Silksong Journal, Entry 3

Well, I didn't get as far as over the weekend as I had hoped... The weather was too nice and the bosses were too hard. My goal was to reach the Citadel, and I came close by taking a look at the Blasted Steps, but I'm not there yet. Since my previous entry, I was busy with clearing the rest of Greymoor, exploring the Shellwoods and the Hunter's March, before finally freeing Bellhart for some much needed progress. Spoilers ahead for all these areas!

One topic I haven't talked about yet are traps, so let's first talk about traps, because this feels like a new thing. Well, Hollow Knight did have some here and there, like the plants in Greenpath, but Silksong has stuff like tripwires that let bladetraps shoot out of the ground, or switches that let some bone scythes swing at you. Or just bear traps... Though, I suppose you would call them "bug traps", unless there are actual bear bugs in Pharloom. After the giant rat-like mites I wouldn't be surprised.

Last time I was struggling with Greymoor and this didn't really get better. You have scissor-wielding enemies that also do double damage and can even cut through the ground. And then there is the boss of the area...

The Moorwing. I don't know, for some reason this gave me Soul Master vibes... Of course, this is an entirely different area and a very different enemy, but you fight them both in the open in the rain. You also have the exact same eerie melody when you get close to the fight, foreboding the danger. It takes a while to go back to this boss, because there is no bench close by. And like the Soul Sanctum, this feels like a very dreary area and one of the more difficult places in the earlier game.

Well, the major difference is that you can get company in this fight – from Garmond and his trusty steed, Zaza. You can ask them to assist you or choose not to. And the Hollow Knight veteran in oneself might hesitate after what can happen to Cloth... But he seemed really happy to do it and it was hilarious to witness, so I just had to. However, like in Hollow Knight, there are probably a number of these choices, which can heavily influence the path of certain characters. And it will be interesting to see what happens if you say "no" in a second playthrough.

But even though I had some help, I hit my first brick wall here, because this boss was very difficult for me to beat. The first phase is easy enough, but in the second phase things get really chaotic and these things all deal double damage. Well, technically some of his attacks do multi-hit damage, which will result in getting hit twice over, but that's about the same. And it made me second-guess my choice of asking for Garmond's aid... Maybe his presence made the fight harder than it would be normally?

If you think about, in Hollow Knight it was actually rare that bosses dealt two masks of damage. It was mainly the optional stuff, like dream bosses (e.g. the Soul Tyrant), the ascended variants in the Hall of Gods, and so on. But foes like the Traitor Lord were the exception, while in Silksong they quickly became the rule... 

So, I spent some time wandering around, maybe finding something that helps, where I purchased everything from the forge and whatever I could find, like the Mask Shard at the shop. Not that completing the sixth mask would have made a difference in this case... It's still three mistakes and you're dead.

There is also the Warding Bell as a defensive tool, which protects you while you're healing. This sounds nice in theory, but it only prevents you from taking a hit (while doing some damage of its own). It will still interrupt the binding, so you lose all the silk and don't get anything out of it. And in this fight, especially in the second phase, I struggled with finding good spots and moments for using Bind, because whenever I healed I often ended up getting run over right after.

You can also obtain the Reaper crest before this battle, which increases your range and knockback at the cost of attack speed, but it felt right for this fight, so I stuck to it after some experimentation. And eventually I beat the boss with it and sheer will, after I thought I had exhausted my options. But maybe I hadn't...

Remember when I mentioned the Wormways as a potential sequence break? Now could have been the time, because after opening the path at Greymoor I eventually ended up right at the ledge that I tried to reach before. Maybe there was some door that can only be opened from one side, which I'm forgetting but I think this is a potential way to bypass the fight.

Whatever path you may choose, you will eventually arrive at the Haunted Bellhart, where you get the game's second cutscene. Lots of bugs are tied up here with silk strings, confirming the involvement of the Weavers in something shady. Freeing the town is your second major objective, though you might be able to ignore it entirely. While I'm not there yet, it looked to me like you can reach the Citadel without freeing Bellhart first. The question is if you really want to...

