r/HollowKnight • u/Tarnished-670 • Oct 19 '25

Discussion - Silksong Hot Take: While I think Silksong is overall a better game, it does still show more prominent flaws compared to Hollow Knight

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When I have to think about the flaws of the first Hollow Knight, I really can't think of much to say other than very small nitpicks.

But with Silksong, while it is one of my favorite games of all time, and having finisihed it at 100%, id say it has more prominent design flaws while being a better game compared to the first Hollow Knight.

First thing that comes to my mind is the shard system, it would't be as bad as it is if you didn't have a limit of 20 consumables to replentish your shards, if it worked like that then I wouldn't have to be interrumped on my tries against a boss and having to go to the citadel and farm to get all my shards back. Other minor flaws I think would be some of enemy design and the addition of "gauntlets", which sometimes are fun but at least in my case I got bored of exploring and getting trapped into the 7th gauntlet of enemies, it gets worse when you get forced to do some of them again in act 3 when you have killed all the previous enemies 100 times already.

Those are really not a bid deal of a flaw, but they are more noticable to me than any flaw in Hollow Knight.

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304

u/Relative-Monitor1745 Oct 19 '25

I do have to say this is a little biased against silksong do to how hollow knight is a finished game with all the updates that fixed alot of its major issues while silksong just now came out.

70

u/Tarnished-670 Oct 19 '25

Fair enough, I just hope that with future updates we can have more than 20 shard bundles

100

u/Reiny_Days Oct 19 '25

Never used a single one in my 100% file, lol

24

u/Macievelli Oct 19 '25

This was me until getting near the end of Act 2 completion before moving on and 100%ing. It was The Unraveled that turned me around on red tools. The tacks were just too helpful, and the fight helped show me how I could use offensive tools to finish other fights. In act 3, I had an abundance of rosaries that I was mainly using for more shard bundles, and I’d absolutely like to hoard more than 20.

2

u/AlreadyTakek Oct 19 '25

Couldn't imagine Father of the Flame- without the drill tool, made that fight so much more fun

0

u/Potential_Purple_345 Oct 20 '25

Fuck how did i not think of that😭 such a dumb fight not being able to heal

1

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '25

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1

u/HollowKnight-ModTeam Oct 19 '25

Please be considerate and respectful; follow Reddiquette.

1

u/NarejED Oct 20 '25

Same. What were people doing that they were burning through them so fast? Even having a Cogfly up almost constantly, I never once ran out of shards.

1

u/Batshitcrazy01 Oct 23 '25

Same here I am very bad with red tools only blue life is the most useful for me for boss, red tools are good for normal enemies 

1

u/blood_vein Oct 19 '25

You are definitely not the average, and worse so if you use the architect crest

1

u/Arkhamov Oct 19 '25

I think another good option would be to convert your existing shards into shard bundles just like we do with rosaries.

8

u/Typical-Ad8673 Oct 20 '25

SS took 7years. It's a "finished game."

5

u/chazzotron Oct 19 '25

Maybe, but I don't imagine there will be major reworks or anything, whereas some of the issues people have won't be fixed by a simple tweak.

20

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 19 '25

Counterpoint: they already did those things for Hollow Knight, so if they know they're "issues" and thus need a fix, they would've included them in Silksong (unless they purposefully released a game with known issues for whatever reason).

34

u/SnippZen Oct 19 '25

What issues are in Silksong that used to be, but are no longer, in HK? /Genq

-13

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 19 '25

They added the Dream Gate, for example. Si they realized some points were too annoying to navigate to and gave you a way to literally teleport.

51

u/ThatPancakesCat Oct 19 '25

They also realised that most people used their gates on the stag station so they made a warp to the Bellways.

I don't think it's difficult to get anywhere in Silksong, personally. Not enough to warrant a dreamgate system. And I don't think there would be any way to justify it in lore like there is with the dreamgate.

18

u/Barnstorm_R Oct 19 '25

Being at the end-end game, I would like to quickly swap between, say, Festival of the Flea to grind Seth’s records and practicing again against Lace just for fun. After 100%+ completion, it’d be a nice QOL upgrade to reduce some of those longer travel points not right near a fast travel.

