We finally got our hands on Hollow Knight: Silksong at PAX West 2025! We’ve been waiting on Hornet to make her debut for years at this point, but was the wait worth it? Find out in our hands-on preview!
Walking into Nintendo’s media suite was a surreal experience – cozy demo stations set up all along the outer edges of the conference room on the 6th floor of Seattle’s Arch building. Kinda made me pine for the old meeting rooms from the E3 days, but alas, those days are long behind us.
Walking in, I noticed that the demo station for Hollow Knight: Silksong was open, so needless to say, I decided it was time to check out one of my most anticipated games of PAX immediately!
The rep quickly handed me a controller and asked if I was familiar with the franchise, to which as a nerd I informed him that I had the platinum trophy in Hollow Knight. He smiled and said “then you’ll be right at home”.
Silksong’s demo featured two playable areas: Moss Grotto and some other industrial place that I believe was called Deep Docks. I chose to start off in the Moss Grotto, which I can only assume is the starting area of the full game (spoiler alert, it is).
Hornet wakes up next to what looks like a cage and you’re immediately free to wander around. The more I moved around, there were a few immediate differences I noticed between how Hornet and The Knight.
First off, Hornet is far more agile and not only do you have to be more precise with how you move her, her downstrike is similar to her diving attack in Hollow Knight, so you have to approach pogo attacks with that angle in mind.
The other biggest difference I noticed between the two games was that while Hollow Knight allowed for exploration and seamlessly moving from area to area, Silksong (at least for the purposes of this demo) seems to be much more linear. Exploration eventually led to a boss fight in both biomes without any accidental wandering into spaces meant for later in the adventure.
While I didn’t get much time with the second area due to the 15 minute time limit, Hornet had a few more abilities including her Silkspear which was nice to be able to have a little bit of extra range since her needle has such a small hit window.
Overall, Hollow Knight: Silksong felt incredible to play and the hands-on time made it go from a game I had planned to pick up eventually to a game that I knew I had to buy on launch day.
We’ll have our full review up as soon as we can, but hopefully this PAX West 2025 preview helps to whet your appetite for more Team Cherry deliciousness.
Hollow Knight: Silksong was just released across Windows PC (via Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2, PS4, and PS5 since September 4th.
