Hollow Knight Silksong vs. Hollow Knight: Which Still Rules in 2026?

It has been a year since Hornet finally graced our screens in Hollow Knight: Silksong, and I find myself returning to the original Hollow Knight as much as I devour its sequel. The release of Silksong in 2025 felt like a lost friend returning from a legend, and now, in 2026, the conversation has settled not on which game is better, but on how they illuminate each other like twin moons over a kingdom of bugs.

When Hollow Knight arrived in 2017, it was a lightning strike in the Metroidvania genre—a hand-drawn world so somber and intricate that every frame felt like a secret whispered in ink. The Knight’s silent journey through Hallownest was a masterclass in minimal storytelling, where the environment itself was a narrator of fallen grandeur. Silksong, by contrast, feels like a vibrant opera where Hornet’s red cloak is both a battle cry and a paintbrush. The evolution in motion is immediate: the original game’s downward thrust was a precision tool, a rhythmic punctuation in combat akin to a drummer who never misses a beat. Silksong’s diagonal replacement is more like attempting to play a harp while falling—beautiful when it works, yet maddeningly elusive to master. Even with Crests that mimic the classic downward strike, I never feel the same percussive certainty I once felt piercing an enemy’s crown in the original.

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