Silksong Symposium Sample: Game Review and Full Gameplay Notes

This page samples my "Silksong Symposium" (2025)—specifically "Kicking Things Off," or the portion dedicated to reviewing and studying the game; it includes a "Pros and Cons (tl;dr)" module, as well as my review for Act I and Act II (the base game), and the entirety of gameplay notes and screencaps taken while playing through the game. So you can see what this sample leaves out, I've also included the full table of contents (and disclaimers, above and below the table of contents).

Note: The reason for sharing this section, solo, is because its parent symposium is actually quite large (roughly 225 pages*, as of writing this); i.e., with the pros/cons section, game review and gameplay notes sandwiched between a lengthy introduction and preface, layers-upon-layers of theory (and reiterations of my past work the symposium connects to), future essay ideas, and more. None of that is included here, though. If you want all the theory this sample mentions (and all of the footnotes, too), go to the full symposium on this blog or on my website. —Perse

*The sample is still 102 pages. However, most of those are the gameplay notes, which appear last. The pros/cons section feature, first (~2 pages), followed by the review (6 pages); the rest are the aforementioned notes, which organize into subsections (totaling ~94 pages).

P.S., This sample post is part of my "Silksong Symposium," which itself is part of my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. As such, its contents will be SFW on my old blog or website version, but will feature some censored nudity in specific shots!

Furthermore, "Silksong Symposium" is part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers; i.e., I've worked with muses and models beyond those on my Acknowledgments page, whose featured models worked with me while I produced Sex Positivity. To see everyone I've drawn before, during and after said series, refer to my Sex Work page.

CW: spoilers, various Gothic themes (sexual violence [rape*], live burial and incarceration, entomophobia and other fears/taboo Gothic typically explores)

*Meaning (from my definition) "to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them," generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) […] Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024). We'll revisit this idea more deeply in the "Other Things to Keep in Mind" section.

**Table of Contents (Silksong Symposium)**

Note: The bold section highlights the contents of this sample. —Perse

Persephone's Silksong Symposium [the opening paragraph and disclaimer]
- Opening: Tying Silksong to My Past Work (re: Reversing Abjection, mid-Amazonomachia, in Metroidvania)
- Before We Start
  - About Me (the Researcher and my PhD's Independent Nature)
  - Obligatory Metroidvania Definition
  - Giving Thanks (to Team Cherry and Ginger)
  - Four Main Gothic Theories (essential, do not skip)
    - Short Version
    - Long(er) Version
  - Some (More) Keywords (also essential, do not skip)
    - General Terms
    - Persephone-Specific Terms (abridged)
  - Preface: A Note on Amazons (as Warrior-Maiden Cops, thus Whores in Bad Faith; feat. Hallie Cross)
  - Preface (cont.): Concerning This Symposium's Broader Focus/Conversational Approach; or, a Tangent on Amazons, Metroidvania, Fascism and the Promethean Quest (feat. Jadis)
- Last Call
- Kicking Things Off
- Final Review (of Acts I and II—short and sweet)
- First Impressions for Silksong (factual observations and opinions)

Extra Theory (from the Numinous to Amazons)
- The Numinous (from Walpole to Me)
- Concerning My Research: Mazes, Monsters (re: Amazons), Gothic Theory and Rape, Camping the Canon with Ludo-Gothic BDSM
  - Mazes
  - Monsters (re: Amazons)
  - Other Things to Keep In Mind: Key Gothic Theories, Metroidvania as Canon (to Camp), Rape (my definition), and the Whore's Paradox
  - Camping the Canon (thus Rape) with Metroidvania
- Thematic Analysis; or, Essays on the Promethean Quest in Silksong

Persephone's Silksong Symposium!

Metroidvania are performative places of power and sin, effectively a videogame "equivalent" of the same chronotope seen in Gothic novels or older still, operas and stage plays: the castle, but specifically a black (non-white) castle/whorehouse/den of thieves, ghosts and pirates' sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.

I use quotes because videogames differ greatly in execution from novels or cinema, but collectively uphold the same basic principles despite these differences: the exploration of tremendous obscurity, power and decay from a disadvantaged (and erotic) social-sexual position, one where a prophesized bastard or whore comes home to roost; i.e., the return of a tyrant or profligate, whose fatal homecoming emerges from a half-formed rogue barbarity/derelict, imaginary past (again usually a castle) as traveling pirate ship! (source)

—Persephone van der Waard, "Metroidvania: What Are They (my definition)?" from Persephone's 2025 Metroidvania Corpus

Welcome, dear reader(s), to my Silksong Symposium (SSS, versus SS, for obvious reasons)! In short, the symposium discusses less if the game is Gothic (it is) and more how it is Gothic; i.e., in ways that are useful to my past work this symposium builds upon.