I also absolutely love the idea that there are so many bells in this game world that you can find entire caverns made out of them, where you can explore those for the first time below and above Bellhart. There is something verily creepy of walking through claustrophobic tunnels made out of metal scraps. And at this point I'm convinced that the final boss has to be Isabelle from Animal Crossing. Imagine the terror.

Next to Bellhart lies the Shellwoods, where the game tests your pogo skills. And once you got the hang of it, you're rewarded with running right into the next boss, Sister Splinter.

And dead! I'm kidding, of course, this also took me a while, though not as long as the Moorwing. Again, this boss does double damage with its giant claws, but the pattern is easy enough to learn and master. It would have been an easy boss if she didn't summon some Splinterbarks to her aid. And this is where things can get tricky. I can deal with a boss, learn its attack patterns and eventually do the dance, but once there is another enemy in the room, all with their own quirks and attack patterns, it gets distracting. It divides the attention and this can lead to making mistakes.

It may also subvert your choice of crest. In this case I went with the Wanderer, because it let me destroy the spiked vines the quickest. But in return it made dealing with the Splinterbarks a pain, because I got easily caught up in their attacks. So, I had to switch to the Hunter. What really did the trick was the Thread Storm, however, where I usually could take out the henchmen in one strike. The Sting Shard tool was also very effective, because you're guaranteed to land a hit by placing them near the top.

The reward is the Cling Grip, letting you do wall jumps. And that's finally something huge, a lot more to my liking than the Princess Peach cloak, where it also invited me to go backtrack and see what I now could find... Which was a big mistake.

Well, not outright. I got the first collection of flees, where I found the last one at the Shellwoods. They then take you to the place where fought the Moorwing, which is curious. What will happen if you haven't defeated the boss yet? Will they still wait? Will they move elsewhere? Is it even possible to obtain enough flees before the boss? But I suppose it is, since you might be able to sequence break and Team Cherry certainly has accounted for this thing.

And it looks like I could have gotten another flee in the Hunter's Marches already. This was my next destination and this was a curious case of confusion. I could have sworn that I was not able to use the red flowers there in any form before, so I assumed that I needed another upgrade. But in the end they act the same as the balloons in the Far Fields or the flowers in the Shellwoods... Maybe there is a trigger that makes them bloom at some point, but it's more likely that I somehow misunderstand them the first time.

It's not like I would have done myself a favor of going there early anyway... The area itself is okay, often giving you a second route to avoid stronger foes, but at the end awaited two fights that I just couldn't do:

The first is the Savage Beastfly in the Chapel of the Beast. The other is a second Skarrgard, but this one has the company of a flying Skarr. And both fights come with the same problem that made me struggle during the Sister Splinter battle. They divide my attention thanks to the second enemies. And of course they all do double damage, so you best not make any mistakes.

The Savage Beastfly is another boss where it is relatively easy to learn its patterns. The Reaper crest worked really well for me here, but eventually it drops its smaller friends on you and often more than just one. Sometimes it takes them out for you with its body slam attack, but you can't rely on that and having the enemies in the room can put you quickly in a corner (as pictured). It's even dependent on luck, because it randomly chooses between Kiliks, Beastflies and the "Vicious Caranid", where the latter is already pain to deal with on its own.

But you also shouldn't underestimate the others. The Beastflies caused me to question my crest choice again, because they are able to push through me before I can strike a second time. And the Kiliks are effectively walking traps.

As for the Skarrgard, that one is a lot simpler on paper. Deal with the flying ant first and then fight the Skarrgard as before. But that's easier said than done when the big guy can jump at you from across the room. My strategy before was to stay close to it, but then I can't deal with the other guy...

With both fights it felt like I could do it if I just kept trying, but I was constantly making use of tools in those battles, so I ran out of shards eventually. And I'm not sure whether I like this system or not. I like how they are limited and get refilled at benches. That makes a lot of sense, but having to farm the shards on top feels like an unnecessary limitation. At least it made me reconsider and go elsewhere. These fights clearly are meant to be optional anyway, where getting a better needle may already make a big difference and I probably shouldn't have wasted so much time on them. To be honest, trying these fights now nearly broke my spirit.

