Hollow Knight: Silksong - We Played It! | gamescom 2025

I finally played Hollow Knight: Silksong. No, I don’t mean to brag, but instead find myself having to type it out just to convince my eyes that it actually happened. Yes, it may have only been for around 20 minutes, but the long-awaited sequel shows little sign of disappointing.

During my demo at gamescom 2025, I was faced with a choice of two areas to play in: Moss Grotto or Deep Docks. Of course, I was going to try both, but first went for Moss Grotto — based on nothing apart from green being my favourite colour — which turned out to be the right decision. This sunlit grassy zone appears to be the very beginning of Silksong, as I fell into it following a brief cutscene in which a caged Hornet (the playable princess-protector protagonist) breaks free from the metal wagon she’s held captive in by collapsing the bridge it’s being paraded on. Developer Team Cherry seems keen on immersing us straight back into the world of Hollow Knight right from the very beginning, teasing lore via a passage of Conductor Romino's Pharloom Folly.

As for Moss Grotto itself, it felt very much like a (re)introduction to the core mechanics of Hollow Knight. A mixture of rudimentary platforming and simple battles was littered across its grassy floors in a short but sweet section of Silksong’s presumably sprawling labyrinth of a world. It all ended with a boss fight against a large queen-bee-like insect that attempted to lock me in her lair. Moss Mother gave me little boss bother, though, dispatching them by unlocking that long-dormant Hollow Knight muscle memory as I leapt over darting diagonal attacks and evaded crumbling rocks falling from the sky. It was action platforming 101, but still felt incredibly satisfying.

I then swiftly moved onto Deep Docks, which turned out to be an entirely different proposition. Tools such as kunai, which can be thrown horizontally to pierce foes, were added to my arsenal, along with skills such as a familiar dash ability. Things naturally get more complex with more items to juggle, which is reflected in Deep Docks' level design that comprises a maze of clanking metal elevators and the numerous semi-hidden levers that operate them. I may have only spent a handful of minutes there, but I could already see myself getting hopelessly lost without the aid of one of Cornifer’s ever-valuable maps.

Upon unlocking a boss arena, I was confronted by an enemy of far greater threat than any I had encountered yet. Lace, a balletic white insect, not too dissimilar in look to Hornet herself, dazzled me with intricate combos delivered at a speed my poor brain could not compute quickly enough. Defeated, I moved on, knowing this would be a battle for another day and not one I particularly wanted the dozens of people waiting in the queue behind to witness me losing again and again.

While it's too early to gauge the overall difficulty of Silksong, the jump up in this later area was noticeable, with enemies capable of far more than simple prods and darts. I usually welcome added complexity and evolution of combat when it comes to sequels, so I have no great issue here. I just hope that in totality, fights won't become too tiresome with exploration and progress being halted too often. Discovering the secrets of Hollow Knight's world was maybe the purest of its joys to me; I wouldn't want Silksong to feel like running into a brick wall too often.

There are concessions to make you feel more powerful compared to the original, though. Health regain is now divorced from skills, meaning you can throw those kunai liberally without having to sacrifice a potential life-saving heal. Attack is still the best form of defense, echoing some of my favourite systems from the likes of Control, Doom Eternal, and, of course, the original Hollow Knight. This is emphasised by the fact that you can only trigger health regen when your silk-white bar is full, encouraging even more offensive maneuvers to build that up quickly. Dodging will only get you so far in Hollow Knight Silksong.

All of these tweaks and changes tie together to create a more aggressive minibeast, and, although I certainly have a soft spot for the original Hollow Knight, I’m finding myself instantly drawn to Silksong more. 2018's game often placed you on the back foot, but here I felt instantly more empowered and ready to go toe-to-toe with my aggressors. As someone who traditionally enjoys the push of faster-paced action games as opposed to the pull of more modern examples of the genre (I’m really trying my hardest not to use the term soulslike here), I’m left encouraged. Creature design is still one of the highlights in the sequel, with the borderline adorable adversaries almost being too cute to stab. At one stage, I got locked in a room with some flying nuisances with pots over their heads who lobbed molten rocks at me, as well as a pudgy little round lad with a saucepan for a shield. I almost felt bad killing them.

But in truth, combat was never the highlight of Hollow Knight for me anyway, but rather the layers of exploration and discovery lurking beneath each of its beautifully crafted environments. And while I’ve barely scratched the surface of what secrets Silksong has stored in this regard, initial impressions promise a similar bounty of nooks and crannies packed full of insect friends and foes. Platforming through these mazes is still a joy; a delicately delightful balance between precision and floaty jumping that tests your skills, that crucially never feels unfair when dropping into a gap unwillingly. The addition of mantling in the sequel helps this massively, with edges freely within grasp even when slight misjudgments are made.

I was instantly taken by how much more colourful the environments are this time around. Cinders dance around caves dripping with lava and glowing green moss dresses earthy overhangs, themselves floating precariously above pools of glistening water. Hornet's red cape billows against the painted backdrops, both acting in harmony to form the sort of Saturday morning cartoon look you'd expect if one were to hang in the Louvre. Hornet also feels bigger on the screen, dominating the frame to a greater degree than her meeker-yet-still-mighty forebearer. That visual design feels like a deliberate choice, one aimed at creating more of a power trip sensation this time around. It's these ideas — from revamped combat design to its repainted world – that appear to be acting in concert to a magical degree, and impressive proof, even in this small dose, of what Team Cherry has been brewing.

Yes, we've been waiting many, many years for this sequel, but everything at this stage points to it being worth it. Each aspect feels authored and prescribed to a clear vision — a piece of playable art that is as fun to wield as it is to watch (I should know, the gamescom queue was very long). It may have been the shortest of demos, but so far, Silksong is very much singing to me, maybe even more than the original.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.