(artist: Fried Unicorn Studio)

Note: Though it borrows material from other pieces of mine (e.g., "Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World," 2024), I'm not sure how thesis-driven this piece will be; i.e., it's a symposium, therefore conversational (and if you want thesis, read my entire Metroidvania chapter, "She Fucks Back" [2024], from the Undead Module). Conversations allow for repetition (a teaching device) amid a chance at new scholarship. Here, our focus will be the Numinous and Promethean Quest—both of which we articulate through ludo-Gothic BDSM as I previously synthesized it: per Amazons, Metroidvania and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine (Gorgons), the heroine huntress Hornet—a Day-of-the-Dead matador [complete with skull mask and red cloak, above]—led to a central menace, her evil double relegated to the maze-in-question, waiting for hugs (or bug hugs); re: hugging the alien during the dialectic of the alien to reverse abjection: us-versus-them, per Kristeva, and one of the four main Gothic theories we'll unpack in "Other Things to Keep In Mind" (the other three being cryptonymy, hauntology and Gothic chronotopes* i.e., that Amazons reify as; e.g., as Amazonian cryptonymy that shows and conceals power in openly defiant/deceptive ways, their nude power a Miltonian "darkness visible" channeling Sun Tzu's adage, mid-dialectic: that "all war is founded on deception"). —Perse

*See: "Four Main Gothic Theories" for their longer definitions. Keywords are color-coded and in bold font.

P.S., While I do specialize in sexuality, we won't be focusing on "thirsty" Hornet fan art; i.e., as that isn't actually in-game (maybe I'll write a small follow-up, down the line). We also won't presently examine how speedrunners play the game (as the leaderboards on Speedrun.com are still locked and will be for another week or so). We'll just be focusing on a single playthrough by me for the time being.

P.P.S., The version of the SSS for this blog and in my corpus are slightly different—mainly the website version including more definitions than this version (whose corpus already features them, earlier in the document).

[...]

Kicking Things Off

The rest of the SSS is dedicated to exploring and reviewing the game. Initially this portion led with my first-impression gameplay notes. However, as those grew, I found my actual review marooned; i.e., trapped at the end of the document by hours and hours of painstaking notetaking (and over a hundred screencaps)! For your convenience, I've decided to draft a quickie "Pros and Cons" section, placing it (and my review of the game) at the front of "Kicking Things Off." After those, you may access the entirety of my notes and read them at your leisure!

(artist: Nitric Acid)

Pros and Cons (tl;dr)

My quick takeaways, after beating most of Act II (thus most of the non-hidden content).

Pros

awesome bosses, most with multiple phases (sometimes up to four)
music grows on you (especially the boss music)
towns (and side quests) add variety in between main quest and exploration
plenty of non-linear and linear exploration (search), but also platforming and combat per the Metroidvania "search/action" formula
plenty of quirky NPCs with their own little stories
area design/variety is excellent, both with visuals and control scheme(s)
beautiful graphics and sound design unexpectedly aid in exploration
great combat modules; i.e., robust crest, charm, magic and sub-weapon systems (which all hybridize for lots of synergy and build options)
tons of enemies, traps and pitfalls per area/Act, all of them excellent
wonderful use of ambushes to ramp up suspense
great Amazonian protagonist (something of a Spider-Woman-meets-Zorro who—dressed in black and red [always a classic]—takes exactly zero shit from creepy, not-so-secret admirers):

(artist: Zummeng)

great villains (even Lace, who's a fucking brat)
great mixture of platforming and combat, per area
cutscenes are nifty (if few-and-far between)
the Bell Beast
plenty of early-, mid- and end-game secrets (even if many are a little too esoteric/cryptic, below)
plenty of in-game jokes/quality-of-life stuff (e.g., rosary necklaces)
great community still making great art, years before, during and after Silksong was announced (above and below:

(artist: Zummeng)

