Silksong's launch pulled in a lot of people who had never touched Hollow Knight. Team Cherry did say newcomers can start with this one and skip the first game.
That is true, and it is incomplete.
"You don't need to catch up" is a statement about the story barrier, not the difficulty barrier. Conflating those two is the single easiest mistake to make here. What follows contains no story spoilers. It is here to help you settle one question: are you the player this game is looking for?
First, the good news: it looks and sounds superb
You play Hornet, a lethal hunter, entering a kingdom ruled by silk and song and climbing toward its summit.
The hand-drawn art keeps the series' signature, but the key is far brighter than the first game. The opening moss caverns are a clean, wet green; not long after, the screen gets burned orange by moving lava. The visual contrast between regions is pushed hard, and the result feels closer to watching a well-made hand-drawn animation than to playing an indie platformer.
Christopher Larkin returns as composer. Ethereal while exploring, tight during fights, heavily situational — the immersion basically never drops.
On localisation: several languages had awkward passages at launch, and that criticism is fair. The saving grace is that this game does not carry much text; you spend the overwhelming majority of your time exploring and fighting, so the impact is limited, and Team Cherry has said revisions are coming.
The core system: silk cuts both ways
The biggest systemic change is that Silk replaces the first game's Soul.
A full spool heals you. It also powers your special abilities — and the trouble is entirely in that "also."
Soul was shared between healing and spells in the first game too, but the rhythm was looser. Silk is tighter. Every time you spend it on something like a silk spear, you are directly deducting a heal you might need. So every fight of any difficulty turns into live arithmetic: do I spend this on damage, or keep it alive?
Spool fragments raise your capacity, but not as fast as the enemies scale. That tradeoff runs through the entire game, and it is where the combat feel diverges most sharply from Hollow Knight.
Exploration: watch for suspicious walls
The map design is still full of things. Three practical notes for a newcomer:
One: when you see a cracked wall or something detonatable, hit it. Behind them are frequently chests of rosaries, shell shards, or an entire hidden route.
Two: when you are lost early on without a map, do not stand there re-treading the same three rooms. Try more paths and more platforms. You will repeatedly find that two areas which look half a map apart are one jump away from each other.
Three: when you have spare currency, unlock benches and buy maps first. Reason below.
Now the hard part: it is tougher than the original
I am reluctant to file this series under soulslikes, but Silksong's difficulty makes the label hard to avoid. And in preparing the heavy material for veterans, the studio was visibly less generous to newcomers.
First, the density of the platforming and spike hazards. Before you unlock the Wanderer's Crest, Hornet's down-attack is a forty-five-degree diagonal, which is far less forgiving than the first game's straight downward strike. Plenty of newcomers die at the bottom of a jumping section rather than to a boss. There is no clever way around this part. You practise.
Second, attrition now leads straight into an encounter far more often. A stretch of traps and flying enemies shaves off half your health, you think you have survived it, and it turns out to have been the appetiser before a boss. In sections like Hunter's March, benches are scarce and there are mechanisms waiting around them.
Third, some benches now cost money. Yes, really. The series' signature save point is, in places, something you pay rosaries to activate. For a player who is broke in the early game, that is real pressure.
Which is why the advice bears repeating: buy benches and maps first. Loose rosaries you have not banked disappear when you die. You can string them into a rosary chain at a shop and store it in your bag to protect the value, but when a rare bench shows up, taking it is always the safer play.
So who should actually buy it?
Silksong is Team Cherry doubling down on this series. Its map design can be taught as a reference case for the whole metroidvania genre, and it pushes the difficulty to a series high — in a sense it is a challenge letter addressed to returning fans and hardcore players.
Buy it if you played and liked the first game; if you like soulslikes; if you are a committed metroidvania player; if you are a regular at high-challenge platformers like Cuphead and Celeste. You will have an excellent time.
Think again if what you normally play is Mario or Sonic, and what you want is an hour of unwinding after work or school. This is probably not that.
Do not let the art style fool you. What is waiting is not a dreamlike kingdom to wander at leisure; it is a fairly punishing test of patience.
Deciding that before you buy is more dignified than deciding it at the refund page.
Sources and notes
This article contains no story spoilers; everything above concerns mechanics and level design that are publicly visible. The localisation complaints and the stated intention to revise them describe the situation at launch — check against the version you actually play. The note that the Wanderer's Crest changes the down-attack refers to the crest system, where different crests alter the moveset substantially; try them yourself once unlocked.
Image credit
In-game screenshots and official promotional art, copyright Team Cherry, reproduced here for illustrative purposes.
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