Alright, my thoughts on Silksong.
First: the game is an artistic triumph. I don't think people give enough credits to the Team Cherry guys for their ability to create fantasy worlds. As far as I'm concerned Pharloom is one of the most fascinating fictional places I've ever seen. It's completely unique too, being part dark fantasy part goofy cartoon bugs part steampunk and so on. A lot of its appeal also comes from the phenomenal OST and the blurry backgrounds hinting at colossal architecture and natural formations, making your imagination runs wild. The atmosphere is like nothing else on the market, some of the areas left me in awe and that's a 2D game with flash like graphics.
Gameplay wise Silksong excels too as they fixed one of the most common criticisms of the first game, the knight's pedestrian movement options. Hornet is much more fun to control, with crazy aerial mobility and far more granular ground movement as opposed to the knight's stiffer and more linear behavior. Because of the way the dash-into-run works you can fine tune your positioning much better and you'll obviously need it because the enemies have been updated too and are much more aggressive and fast. The new Metroid-style mantle makes basic platforming much more fluid and Hornet has a few cool hidden moves like a Mario 64 backflip or a very funny quick hop (jump and immediately dash after, almost like a P-link) that makes her look like some kind of rabid animal. Overall even if movement doesn't exactly reach the heights of Metroid Dread of Ori and the Will of the Wisps it's really not that far below these two references.
These new movement options are used to great effect with the platforming that is much more frequent and much better contextualized than in HK. I always found it a bit jarring that the first game turned into Super Meat Boy all of a sudden, seeing buzzsaws all over the place felt too abstract. Here the platforming sections always make sense in the context of the world, a lot like in Tropical Freeze for ex, and they're very often pretty demanding. Of course the main challenge comes from the combat, and I guess we need to talk about the difficulty. The game is insanely hard. I think it might be the hardest game I've played outside of the antiquated NES era titles like Bayou Billy or the first Metroid. I must have died hundreds of times. Everything hits for two damage and damage snowballs very frequently, enemy placement is sadistic and of course bosses have complex and ridiculously fast patterns. For the most part it's fair and very fun but there are obvious problems.
First, and the most unnacceptable for me, the pogoing is broken. There's a big problem with the hitboxes, where sometimes the sword hit won't register or Hornet will trade which is obviously a huge issue since as previously said everything does two hearts of damage. At first I thought it was a problem with my timing but no, I watched a couple of streamers who had the same issue. Secondly, the devs have apparently fallen in love with gank squads. The number of bosses with trivial patterns becoming a nightmare to fight because they constantly summon shitty flying adds that take forever to kill because even the most insignificant gnat has a hundred HP is aggravating. The core combat isn't designed for this sort of encounter and indeed it shines when it's one on one against an opponent with abilities roughly similar to Hornet's. Finally, the quality of the bosses is wildly inconsistent, but their difficulty also is. I repeatedly demolished bosses only to be stuck on the following one for an hour. This is a direct consequence of the game's structure and its overall design choices, and it highlights another pretty big problem, the glacial pace of Hornet's abilities acquisition.
In Silksong you'll sometimes have to wait for half a dozen hours before gaining a new core ability that significantly changes the gameplay and allows you to progress through the critical path. Not only that, but because the world is absolutely gigantic and the important rooms aren't designed to be strikingly memorable to make sure you keep them in the back of your head it becomes very hard to remember where to use this new ability to go further. These two things combined mean that I'll never agree with people who claim that Silksong, like Hollow Knight before it, is the new gold standard for Metroidvanias. It can never be that because it fundamentally gets the core of the genre wrong. But maybe it doesn't need to be the new gold standard for Metroidvanias. Maybe it's not even really a Metroidvania.
In fact I think it's more than that. I haven't focused on that aspect too much but I want to stress how monumental this game is content wise. This is an immense playing ground, filled with dozens upon dozens of enemies, quests, towns, NPCs, items, environmental narration, scripted events, minigames, easter eggs, multiple endings etc etc. You'll start exploring an area, break a wall and find another entirely new zone behind it, and later realize there's another breakable wall in the same area that hides another new part of the map. It's frankly mind-boggling how such a small team managed to create a game of this scale. This is why I say I don't even consider it a Metroidvania in the sense of a relatively compact, well paced, endlessly replayable game with a steady feeling of progression. Silksong is basically the 2D equivalent of these huge action-adventure/action RPG games that were so impactful these past years, titles like Breath of the Wild, Nier Automata, Elden Ring etc. I generally don't think of games that way, but it is insane that a game like that only costs 20 bucks.
And to me that's what Silksong is, a weird, sort of broken but fascinating title that references all the classics from the 2D golden age while evoking the best of ambitious AAA 3D games from the modern era. In fact to me Silksong is what would have happend if Nintendo didn't use the A Link to the Past/Ocarina of Time formula as the new standard for Zelda and instead kept making games like Adventure of Link. This is Silksong: a bittersweet, goofy, creepy, hard as nails, engrossing adventure in a marvelous world with some of the best gameplay in the 2D action platformer genre. It made me rage but I couldn't put it down, and even if I sometimes had mixed feelings about it now that I have beaten it I think it might be my favorite game of the year, tied with Donkey Kong Bananza.
9/10