Well, I took it out on the next best boss nearby, the Skull Tyrant. Finally a success! But this also didn't really score me anything of value... yet. You get a Crown Fragment, but I don't know what it's good for....

What has been useful is finding Memory Lockets, however, which is what can unlock additional slots on your crests:

So, each crest can have seven slots. The one in the middle is for your primary silk skill. And then there are two of each color / type, where the crests start out with three of them. I made it so that each of my crests has two of a different type. The Hunter has two attack slots (red), and the Reaper two defense slots (blue). The Wanderer starts out with two utility slots (yellow) by default, so I've added the missing blue slot.

It also feels right for the situations I usually use them. I don't fight with the Reaper outside of boss battles, but there it's good to have more defensive options. And I always go with the Wanderer when I... wander around, where it's nice to have both the Rosary magnet and the compass at the same time.

Finally, I went back to the Shellwoods and arrived at the bridge where the beginning of the game took place – the one Hornet broke and fell through. From there you get into the Blasted Steps, which is Pharloom's counterpart to the Howling Cliffs, taking place in the same wasteland. Only that it's a lot more lethal. This is where you can reach the Citadel from what I could tell, you even encounter your first Judges here, enemies looking a bit like the Godseeker for some reason. The sands are also filled with worms, which will hit you twice when you fall into them... And since I had hundreds of Rosaries at this point, I didn't want to risk losing them all.

You can actually string them at shops and certain stations, so you don't lose them, but this will cost you 20%. It's still a good option in such a scenario, but instead I decided to go for my previous assignment: unhaunt the Haunted Bellhart, since maybe there will be something to spend my money on.

And this was right on the money. There is yet another boss fight waiting for you here, a weird Weaver called the Widow, but at no point during the fight I felt like I was too weak. The Wanderer was super effective, because she is standing still quite a lot when pulling in the bells, and despite the chaotic second phase this boss fight was very manageable, despite still doing double damage here and there.

Now, the best part is that this gave me two major rewards. First you receive the Needolin, which lets you play your needle like a violin or harp, how cute. But my map has a number of markers for weird gates on it, where this might help. And what's even better, one of the vendors there let me sharpen my needle! Maybe now I can get my revenge in the Hunter's March...? 

Silksong Journal, Entry 2

Today I've been playing for a couple more hours, where for the most part I've been going back and forth on the horizontal, instead of gaining some altitude, but I've reached a higher area eventually. My journey went to the Deep Docks, the Wormways, the Far Fields, and finally Greymoor. Keep that in mind when reading.

My next major destination were the Deep Docks, which is the other area known from the game's demo. You can quickly find Lace waiting behind a closed gate and since this is an important point in the game, this made me "procrastinate" for a while, where I've been messing around with how far I could get elsewhere, mainly around Bone Bottom.

There is this part of the abyss where Hornet fell down, which can be crossed right away by bouncing off the Vengefly knock-offs there. So, that's likely an intended sequence break, where afterwards you have to face the acid-spitting monster. Since I didn't have the dash yet, this was even a tiny challenge, where you have to find cover between the attacks.

However, my efforts weren't exactly rewarded, because I ran into a dead end with a locked door. I needed the Simple Key from the shop at Bone Bottom, which costs 500 Rosaries, the most expensive item so far. I had been buying out the map maker instead and this early in the game you have to be picky, which is pretty much the identical to Hollow Knight with the key and all.

The other possibility was the big ant guard, called Skarrgard, which is protecting the entrance to the ant colony. After doing a number of radiant bossfights in the last two weeks, I'm up for any boss challenge, especially when there's a bench close by, but this prove to be too difficult at the time, when Hornet still played like a rock. It's doable, but you have to position yourself perfectly on every turn.

It became clear that some sort of dashing ability would be the key to win this fight, so I proceeded into the Deep Docks, where you can also obtain the Magma Bell from the forger. That one protects you from fire, at least briefly, and also haves the damage from falling into lava. It lets you the find the "Swift Step", which is exactly what I wanted. Now the game is already flowing so much more nicely, adding a lot more speed into the gameplay.

