A game about bugs, where your a bug that fights other bugs. The only thing that really bugs me is how long it took for this buggy little bug of a game to finally bug its way onto my screen. 10/10 - No software bugs, just actual bugs.

Crashing entire steam for the first 5 minutes after launch is crazy

Trying to buy this game on release day was the worst and most painful, two and half hours long edging session in my entire life... It was worth it.

We actually got Silksong before GTA 6 A minute of silence in honor of all fans who didn't live to this moment

team cherry one-upping every other silkpost by actually releasing the game

This game is full of bugs... and they're kicking my ass It's really, really good

Lucky enough to buy and install the game before the servers crashed...

Silksong today.

The game is woke right out the gate. Also please add a patch for more LGBTQIA representation.... Such a shame.

I wanted to write a positive review, but instead of going straight down my mouse went 45 degrees to the right and I accidentally switched the review to negative

Team Cherry typed "Silksong" into the patch notes of reality and rage-quit the timeline. Since then:

• I've graduated college.
• Elon Musk renamed Twitter and then drove it into a ditch.
• The Queen died.
• COVID came and went like a Dark Souls boss fight nobody wanted.
• I changed GPUs three times.
• My nephew was born, learned to speak, and now mocks me daily.
• Skyrim was ported to a smart fridge.
• NASA found water on Mars.

Reality finally patched.

After so many years of waiting, it's finally here. Everything feels just as good as the first game. this game is still full of bugs

Disappointed in the lack of hornet sex scenes

What happened with the launch was dangerous and unacceptable and can NEVER be allowed to happen again. It is up to all of us to leave negative reviews on this game to send a message.

team cherry replaced my pillows with bugs and set fire to the fridge DO NOT PLAY

No matter who you are — Denier, Doubter, Accepter, Believer... In the end, we've all won No more silkposts No more silksanity Silksong is real Silksong is here! Shoutout to DSN, you will never be forgotten

I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it I'm silking it

Its a lie, silksong is still not real.

