#Hollow knight silksong playable demo full#

I couldn’t imagine how that would even be possible before I tried it for myself - and, frankly, I would have been pretty okay with just more Hollow Knight. There are a million questions that I couldn’t even begin to get answers to in what I played.īut what I do know is that the framework I saw in this demo has set Silksong up with a chance to surpass the original. Obviously there’s a lot more to what makes the first game great than just the combat, and if its map is a letdown or the bosses just aren’t that interesting then it could, of course, still fall short. So here’s my bold claim: Hollow Knight is one of my favorite games ever, but I think Silksong has the potential to be even better. It’s a gorgeous game and even just the two areas I saw have me hungry to discover more - with teases to a still nuanced but slightly more explicit story now that your protagonist can actually speak. Bright green bushes, red hot lava, more variation in backgrounds, and a brand new cast of enemies to discover (and get killed by). The world, one of my favorite parts of Hollow Knight, also seems more rich with detail and more vibrant with color. And those tweaks to common complaints about Hollow Knight don’t stop at combat - as far as I can tell, you don’t drop your money on death this time around making it a little less punishing, and there’s more nuance to your abilities now that your options beyond the basic swing don’t all use the same magic meter (I really like those new kunai).

It feels like a direct response to the slower, less agile nature of the original, taking what was great about that game and not being afraid to seriously change it to fix its inherent limitations. You can flow through Silksong at lightning fast speeds as a result.

#Hollow knight silksong playable demo full#

Being able to heal so much so quickly means low health moments are make-or-break opportunities where you could easily swing back into full force, but you need to get hits and fill that bar entirely to do so. Comparatively, Silksong’s feel like proper duels. Hollow Knight’s boss fights could sometimes feel desperate, trying to find any safe moment to heal and knowing you were near doom while at low health. It created constant moments of tension where aggression was the only way to survive. That rework had drastic repercussions on how I played - ones that ultimately made its fights feel a bit more strategic than before.

That’s an insanely powerful upgrade, but it also uses all of your magic meter (a spool of thread in Silksong) and can only be used at all if it’s full. Instead of the long charge to heal a single hit point at a time like its predecessor, Hornet’s heal is almost instantaneous and refills three hits at once. But the single most impactful change was her heal.