers to the series lose nothing by starting here. Hornet's arc makes sense without Hallownest, and the callbacks read as flavour. If you want the game outright, Steam gift cards cover it. The free Sea of Sorrow expansion is worth factoring in too, since Team Cherry has it down for 2026 with new areas, bosses and tools and no date attached yet.
FAQs About Hollow Knight: Silksong
Final Words
Silksong explains almost nothing and trusts you with almost everything. No difficulty options, no waypoint arrows, no map until you buy it. That trust is why the good moments hit so hard, and it is the same reason a chunk of players bounce off before the game shows them anything.
Feeling outmatched in the Marrow is the intended experience, so read that as encouragement. Hornet gets faster, meaner and far more flexible than she looks in hour one, and the version of her you finish with barely resembles the one you start with.
Sea of Sorrow is the next thing on my calendar. A free expansion from a studio this small, on top of a base game carrying 43 bosses, is an absurd proposition. If it lands with the density of everything around it, Pharloom becomes a place worth returning to.
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