Insert 80 rosaries to get a positive review

Review part 5 at 20 hours, after cogworks in act 2: I will change the way for the reviews now, simply adding or removing positives/negatives depending on how they changed for me on the run. Again, thank you for deciding to read the "negative" side of the reviews. I want this to be a good overview/insight for any interested players, to hear more about the game. Progress: https://imgur.com/a/nnIzjUu still a lot left to see, excited for my new mask Positive: - the game looks amazing, definitely the strongest aspect about Hollow Knight - combat feels fantastic, Hornet is good to navigate and that increases depending on what moveset you choose - the areas, most at least, look solid to great in general too, each has their own nice touch - a nice touch that Hornet can talk - NPCs are more fleshed out, gained more personality - The tools are a great new gimmick that make the combat more fun, just takes its time to get used to them - The crests are a neat idea, even if at the cost of the pins for more charms. You need to get comfortable with the change from HK, they’re not here to increase your combat abilities. At least most won’t - The explorations with all its abilities feels really good, everything is neatly connected, the quick runbacks from area to area are smoothly integrated which makes them even more fun - Love the way they handled the map for the Citadel, in addition it’s fairly creative to add another travel option in there to make it more convenient. - The achievement bosses have all been fun to fight so far, their concepts and movesets allow for exciting fights - The limited benches are gone again, thanks god - The second needle upgrade is the most crucial one I would almost say, that point of the game is fairly far in (after Cogwork), but the damage is more reliable. Negative: - Money is still a thing I consider a problem at this point of the game, although you can debate whether the problem is the game itself or the way you prefer to play. I usually want the stuff I can get, being limited is not too enjoyable for me. The enemy bead drops slightly increased, my old spot gave me around 30 beads per 20-30 secs, the new one 64 per min (depending on how fast I get to clear the enemies). It is good that we get “increased” drops as we progress, but the shop prices skyrocket damn hard in comparison. Still, it’s a problem that literally everything costs money. - The areas seem to have gotten more consistent with making their enemies stronger, past the drastic change to having basically all mobs deal boss damage. Still, it is unreasonable to have all mobs deal 2 masks damage - The game is overcrowded with flying mobs that are based on ranged attacks. Most of the time you'll be forced to kill those if you want to explore/progress properly without eventually dying to a mass following you, yet it's taking just as much time to kill them IF the AI decides to fly down for once. Terrible to fight against, slowing down the entire experience. Don’t give them ranged attacks - Every boss deals 2 masks damage, the Act 1 boss even has a move to deal 3 masks, and overall that would still be fine if most kits wouldn’t be overloaded at times. Give them at least a cooldown on their attacks so you have a proper chance to breathe - It’s something you won’t necessarily think about at first, but the non-existent drops from bosses, especially frustrating ones, feel like a punch in the face as those fights don’t seem to contribute anything for you at all. Yes, some guard new mechanics etc, but it wouldn’t have hurt to have them drop at least some beads to make the gathering on those more consistent and the fight itself less punishing. A reward doesn’t hurt - Talking about healing, I think it is great that you're able to heal up to 3 masks with one heal, but the requirement to have a full silk bar is such a drastic limitation that it increases the combat difficulty against most enemies automatically. The fights get a lot more riskier. Taking into consideration how long it takes to fill the entire silk, a boss battle will oftentimes turn into an uncomfortable experience. Losing your silk on a failed heal attempt is simply unfair - I still consider the first needle upgrade to be disappointing. The damage increase is barely given, practically not existent. You remained weak while every enemy gets stronger and stronger - Same with the masks. I found a total of 4 mask pieces in the entire 11 areas I cleared. After 10 hours at best, obtaining a 6th mask is absolutely useless. Most enemies deal 2 hearts, bosses do either way, you’re still a 3-hit. We remain weak nonetheless. 20 hours in I’m one piece away from the 7th mask, praying to find one. - As nice as the Crests are, you're awfully limited with your build in this game which removes any possibilities to feel an actual difference in your game. I consider the limitation as annoying the more charms I get, I am practically forced to run the charms that I consider as crucial forever. - As much as I love the tools now, it feels weird to me that most of your damage is depending on them. The poison charm + any pouch upgrade you can get act as a huge gamechanger, lacking them in a fight can be fairly annoying. I wouldn’t really consider this a negative at all though, you just have to really really get used to them. And have enough shards on your boss attempts, in case you die too often. - Negative effects from certain areas are such a pain in the ass, don’t want to go into all of them as it’s too much. Bilewater… - Creating a flying enemy that throws granades with the range of a nuke, while immune to them, sure sounded great What can I say in the middle of Act 2? Combat with Hornet is fun, a lot of the areas are beautiful, the fast pace is really something that helped out Hollow Knight a lot here. The exploration is genuinely fun a lot of times, the same for the backtracking. A lot of enemies seem to be more balanced than prior ones, the huge damage and solid tankiness still persist though. The money is a frustrating matter, it is miserable that we have to pay for everything and the drastically increasing prices don’t make it better. Suffering a 3-hit death after 20 hours is still fairly demotivating, depending on where you are at, but at least your own damage finally gets a huge buff. The Final Boss of Act 1 is absolutely amazing, the first area afterwards can be fairly fairly annoying, but the area afterwards (Citadel) is awfully well-designed, making the exploration of that area great in general. The boss there is just as great. Nonetheless, Hollow Knight should not be a Dark Souls, even if that's basically the same fan group. Exploration at a comfortable pace with challenging but fairly designed fights should be the goal, not turning every early-game boss and common enemy into a similar experience of HK mid-late, without the resources. The fun is there, I enjoy it, but the frustration at game design and how things are handled is at times too big, making me question what they tested before release. I do have fun, but I couldn’t recommend this game with a good feeling at heart. It’s too punishing of an experience for that I shifted the review to a docs, continuing with part 5 (middle act 1) due to character limit on Steam. Every part will be visible in the Docs for a full read on the experience of the game from beginning to end, while the review section here will serve for the current point. Thanks for reading, enjoy https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D9BhtWLiOmUt0CSbIkUEEGx4jCeN-9zbjku-QAxDjW8/edit?usp=sharing

