Hollow Knight Silksong First Impressions!

Hollow Knight Silksong was released yesterday, and it broke the Steam Store page. I assumed that Steam's servers were overloaded with people trying to buy the game for about half an hour after the game's release, and I couldn't even buy the game. I didn't expect the downtime to be this long. At the time of writing this post, there are still about 400K players in the game playing Silksong. That's a lot of players for a single-player game or for any game, for that matter.

I was a bit frustrated not being able to even buy the game for that long.

I was excited when I got the game; it was just 10 dollars, equivalent to the game in my local currency, much lower than I expected to pay. I bought the soundtrack as well to support the developers, not that they desperately need it at this point.

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Anyways, I played for a few hours already, exploring the first few areas of the map and defeating 3-4 initial bosses. Overall, the game felt good with some things that can be improved. There are a couple of points that can be improved, but let's first look at the stuff that is better in this game than in the last.

• Improved animation and visuals - The first game had some gorgeous hand-drawn levels and a simple animation style that I liked a lot. This one is just an improvement on those aspects. I was expecting this from the trailer as well. There are more visual elements in the scenes, more fluid animations, smoother character animations and a lot of other quality improvements.

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• Music is great again - I haven't heard a lot of tracks yet, even though I have the complete soundtrack album. I just want to experience it first with the game. I love the background scores, the NPC character singing and audio cues. It is very interesting to play as a character which makes a variety of sound effects and talks with the NPCs, quite a different experience than Hollow Knight.

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• New quest system - I like that there are quests which are called Wishes, and you can take side quests from a variety of bugs. The first few side quests are simple, but I feel this will turn out to be a game-changer. I expect some tough quests towards the end of the game.

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There are a lot of improvements in the visuals and animation department, but I feel that some of the gameplay decisions are not the best. For example, the horrible diagonal downward pogo is so tough to judge. I can't simply get my head around the fact that they removed the downward slash in the game. That was one of the best things in the game.

There are some sections with those red flowers where you can bounce, and judging exactly where that 45-degree diagonal dash will take you is extremely difficult. If they can have up slash, why did they need to remove the down slash? Makes zero sense to me. Yeah, it looks cool if you get a combo, but I feel that shouldn't be the case. Don't fix it if it ain't broke.

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Another thing that I think is a bit off-putting is the heal mechanic. It is good to have Hornet heal 3 shards at once, but it can only be done when your silk spool is full, and you can't use it when it is not full. Will we get the ability to partially hear one or two shards, which won't consume the full spool? I don't know. But that makes the boss fight and other sections a bit too tedious. You are constantly worrying about not using your special attacks in the hope of having that luxury to heal. That's not a great thing for a game so focused on combat and boss fights. Maybe I will change my views on this when I have more mask shards, so I don't die in two hits. LOL

Some of the normal enemies deal 2 mask shard damage as well, which is an interesting choice. It feels like a forced difficulty at the start, especially when you have that inferior healing mechanic and only 5 mask shards at the start.

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These few gameplay decisions are the online complaint I have; other than that, the game looks better than the first one, sounds good and is much more lively than the first gloomy place of Hallownest.

I will recommend the game to everyone. Looking forward to playing it more.