TECH

4 months, 40 hours, and a personal battle: why Silksong proves that the hardest game of 2025 is about enduring, not winning

In the second half of 2025, after years of waiting, Australian developer Team Cherry released the game Silksong, a sequel to 2017's Hollow Knight. Its theme is fighting to survive in an underground kingdom corrupted by insects.

The journey, according to The Guardian, mirrors Dante's in the Divine Comedy, from hell to purgatory and paradise, from the cursed depths to the abode of God. The main character is Hornet, a masked spider who wears a red cloak. The other characters are insects with empty stares and sad appearances.

All the creatures that live in the kingdom of Pharloom have had their minds poisoned, except for Hornet. Throughout the game, classified as difficult, there is much suffering and many battles. Keza MacDonald, games editor at The Guardian, tested the new feature, and did so while battling a personal struggle: acute pain resulting from brachial neuritis, an inflammation of the nerve that runs from the base of the neck to the hand.

She said it took her months to get through, with great effort, a game that she would have finished in three weeks. “My journey can’t be rushed. A large part of pain management involves cultivating a state of safety for the nervous system, minimizing stress as much as possible, and it turns out that difficult video games are very stressful. The frustration of defeat causes my hands to grip the controller too tightly and my fingers start to ache. The adrenaline of victory leads me to a state of euphoria, of fight or flight, which my nerves can’t handle at the moment. Instead of losing myself in Silksong as I did with other games since adolescence, I play for 20, 40 minutes at a time, over months,” she reported.

According to her, this process made Pharloom seem like a parallel dimension, a place where she could take refuge and where, when she could no longer play because of the pain, she continued playing mentally.

“It’s evident that this game is a work of obsession. The level of detail is extraordinary everywhere, even in the writhing larvae that cover the floor in the aptly named Putrid Ducts. But, while in most game worlds everything seems geared towards the player—fun leisure areas prepared for their entertainment, a touch of yellow paint here and there to indicate the way—Hornet’s presence, my presence, seems almost incidental in Pharloom,” MacDonald observed.

She added that some places in Pharloom are not fun at all, and she never wants to see them again, and despite the pain she felt, she never thought of giving up the game. “I took breaks from Silksong — one or two weeks at a time — but I didn’t give up, not even when I got stuck on a near-impossible challenge involving waves of aggressive crows,” she pointed out.

She continued: “Sometimes Silksong feels like a sadistic, unnecessarily punitive game: taking a hit usually means losing not one, but two precious Hornet life units. I don’t really know why I didn’t give up. It wasn’t pure stubbornness. I think that, since I was already suffering all the time, adding a little more suffering to my days by choice gave me, at least, a sense of control.”

After four months and 40 hours, she had done practically everything there was to do in Pharloom. She emphasized that, with Silksong, she learned to play video games slowly and also learned many things about pain, mainly that recognizing and adapting life to it doesn’t mean giving up.

“It means you can keep living – keep playing,” she stated. “...Silksong helped me to face suffering in a slightly different way. There doesn’t have to be a purpose; it doesn’t necessarily come with a clear narrative of perseverance and ultimate redemption. But you can learn to cope with it. You can move on,” she concluded.

Hollow knight: Silksong was officially released on September 4, 2025. After years of anticipation, the game became one of the biggest hits of the year, receiving critical and commercial acclaim.

Current information (January 2026):

Release Status: The game is available for PC (Windows, Linux, macOS), Nintendo Switch (1 and 2), PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It is also part of the Xbox Game Pass catalog.

Awards: Recently, on January 3, 2026, Valve announced that Silksong won the Game of the Year (GOTY) award at the Steam Awards 2025, chosen by popular vote. At The Game Awards 2025, it won the Best Action-Adventure Game category.

Free Expansion (2026): Team Cherry has announced a major expansion titled "Sea of ​​Sorrow," scheduled for release in 2026. This content will be free and will feature a nautical theme, with new areas, bosses, and tools for the protagonist Hornet.

Hollow Knight Original: An optimized version of the first game ("Nintendo Switch 2 Edition") is in development for Nintendo's new console and is also expected to arrive in 2026.

by mundophone