This let me defeat the Skarrgard, but this was also not worth the trouble, because right afterwards you need another ability to proceed... (Or at least I thought so.) But since I wanted to do something "cool" before facing Lace, I went back to the locked door, which also can be reached much easier with the dash. (By the way, I also thought that I needed another Simple Key to free Grindle at first, but you can just smash his cell door. This is why I also didn't have the pins for a while.) 

I had to kill a bunch of pilgrims to get the necessary money, but behind the door waited... the Wormways. This is something I always loved about Hollow Knight – you expect some small secret, but end up in a completely new area to explore. This one feels like it's sitting right between Deepnest and the Ancient Basin in gameplay and atmosphere. You have those worms going up and down, enemies popping out of the ground, just like in Deepnest, but visually it's more in that ominous cavern style, with thorns all around, like the Ancient Basin.

Going up from here didn't do me much of a favor. You can go there, but without any double jump or alike it's difficult not to fall down... Maybe it's possible, but it's really in that category of "one misstep and you have to start all over again", including the tour through the Wormways. You can open a shortcut, but this one requires you to have a double or wall jump. And there is no good reason to unnecessarily frustrate myself when I can just proceed elsewhere.

Still, this detour was not for naught, because you can also go down from the Wormways and end up in the westmost area of Bone Bottom, which was locked off before. This let me obtain the Wanderer's Crest, which is a new thing in Silksong – the Crests change how you attack with your needle. The default one is the "Hunter", which lets you do these diagonal down thrusts. The Wanderer is quicker with its attacks, but the range is also reduced. So, in a way it's like the Quick Slash Charm, but you will lose the Long Nail... It also lets you attack downwards normally, which feels a lot more like playing the Knight.

There is another aspect to these crests, which is effectively replacing the old Charm system, where the crests come with a number of slots for tools and skills. The latter are your secondary attacks, which require silk, like the Silkspear. It's basically like the Spells from the first game, except that you can swap them. But there are also spaces for passive and active tools. The active ones give you additional ranged attacks, but they are limited in their number. You will regain them on a bench, but this will cost you the shards that you collect from certain enemies. The spike traps that Hornet has used in her second boss form is one of these active tools, which you can get from the forge, as well as the aforementioned pins, which work like throwing daggers.

The passive tools are exactly like the Charms. They are split into two categories, blue and yellow, where the blue ones seem to be for defensive options. The Magma Bell is one of those, but there is also one that refills some silk when you receive damage. The yellow tools include a magnet that attracts Rosaries and of course the compass, which shows your position on the map... Which you mostly want on your first playthrough.

Well, this was at least something, so now I could go fight Lace... though, I don't recommend the Wanderer's Crest for this fight, it was much easier for me with the Hunter for me personally, so I had to swap back.

Lace feels a bit like this game's equivalent to Hornet, so you actually talk to her before the battles and you will have to face Lace multiple times. And it feels like she could become your ally eventually, once she has given up on killing you. But when Hornet is imprisoned in the round cage at the beginning of the game, one of Lace's butterflies sits down on it and this breaks the seal... So, she might have helped Hornet already. She is a bit of a nutjob, however.

Afterwards you can enter the Far Fields and what starts out like a Greenpath rip-off turns into this hot-air balloon scenery. The visuals of the giant, floating tent reminded me of the Grimme Troupe, but the character inside doesn't have red eyes... Instead you get a fetch quest, where you have to collect 25 spines in the neighborhood in order to upgrade your cloak. This was a bit odd that you had to do this and it took me a little while to understand that those were the projectiles fired by the Hoker enemies. But once you realize this, it's easy enough.

It's also interesting that you can only collect these things when the quest is active and not yet fulfilled. There is a similar quest about collecting the scarfs of pilgrims at Bone Bottom and once you receive it, you can loot all their corpses for these scarfs. But this stops right once you get the necessary amount... I don't think I've ever seen a system like this, usually you just collect all the plunder and loot in Adventure games, until you eventually need it.

Anyway, at the Far Field this activity gets you the Drifter's Cloak, so you can now play as Princess Peach. But it also enables you to go up the air streams, where the Far Fields finally let you gain lots of height in the world. But before that you have to get through another boss first...