Cons

frustrating cartographic bottlenecks inside the embedded labyrinth sections from Act II (which sometimes make main quest progression very one-way and cryptic)
equally frustrating lack of individual room completion for the world map (aka the "fill in the squares" style from Super Metroid, onwards, which—notably absent in Silksong—makes it very easy to skip vital items/areas per location, then have no idea where they are, afterwards)
giant larger map makes it hard to keep track of where you've been/need to go back to, regarding above problems (tl;dr – backtracking really sucks/requires guides to save time)
annoying ability to do certain side quests "backwards," accessing final area before quest has even started (e.g., plasmium quest; see: "First Impressions")
lack of clues with some puzzles, versus too many clues for non-helpful things
certain puzzles boarder on Myst-level vague (e.g., the music pillars)
certain areas suck to find (e.g., Bilewater)
certain areas suck to navigate once found/are too tight, dark, one-way and booby trapped (e.g., Wormways and the area beneath Whispering Vaults)
total lack of stationary map vendor and infrequent map access (e.g., Shakra only giving me the map marker for elevator way points after I discovered all of them; i.e., some maps are sold to you, some are found—and it all felt very random)
not enough bees

(artist: Zummeng)

The Verdict

Metroidvania habitually deal with sham-like gameworlds, monstrous-feminine friends and foes, and false tyrants. Unlike those, Hollow Knight: Silksong gives up the ghost, yielding a variety of pleasant surprises amid its army of obstacles (and Numinous backdrops). Simply put, Silksong is an awesome, awesome game—well worth the wait and up there with Super Metroid, Zelda II (fight me), SotN or OG Hollow Knight as one of the greatest Metroidvania of all time. Is it the best? Eh, your millage may vary, and such things are ultimately arbitrary.

From an objective standpoint, achieving total perfection is denied—sadly blemished by some irritating design choices that "come with the territory"; i.e., the game is admittedly a little too ambitious, in spots, but jam-packed full of goodies to keep you coming back, regardless! The flaws didn't sour my maiden voyage (or desire to return to and keep at it), but did make my first playthrough a tad bittersweet! But barring any nasty surprise that Act III has in store (the hidden portion of the game), I only expect things to improve, from here on out!

To conclude, in a time of corporate overreach and AAA oppression, Silksong shows that Metroidvania—and by extension, the Gothic at large—are alive an well. "We live in Gothic times," indeed—a thing we workers make as much for ourselves as responding to the world (and Capitalist Realism) around us! We're all queens under Communism, and Silksong is our royal jelly!

Final Score (for the Base Game): 95 Lifeblood out of 100 "Not the Bees!"

(source)

Final Review (short and sweet)

My opinion of Silksong combines theory and statements of fact (observation) with experience. I'll be keeping this review short and sweet (a bit like Sabrina Carpenter's Daisy Dukes, below—the Metroidvania home to many different kinds of monstrous-feminine, but especially globetrotting whores)!

(Sabrina Carpenter's "Manchild," 2025)

What a time to be a Metroidvania fan! After X-Fusion released and reviewing and playing that game, it feels utterly wild to me—suddenly able to take my skills, honed over ten years, and using them to review the Metroidvania to end all Metroidvania eight years after its development and release; i.e., coinciding with my time in grad school onwards: into postgrad and beyond, approaching this project after having written so much on Metroidvania, already!

To it, I can really build on my research, here, but also take my time with this project; i.e., going in blind to enjoy myself. Having done so, this review takes the theoretical scaffold—itself embedded in my larger corpus and book series—and marries it to my list of first impressions; re: playing blind while taking notes. It's the best possible way to review something—not to simply slap a number score on it, but get all up in its guts while contributing hermeneutically to a larger body of work (at times setting the theory up and being too tired to play the game, but in truth enjoying myself plenty once I laid the groundwork out).

All that being said, let's get started!

Note: I'm writing this review after having beat the main game, but not 100%. This game, compared to the original, was released fully finished, no DLC required. So there are things I've missed (e.g., town quests, below); i.e., it's only based on a single playthrough of Acts I and most of Act II (with a second follow-up review/addendum to be written for Act III/future playthroughs). —Perse

To frank, my initial feelings were a little underwhelming. However, the more I played, the more incredible (and open) the experience became—though, I do have some critiques of the game, overall! Furthermore, I probably wouldn't say that Silksong is as radically different from OG Hollow Knight as Super Metroid was to Metroid II (1991), but the fact remains, it appears similar while playing in ways that set it apart. In that respect, it's the MGM Wizard of Oz (1939) versus Baum's original 1900 book:

While plenty of things hold their own versus the original, the music this time out—while serviceable—just isn't as memorable overall as Hollow Knight 2017. And maybe that comes from me having had more time to play the former, thus commit its music to memory. However, the music for Hollow Knight wasn't always the most melody driven. Like "Surface Runner" from Metroid II, some tracks are straight-up bangers, but the tone was less anthemic and more morose and thoughtful. Even so, the City of Tears theme still slaps, and many of the horror themes do as well (say nothing about the Castlevania-esque music for Grimm). By comparison, Silksong's music doesn't really have any bangers. Everything works, but it doesn't really ever catch fire (maybe Act III does).