Don't look at the bad reviews just buy it

Game is full of bugs, but they're cute. 10/10 Goty right here

AI slop

To preface: I beat everything in Hollow Knight including P5. I also have not gotten stuck on a single boss so far, these are just my thoughts. Team Cherry very clearly got lost in the sauce for 7 years with no meaningful feedback from actual gamers instead of pro Hollow Knight players and doubled down on everything that dragged the original game down. Instead of a lovely curving difficulty that teaches you along the way, you immediately get butt blasted. Not with engaging new enemies with fun mechanics. Oh no, Team Cherry decided to up the difficulty by literally just increasing the damage of every enemy and hazard in the game. It’s the absolute laziest way to increase difficulty. It’s like they saw the top 0.1% of people beating P5 with all bindings hitless and said “yeah this will teach them” A lot of the bosses feel fair but at the same time they feel like they have been padded to artificially extend the time you play and further increasing the punishment for making a mistake. Your starting weapon feels weaker than the starter in hollow knight, every boss in the game has 3 phases now and 10 moves. If that wasn’t enough for you then they also occupy a tiny arena and spawn multiple minions that themselves take up half of the arena and ALSO deal just as much damage as the boss. These minions they spawn make primal aspids look like jellyfish. The run backs. Instead of streamlining the game and making the mechanics that of an actual metroidvania, Team Cherry said nah, you have to run back 5+ rooms full of enemies that two hit you, full of difficult to navigate hazards that two hit you, just to get to a boss that two hits you and so you spend more time running than actually learning. There are some, albeit optional, platforming sections still in act 1 that rival the regular path of white palace in levels of frustration. If Silksong hoped to ever draw in new players, it will not succeed this way. Even though this game has more benches than the original, this game is so expanded it doesn’t feel like it. They are sparse and some even kill you if you sit on them. Some even cost money every single time you sit on them and money is sparse in this game. Even though I haven’t gotten stuck on a boss for more than a short amount of time, most of my time has spent feeling bored, annoyed or frustrated. The only time I ever felt that way in the original game was in places like P5 where my time was seriously disrespected and this game has doubled down in every location. If you have a job, this game will laugh at you and waste any free time you have on pure tedium rather than letting you just learn engaging boss fights. Team Cherry also decided that removing I frames would be another good "difficulty spike" which results in the same enemy hitting you with multiple instances of the same attack. What in the original game would only deal 1 mask of damage to you now deals 4 masks to you in this game. And by multiple instances I mean some attacks literally lock you in place and you have to eat the multiple hits. Some bosses even do 3 masks of damage to you. Wow, 3 masks? You shouldn't have, you're spoiling us! If the only meaningful way that you could make the game more difficult was purely through numbers then you should've either not bothered at all or gone back to the drawing board. It seems like they wanted to 1 up literally everything that the original game had and in doing so has shot itself in the foot. The new charm system is also just lame and boring. Compass still takes up all your space? I know they want you to get lost but it just really takes the cake. To sum up, Team Cherry decided artificial difficulty, time padding, run backs worse than dark souls 1 and disrespecting the player’s time was the best move for their 7 year in the making game. Perhaps if they had communicated with the community whatsoever in that period they might have avoided this. There are only 3 total playtesters credited for Silksong which shows just how little feedback they received and I imagine the privilege was only given to the most hardcore HK players which has skewed the difficulty into an unhealthy direction. If your only response to my valid criticisms is “git gud” or “skill issue” then I am going to assume you cannot read above a 4th grade level and do not have the capacity to engage in meaningful conversation. There are many more flaws but I don’t have the time to type the rest of them up. The game is obviously beautiful, Hornet is a cool character and I want to experience more but honestly? I don’t know if I can be bothered. Quite simply, the core gameplay loop is more annoying than fun. I have to add one more point - taking 2 or even sometimes 3 damage from environmental hazards like spikes and saws. A metroidvania game, where the main purpose of the genre is to explore, is literally punishing you for trying to do what is the very core of the genre and this game is. It literally tells you "hey, don't go down this path and see if there's a cool new item here because I will kill you in 2 hits and you'll have to run back for five minutes". It is literally a betrayal of its own roots. Imagine if in HK you were doing path of pain and you could only take two hits before it sent you back to the beginning. It is absurd to expect the majority of players to be okay with this.

6/10 mid game, combat is stale. at least it supports ultrawide... I'd rather play RDR2 tbh even after 3 hours of gameplay I still see RDR2 far better.