I love how you could already see it lurking in the background. This gave me Diggernaut vibes, but here you're getting straight to it. The "Fourth Corus" is very well staged and by far the largest boss so far (including everything from Hollow Knight), but it's similar to bosses like the Diggernaut or Experiment Z-57 from the more recent Metroid games, where you attack the head, while it attacks you with its limbs, and the rest of the body is in the background. I also died at the end of the fight twice, because I struggled with hitting the magma bombs. The hands also do double damage, which might even result in three masks of damage should you happen to fall into the lava right after getting hit... But there were always good windows for healing yourself and the fight felt very manageable.

After clearing the path, you can soar up and reach Greymoor, a swamp-like area right out of a horror movie. It's home to the Craws, which are basically crows, but probably still bugs posing as crows. And this is where I got a bit frustrated for the first time...

I had to return to the room above a number of times, after dying in battle. The larger Craws tank a lot more, where it's time for a needle upgrade, and the swooping attacks of the small crows can be irritating. I kept jumping into them for some reason... This is where the Wanderer's Crest finally came into play. For me it made the fight more intuitive and it also makes it a lot easier to bounce off all the balloons, which are spawned afterwards. So, it's good that I already had this, but I wouldn't mind a needle upgrade nevertheless.

What you get instead is the Thread Storm skill, which is Hornet's second signature attack from her boss fights. It's curious that you seemingly won't be able to use it and the Silkspear during the same battle, like Hornet could in Hollow Knight. But the crests can be upgraded to unlock more slots, so maybe it's possible...

And since this game is clearly meant to be a prequel, it's okay if Hornet can't do everything of what she was capable of in Hollow Knight. Though, it raises the question how she lost her new abilities, like the Drifter's Cloak.

Eventually, I got to Halfway Home, a hostel in the middle of the dread lands. Here you meet Nuu, the funny character from the latest trailer, who tried to give Hornet a smooch. Turns out that this is where you get the Journal from, which stores all the monster information. And exactly like in the first game you need to defeat each monster a number of times to learn more, but this time the comments come from Hornet herself.

It also speaks of the "Haunting", which is this game's version of the Infection and the reason why certain pilgrims are attacking you. I must have missed this when skipping through some dialogue earlier in the game... Some visual indicator as to what bugs are haunted and what bugs are still sane would have been nice, but maybe there is one and I'm not seeing it. :D

Silksong Journal, Entry 1

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure this will be a good idea, but I'm going to give it a try nevertheless. Usually, I only do these logs for new Zelda games, but I have done one for Metroid Dread about four years ago, where Hollow Knight is very close to home and checks all those boxes of what I love about the Action Adventure genre.

The difference is that I wouldn't call myself an expert in Hollow Knight, because I've only beaten the game once so far. And while I had done things like the Path of Pain, Trial of the Fool, Radiance, Nightmare King, and what not, I lost motivation somewhere in the middle of Godhome and in the middle of my second playthrough. I've been playing a bit lately to warm up and may even go for the 112% after I'm done with Silksong, but I doubt that I could ever put myself through the Pantheon of Hallownest. And that also makes me a bit weary about this new game...

First of all, I want to say that admire the whole launch situation. Of course, it would have been nice if you could have pre-ordered and pre-loaded the game to avoid those outages of all major digital game stores all at once, but I was still at work anyway when that happened. And I like the intention of giving this to the whole world at once. No early copies for the gaming press, where at day 1 they are uploading complete guides of the game... What truly matters are the fans who have supported Hollow Knight, may it be as a backer on Kickstarter (where they even got the new game for free, because it was originally planned as an expansion), or simply as a player who has bought the first game.

And it's relatively cheap. It costs a bit more than Hollow Knight, but not much, only 20$ / 20€ in total. I thought that this was going to be the first time that I buy a game on Steam for its full price, but the bundle with the soundtrack was already discounted by 20%, so I got that for around 26€. Totally worth it.

However... while the game was released to everyone at the same time, by the time I'm writing this, there are probably people out there who have already beaten it. I'm sure of it. But as usual, I won't rush and will try to avoid spoilers for myself as much as I can. There will certainly be some secrets that I won't be finding without the internet, but it's going to be a long way before I look such things up.

