Recent reviews by Pixelnator

This recommendation still comes with a massive asterisk and even though it is a game clearly made with love it does look to me like it lost its way somewhat during the long development cycle. If you are a casual fan of Hollow Knight then Silksong unfortunately is not made with you in mind. There is currently no easy mode or an assist mode in the vein of Celeste, so if you want to play this just for the vibes and the story you unfortunately will not be able to get your moneys worth at the time of writing this review. The game, rather annoyingly, seems to also be leaning more and more into the "hehe lmao got u" type of developer antics that were only mildly present in Hollow Knight, which translates to Silksong being a much more stressful, difficult, and frustrating experience. It's still a great game, but an unaccommodating one.

If you are a casual fan deciding on whether you should buy this or not, go back to Hollow Knight and beat Path of Pain and the optional hard variants of all the bosses first. Silksong assumes a player to be able to do so. This is not a hyperbole. The wholly optional blade pogoing mechanic Path of Pain was centered around in Hollow Knight has been made into a mandatory movement mechanic in this one and some bossfights require you to do it on every attempt as you have to walk back from the nearest bench to re-attempt the boss. And if you are not a skilled player, you will be walking back to bosses a lot. You will have to adapt and learn to blade pogo like a pro or you will have to refund. The progression is gated behind learning these mechanics and failure is punished by spike pits so there simply is no other alternative.

The amount of enemies and hazards that deal two hits worth of damage per hit is also off the charts, to the point that it frankly would have been better to just represent your HP in halves. If you have 2 HP remaining, you are in fact one hit away from death form most things. The visual cues for low HP only kick in when you have only 1 HP left though, and so are not of much help there. Basically treat 2 HP as having "one heart left" and 1 HP as having "half a heart left" because that seems to be the decision they wanted to go towards. Healing is also much more of an "all or nothing" move: You heal 3 HP worth of damage in one go, but have to consume your entire MP bar to do so, which means partial heals in the vein of Hollow Knight are no longer a thing, making for a much more harsh system in terms of mistakes.

Still, I have to mark this review positive and mention that the developers are shown to be addressing some of the common complaints and recently patched the start of the game to be very slightly more forgiving. In terms of the good stuff, the game has the exact same pretty animation, music, art, vibes, and storytelling that Hollow Knight did and you can find reviews talking about those elsewhere. If you liked Hollow Knight in terms of its presentation, you will like Silksong for those exact same reasons too.

But if you are looking for a fun casual metroidvania and aren't good with frustrating games and a high difficulty, do not buy this yet. Wait until they adjust the game further or add either an easier difficulty or an assist mode. If you're a huge fan of Hollow Knight but struggled a lot while playing it, I'm sorry to say but the devs forgot about you when making Silksong.

I am only comfortable recommending this game if you are good with punishing games with high difficulty.
It is a good game, but expect to be frustrated by it.

Get a group of friends together and schedule a regular play session for this into your calendars like you would a ttrpg campaign and you'll have a blast. That's where the game really shines. It's quickly become a thing our group looks forward to every week and we find ourself getting excited when Barotrauma day approaches.

Unfortunately it also means that the vibe in single player experience is very different. Not /bad/ but if you're looking for the sort of experience you get with a dedicated group of friends then you won't have that when playing alone. In single player it's more of a management game sort of a vibe. Personally I only really like it when playing with a dedicated friend group but I definitely feel like I've gotten my money's worth while doing that and I know there are people who actually prefer the more paced management-y aspect of the single player experience.

Also tinkering with the submarines in the submarine editor is kinda fun once you get over the sheer cliff face of learning the system and that tinkering then directly translates to understanding how the submarines work in the game which in turn lets you do some very neat engineering tricks. For example did you know that you can overclock your submarine to make its systems run more efficiently by intentionally overloading the electric grid and that doing so will also make the ship's engineer hate your guts because you're also blowing out every junction box in the process? Or that you can unhook the oxygen machine from the power grid in the event of a fire to put the flames out since without fresh O2 the fire will quickly suffocate itself? There's a lot of little niche details like that for a player to discover but they are also entirely optional and not required to match the difficulty of the game.

Ridiculous crossover FOMO cashgrab when they specifically said that they'd try to avoid that. We already paid for the game.
Yes, you can grind for supercredits but at that point you are paying the cost with time instead of money. Yes you can avoid buying the item but if they introduce an armor that gives 50% resistance to all the damage types then either you get that armor to have a leg up every faction in the game or you don't and get delegated to secondhand citizen status. Why in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is this time-gated piece of gear A) strong and unique and B) the cost of half a premium warbond.
You should have released this thing as a regular damn warbond, not as a collection of superstore items. The superstore should be removed altogether to begin with in favor of an open shop but I've tolerated it for now since the stuff in it has been almost purely cosmetic.

Nonsense. And of course it's a crossover event meaning Sony is once again the one with their finger in the pie.

They've granted us the second half of the crossover pack for free. I'll switch this back to positive but I have to admit I'm getting a little tired of needing to re-review this game. Thank you for listening to your fanabse at least as well as owing up to the fact that it was you and not Sony who did the pricing decisions. I can respect that honesty at least.

A fun free horror romp. In terms of gameplay it doesn't offer anything beyond your average chase sequence and the level design is nothing to write home about so currently it rides solely on the shoulders of its character work (specifically the character work of Rambley The Raccoon). Given that this is still a positive review you can see how much effort was put into writing Rambley to be a genuine character, as he currently basically singlehandedly carries the game on his shoulders. This isn't a bad thing though as the game is a small passion project and really just feels like the game is just the medium chosen to deliver the story of this character to us.

The game is free and has a playtime of about an hour or so, so you might as well give it a playthrough to see how you feel about Rambley (seeing as their character is what the entire game is built around).

An absolute treat of a game. Go into this as blind as you can.