This article contains complete spoilers for Silksong. Finish the game first.
It took me eighty-five hours on console to reach one hundred percent.
If I had to compress the theme into one line, I would say this: it is about inheritance after everything has changed, and about being born again.
1. The crimson memory: that lift, and that sign
The most affecting stretch in the game is the crimson memory sequence.
You walk step by step into Hornet's interior and reassemble the fragments of how she grew up. I kept moving forward until a disused ascending lift and a sign pointing to a stag station came into view — and I physically flinched.
Before that moment I am not sure I had ever properly understood something about Hollow Knight: why, after crossing the savage, chaotic, spider-infested dark of Deepnest, the deepest point of it holds a place called the Distant Village. That name carries a stillness completely out of key with everything around it. And a good part of that relief came from exactly those two objects at the village entrance — the broken lift and the stag station sign. Seeing them meant you could get out of Deepnest and back to somewhere safe.
The crimson memory completes that feeling. The place holding Hornet's earliest memories is that same long-abandoned, long-forgotten Distant Village.
The scenes in that sequence compress her origin into a single line. Her birth mother is Herrah the Beast, leader of the Deepnest spiders, who made a bargain with the Pale King for her people's survival: she would bear him a daughter, and she herself would become one of the Dreamers holding the seal on the Radiance. Hornet is the product of that bargain, and her mother became a permanent seal not long after bearing her. She then grew up in the court of Hallownest, with the White Lady as her mother in name; her fighting technique came from the Hive, from Vespa.
She was in Hallownest long enough to watch the whole land go from flourishing to ruined, and to watch an orange plague spread through its dreams. Which is why, by the time she is dragged into Pharloom, the sense that she ought to do something about it is close to innate.
2. Shakra: following a teacher's footsteps to the end
You meet Shakra early. Her singing does the same thing that stag station sign does — it makes you feel safe.
A few lines of conversation and you learn she travels Pharloom drawing maps of every region, because she is following the route her teacher took. From then on, in every new area, you find the metal ring that signals her presence: both her signature weapon and a percussion instrument that rings out clean.
Shakra is close to a portrait of every pilgrim in the game. Pilgrims are ordinary and devout; they climb one step at a time and take the weather as it comes. Shakra is trained enough that Pharloom's hostility does not really dictate to her — and yet she too is chasing one person's footprints across an enormous world, trying to feel her way through what her teacher went through.
She finds the end of it in a corner of the world: a very quiet place deep in clean water. Pure water falls from above and washes over layered black rock. Her teacher stands peacefully on a stone in the middle of the falls, and that motionless body reads like the final answer to a question she spent her life asking. Everything that belonged to her ends here, and those who come after can only trace her steps and copy down what she understood along the way.
Meeting Shakra there, I think I arrived at something close to her state of mind. The few lines we exchanged were surplus to it.
Her pilgrimage is finished. For Hornet, and for the player, nothing is finished yet.
3. Mother and child: a motif inherited from Super Metroid
Play far enough and you notice how often mother-and-child pairings recur: Grand Mother Silk and Lace, the bell beast and its young, the great bone elder and the bone hopper. This is not coincidence.
Super Metroid, the foundation stone of the metroidvania genre, is built on exactly this motif. It picks up directly from the end of Metroid II: Samus is supposed to exterminate every Metroid on the target planet, but after killing the Queen and preparing to leave, a newly hatched Metroid takes her for its mother and circles her, chirping happily. Samus, normally cold and decisive, does not kill it. She takes it back to the ship.
That looks like an offhand beat and is actually the master stroke — it injects a current of warmth into a series whose default register is cold and lethal. People discussing Super Metroid today tend to talk only about its textbook level design and skip what it is actually about.
Silksong and Hollow Knight build a world with insects as its protagonists: civilisation tangled with wilderness, order colliding with chaos, flourishing cycling into decay. In a world like that, survival and reproduction are the base drives of everything alive. And empathy makes us project human feeling onto insects anyway, imagining their colonies as communities resembling ours.
That empathy makes it impossible to look at life with pure rationality — and that same irrationality is what gives art its depth. Both games' protagonists are women, and on this axis Silksong stands in the same line as Super Metroid: not as a deliberate statement, but as what follows naturally once the premise is set.
4. Lace: three meetings
Lace is a charming antagonist. The first time I met her I was caught immediately by that sly laugh and the elegance of her swordwork.
It happens in the Deep Docks, in thick heat, and her white cuts into the frame with a sharpness that is almost cooling. She appears early and her moveset is simple — very much the role Hornet herself played in Greenpath in the first game. Worth noting: Hornet back then was also the single bright red note in a screen full of green, pulling the player forward. From that first meeting I knew this was going to matter.
You cross blades with her three times, and every setting carries weight.