Anyway, I've only played it for one and a half hours last evening and defeated the Bell Beast, meaning that these are some very early impressions, before I get back into it. I'm playing it on the PC, where my ultrawide screenshots may give this away (supporting such resolutions is a new feature, by the way). 

The game already begins with an interesting "promise". After the initial cutscene it states "Act 1 – Pharloom", indicating that there might be more to this game than just one kingdom. Or maybe Act 2 starts with the Citadel, where reaching it at the kingdom's top is your initial goal. I really like the whole setting, this inverse of Hollow Knight where you had been digging deeper and deeper into the kingdom of Hallownest.

And this is already a much stronger aspect of the story. You will encounter pilgrims, who are trying to reach the citadel as well, but will fall down on their way eventually. Good for them and for Hornet that there is no fall damage in the world of Hollow Knight. And it certainly leaves an impression how deep the shaft goes that you've crumbled down inside the cage. You're encountering it several times and it's always tempting to just jump down again to discover something along the fall...

This world design also gives me slight vibes from games like Getting Over It, or Only Up!, except that you will be able to create shortcuts along your way... and it doesn't look like trash. Quite the opposite, Team Cherry has absolutely outdone themselves with how beautiful this game is. Hollow Knight was already timeless with its hand-drawn aesthetics, but there is so much more detail here that it often feels like you're playing an animated movie.

Otherwise it really is like Hollow Knight, just different, which isn't a bad thing, but you shouldn't expect something groundbreaking. For example, instead of Geo, you are collecting beads as a currency, called Rosaries, which scatter even more easily. And there are also the Shards, which you can get from breaking certain rocks and enemies, but I find them a bit too subtle. When I first broke one of such rocks I didn't even notice that it dropped something.

Or, you will encounter a map selling character, Shakra, wo also sings to mark her presence. But she combined Cornifer and Iselda into one, meaning you can buy all the map utilities right at the spot. You can also buy maps for multiple areas, like with Tingle in Majora's Mask, where you don't have to search for the map seller in each single one. And Majora's Mask might be a good comparison, because Silksong truly feels like a sequel (or prequel) in a similar DNA, where it remixes all sorts of aspects from its predecessor in a new setting.

After the Moss Grotto, which is the area you fall down into, it quickly branches out into multiple areas, like Bone Bottom and the Marrow. This gives the impression that the beginning is less linear than it was in Hollow Knight, but this might be an illusion. I think there is no way around getting your first major upgrade, Hornet's signature needle throw, the Silkspear. It lets you cut through spider webs, which then lets you tame the Bell Beast, the equivalent to the Stag Beetle fast transport.

Hornet herself feels much sturdier, but also like a bigger target. And some of the enemy patterns in the early game managed to catch me by surprise. My first death came during the first "group battle", where you're locked in with some enemies, because those walking large skulls do double damage already. And the enemies like to run you over, where it makes me want to have an equivalent to the "Heavy Blow" Charm, which I barely even used in Hollow Knight... But if I recall correctly, I had the same issue in the early game with the Knight. At least you don't have to fight your Shade any longer, which could be annoying.

The game still feels a bit slow at the beginning, where I can't wait to obtain the sprinting mechanic and the "hookshot", for everything to become more acrobatic. Maybe one of these will come next...

Finally, the one big difference is that Hornet actually talks, unlike the Knight... and many of the silent protagonists in the gerne, like Link and Samus most of the time. You will get proper text boxes for her, which show a little Hornet icon at their top to distinguish them more easily, though sometimes I'm still confused by them, especially when she starts to talk. I'm simply used to how it works in Hollow Knight and pretty much every Zelda game, where the textbox is always the other person talking.

I'm also sometimes confused by whom I can even talk to... and who will attack me instead. In Hollow Knight this distinction was clear for the most part. Bugs with glowing eyes are infected and will attack you. But in Silksong you are not facing the infection, at least not yet, and instead you're dealing with religious fanatics who apparently are racist against spiders. And this catches me off guard from time to time.