I decided to include both of these games in the same “page” since they’re part of the same franchise and they’re both on my list of all-time favorites, but I’ll talk about them one at a time.

Hollow Knight

The original Hollow Knight is the game that introduced me to the Metroidvania genre, and for that it will always hold a special place in my heart.

I’ll admit it: Hollow Knight is not a beginner-friendly game. When you start a new game, you are thrown into this dark, hostile world, of which you know nothing about. All you can really do is move, jump, and attack enemies with your trusty Nail. As you explore the world of Hallownest, you unlock new abilities that will make you think “oh God, why couldn’t I have had this all along?!”, but that’s part of the charm in these types of games. You’ll probably spend the first few hours of Hollow Knight just running around the map like a dizzy cochroach, in hopes of finding the thing that will let you move on to the next area. It may sound frustrating (and it is — a bit), but it’s one of the core tenets of the genre. As you familiarize yourself with the mechanics of the game, you’ll (hopefully) start to develop a passion for it, as I did.

I loved discovering each new area, with its own enemies, collectibles and especially a soundtrack that will make you understand why some people have video game soundtracks in their Spotify Wrapped (if you’re reading this in the far future, Spotify Wrapped was this thing from the late-2010s – 2020s that people shared on their social media in December with the songs that they listened to the most throughout the year).

For me, playing Hollow Knight for the first time was a truly magical experience, one that I’m sad I’ll probably never feel again. Fortunately I felt something similar in…

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Oh boy, where do I even start? You probably already know about the memes and the hype surrounding this game. I first played Hollow Knight in 2022, so I “only” had to wait 3 years for Silksong, but it was still a hell of a wait.

However, on September 4th 2025, it all became worth it. Just a few hours into the game, Silksong became one of my favorite games of all time. The way that it expands on what made Hollow Knight great and then improves on it with new movesets, combat abilities, bosses, and a vast new world with many different areas to discover and explore… what Team Cherry did is nothing short of a Herculean feat. There were a handful of times while I was playing that I just stopped and said to myself “holy shit, what a game”, while doing the Martin Scorsese “Absolute Cinema” pose.

It’s also incredible how long Silksong is. It took me 65 HOURS to get to 100% completion. For comparison, I played Hollow Knight twice, both times I got close to 112% completion (the most you can get) and that accounted to around 70 hours. When you finish the game, a task that will easily take 20 to 30 hours, assuming that you follow the natural progression of the plot, you’ll think “wait, I remember seeing ‘Act 2’ a while ago, but was there an Act 3?”. And yeah, there is, there is an entire ACT after the credits roll, where you can get the “true” ending, one that will take you another 20 hours or more to reach.

Now, I do have a few gripes with the game. The biggest one is the entire area of Bilewater. While I can appreciate a game that’s hard and doesn’t pull its punches, Bilewater crossed the line between hard and cruel for me. It’s not very fun to have to retread a 5-minute long path filled with enemies, traps, and water that infests you with maggots when you fall in it and prevents you from healing. Now imagine having to do that BEFORE fighting a boss, and redoing it EVERY FREAKING TIME you die in the fight. Technically there is a secret bench that you can unlock that reduces the runback from 5 minutes to around 2, but in addition to still having to replay a section of the area on every death, this bench is so hidden that I’m not sure that most people would even know of its existence without hearing about it or looking it up online (I sure didn’t). There are harder parts in Silksong, as well as frustrating sections, but Bilewater managed to create such a unique combination of both that once I finished it, I couldn’t even feel accomplished, only relieved that the nightmare was over.

Still, Hollow Knight: Silksong is one of the best sequels to one of the best video games of all time. If a third installment in the franchise ever comes out, I just hope that it can keep what made these two games special.