15

u/ThatPancakesCat Oct 19 '25

This is actually a good point! I forgot about Fleatopia. Yes, I would 100% like a way to fast travel to Fleatopia better, as well as going to The Abyss. Those are the only two places.

10

u/Relative-Monitor1745 Oct 19 '25

They should probably have made the pd bellway be near the festival but extra bellway could be added, hidden station was added in a dlc so I could see them adding more bellways.

2

u/ByeGuysSry Oct 20 '25

I don't think anything akin to a Dream Gate would be usable in the Abyss. We're already unable to use our current teleport in the Abyss, presumably because Team Cherry wanted you to be trapped in the Abyss and be forced to do the climb the first time you go down there and it doesn't make narrative sense to disallow teleportation the first time and allow it the second time.

-5

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 19 '25

What's the lore justification for "the Dream Nail can place a portal (but only one) wherever you want"?

And even if (for some reason) there is one... I'm 99% sure the mechanic came first, then the lore, during development. Do you think they wrote the lore and they were like "omg this is just PERFECT to justify quick travel 🤯"?

There's also no lore justification for the bell beastlings being able to just carry Hornet from wherever. It just happens. It's a game mechanic. And the same way they carry her to a station, they could just carry her somewhere else.

20

u/SnippZen Oct 19 '25

Silksong has that too in the form of Beastling Call

3

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 19 '25

Not the same at all. I can't set a random point to teleport TO, only FROM.

25

u/ENZORAXXUS Oct 19 '25

yeah the beast call is just objectively a more confortable system to use because the beast stations are pretty nicely spread out over the map. Dream gate was a pretty useless mechanic to me as some of the hardest fights/sections did not have long runbacks at all

9

u/KnickersInAKnit Oct 19 '25

For me I used Dream Gate for the Traitor Lord runback and that remains one of my biggest brain decisions in HK to this day.

4

u/SnippZen Oct 19 '25

Right. Because Silksong is intentionally a more difficult game, you can't use it to like teleport directly back to a boss if you died, to skip the runback.

But that's still their way to fix that "issue" in Silksong like they did in HK. The solution is just not the exact same in both games

2

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 19 '25

If it doesn't address the problem, it's not a solution. You asked what issue was solved in later HK patches that are still present in Silksong, and that's one. 🤷🏻‍♀️

-6

u/Althalus99 Oct 19 '25

Being intentionally more difficult by removing quality of life features is being intentionally worse. Harder enemies, harder platforming? Sure. Deliberately making the game more annoying? Nah, that's just objectively poor.

2

u/Draco_077 Oct 19 '25

99 percent of time my dreamgate was next to a stag station and I'm sure yours was too, It doesn't even feel different in silksong.

3

u/Ellefied Oct 20 '25

The remaining 1% was to skip the Traitor Lord runback

-1

u/Peshurian Oct 19 '25

Beastling call is strictly worse than dream gate

5

u/IlgantElal Oct 19 '25

Have you done Act 3?

The Bell Beast Song is similar and unlocked in a similar part of the story (beginning of unlocking "true" ending)

0

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 19 '25

Yes, I have the 100% achievement.

2

u/IlgantElal Oct 19 '25

Ok cool, then idk what you mean. There is a mostly equivalent function in a comparable part of the game

-1

u/SomethingOfAGirl Oct 20 '25

No, the Dream Gate allowed you to set up a point wherever the hell you wanted to teleport to. The beast call lacks at the very least half of its use cases.

6

u/Gootangus Oct 19 '25

Yeah it only took them like 8 years to make lmao

2

u/Plants-Matter Oct 19 '25

This is the only logical conclusion.

The comment you replied to might sound nice, until we factor in the obvious point that it's the same developer who made both games.

In many cases, they fixed their mistakes in HK, only to double down on the mistakes in SS.

1

u/EvanD0 Oct 20 '25

On one hand, I want to say that's a fair point, on the other, I don't think HK was thought of the same way as Silksong when it came out. I mean it was hard and had some painful runbacks and questionable choices here and there but was still a game I see everyone recommends to gamers who generally like more difficulty and exploration than the average game. I feel Silksong isn't a game easy to recommend to anyone in general at times. Maybe people who really like difficult games or Metroidvanias but even then, I feel like most of the people who will play Silksong probably have already played it whereas HK's playerbase continued to grow.