The first is the Deep Docks. The second is at the top of the Citadel, where she is feigning sleep in a field of dreamlike white roses, waiting, before dancing an elegant duet with Hornet. The third is below, in the abyss, where she has been blackened by the Void and stands on a sheet of still black water; with music heavy with inevitability, Hornet — carrying the conviction that Lace can still be saved — settles it.
By the time you reach that last fight, every grievance the previous dozens of hours produced resolves into something hard to name. Relief about the brutally steep early difficulty curve. Relief about the mid-game's various cruelties. Relief that a full, turbulent journey has arrived exactly where it should.
Lace is the thread in this story. A handful of key meetings stitch scattered details into a shape.
(One detail: if you manage to avoid that first contact in the Deep Docks, the first conversation is pushed to the border of Blasted Steps and Shellwood, or to Sinner's Road — meaning a full run can be completed with only two fights against her.)
5. The Citadel: what is underneath all that gold
Once through the Citadel gates you fall almost immediately into the filthiest factory at its base. You were looking at splendour a moment ago and now you are pressed into something oppressive. The drop is severe.
The further into the factory you go, the clearer it gets: the Citadel's prosperity runs on squeezing the labourers at the bottom. Hammering never stops. Toothed gears grind out an ugly noise. Every chair you can sit down on charges you, and standing up means paying again to sit back down.
Not just the factory. Read the stone tablets in the Sands of Karak to the Citadel's west and you learn that the sands were once a coral forest with water to spare; now there is nothing but moving sand and the greedy worms beneath it. To the east are the Putrified Ducts and Bilewater, where the music is genuinely beautiful — beautiful enough that you can hear resentment between the notes.
Connect the three and a picture forms: the Citadel takes Karak's water and discharges its waste into the ducts and the bilewater. Its magnificence stands on the death of two ecosystems.
And the Citadel itself has now fallen too. Silk-controlled husks wander its halls, choral singing still echoes down gilded corridors, the bathing pools still steam, and the great bell keeps calling pilgrims in from across Pharloom. The end of their lives' journey opens to them — and then they see what it actually is, and their faith comes apart. After the Void's incursion, the corridors fill with the sound of the sick.
Ocarina of Time is worth mentioning here. It showed players a maximal contrast using two worlds seven years apart: alive before, hellish after. Strong visual impact, and it hands the player a direct motive to put the world back. Hollow Knight and Silksong take the opposite route — they show you only the ruin, and let you glimpse the former splendour very sparingly. So you spend most of your time imagining the past out of scraps, and looking at the wreck in front of you.
The pleasure of the adventure is in the gradual uncovering. These two games take that principle about as far as it goes.
6. Seth, by the lake
The insect world is dangerous. The bug most in love with life may die because a beast walked into the village. The most reclusive hermit may burn out at an altar for the sake of the tribe's faith. The freest knight may fight to the last chapter trying to lift the curses of the world and part in tears from the companion at their side.
Before you take the Heart of Lenith, a guardian stands at the temple door: Seth. The music during that fight is far sadder than a boss theme has any need to be.
The character came from a Hollow Knight fan's creation — his design, his backstory, his boss moveset. That fan died of a terminal illness. Team Cherry put the character into the game as designed, and named him after its creator.
Beat him and he falls into the water and disappears.
But travel to Greymoor later and you meet him again. He says he has only just come into this world; he woke by a lake, does not know how he knows his own name is Seth, and finds the world full of interest, so he has decided to go and look at it.
That scene got me completely. Thank you to Team Cherry for a gentleness that clearly runs deep. They believe, and they make the player willing to believe, that the fan simply went on to a wider world. Inside a fictional one, he was given a second life, and a permanent one.
Last
There is far more I have not covered, and I do not think I have the ability to put every moment that moved me into complete sentences. This kind of thing you have to go and play.
Silksong's very sparse marketing had a lot of people convinced it had stalled out. As late as the end of 2024 people were speculating that so many years of silence could only mean internal trouble. We now know they were simply polishing it. The first game's success had already made the studio financially independent; they kept working detail by detail for years anyway, and then handed over the result.
Having developers like that, and games like this, is good fortune for the whole industry.
Sources and notes
This is a personal account written after finishing the game, with full spoilers. The account of Hornet's origins — born of Herrah, raised by the White Lady, trained in the Hive — is assembled from the crimson memory scenes together with established lore from the first game; the ordering and details of those memories admit other readings, and the community does not fully agree. Seth's origin as a memorial to a fan is something Team Cherry has publicly confirmed. The relationship between the Citadel and the water of Karak, the ducts and the bilewater is not stated outright in the game; it is my inference from the tablet texts and the regions' positions. Metroid II, Super Metroid and Ocarina of Time are referenced as comparisons and have no production connection to this game.
Image credit
In-game screenshots, copyright Team Cherry, reproduced here for illustrative purposes.
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