Conversely, the bosses and crest system are easily the game's strongest suit. I mostly stuck with the Reaper crest, but found myself using the Hunter crest by the end. Needless to say, there's plenty of different abilities to use (e.g., the Beast crest, above—rawr). You get stronger as you collect power ups, but not too strong (thought I haven't collected all of them, yet). Instead, the fights wind up feeling like call-and-response dances[34] (a la Dark Souls, 2009)—challenging but not brutal, at least not to the point that you want to pull your hair out (with just enough space between the save point and battle to make death impactful, but not deflating in defeat). Tougher bosses require you to use more and more of your abilities to overcome, and it synergizes nicely with the ammo/currency system if you lose. This game doesn't feel overbaked, but well-tested and thought-out.

Furthermore, the secrets for Act I and II are less cryptic and more rewarding (read: without feeling cheap); the platforming is less relegated to a single area (re: the White Palace), thus seldom prone to prior Super-Meatboy-levels of intensity and rather spread throughout the entire game to a balanced degree. The bosses are where the biggest challenge is, but the platforming holds its own, too. Like SotN, Team Cherry gives numerous nods to Zelda II without making their game open world. Even so, there's still tons to see and do!

For example, after killing a local "Jabberwock," of sorts, you rebuild the former boom town that hired you… only to watch it get ignominiously trampled, Juggernaut-style; i.e., by a second Skull Tyrant seeking revenge for you having killed (ostensibly) its mate (and only for shards and beads). The town heals, but the initial shock gives quite the kick!

To that, Metroidvania are expected gateways bridging our world and the Numinous—with Hornet's travel companions prone to invasion from "feral" elements of nature that she, the good Amazon (or maybe the Gorgon), must put down. But if the victory feels a bit hollow on purpose, it's actually exhilarating in practice. So abjection should; so should leaving Paradise into Hell, or returning from Hell to find home is Hell—e.g., Hornet defeating Widow with her own fabled strength to then rape her with Hornet's "nail" (below). It's very medieval, reminding people that Hornet's the cop and Widow is the madwoman in the attic: "Reader, I face-fucked her."

Ostensibly. It's also the Gothic (dualistic) version of "cleaning house," one tied to older village scapegoat narratives and frankly death in general (the Gorgon's severed head apotropaic when killed, the Amazon apotropaic when compelled to kill [classically] for the state); it's also, per ludo-Gothic BDSM, just a touch kinky—if rooted in the biological as rapacious. Seeing how consent is non-existent, in nature, we see Communism eating Capitalism alive!

Spiders—the game's stigma animal and sacred cow—are Hornet's sigil, her feudal crest while she proves she's literally "one of the good ones," killing bad spiders. But, again, this isn't as simple as it sounds. Per Creed, Athena and the Gorgon are both ambiguous, overlapping and dualistic as "two sides of the same coin"; per me, these ambiguities play out during ludo-Gothic BDSM—i.e., insofar as how we interpret (and learn from) our avatar's actions while we control them: playing Dorothy hunting bad witches for good ones, but feeling sympathy for the Devil in ways that remind us of one witch's hypocrisy scapegoating another (re: Federici). There's more than one interpretation; i.e., the sum of which holistically drive towards more areas to rescue, more quests to act out, more white castles to restore (from villages to actual castles), more witches to hunt while "following the Yellow Brick Road" (even if, just as often, the game prefers blues and reds, below); re:

I love Silksong—it takes me back to when I was a kid, playing on my uncle's Amiga (the early '90s). It has a similar level of wonder and scale. I still can't believe they're selling this for $20! Then again, it's Team Cherry making the product of a lifetime and giving it to the people (rejecting raw greed in the process). It's "Heaven in a wildflower," as Blake would say—made with time, care and love.

It also bears an Orientalist stamp that's neither here nor there, but not strictly xenophobic; i.e., the false mother having hidden spider qualities, below, her outwardly two-armed body denoting a cryptonymic sense of assimilation that Hornet ultimately rejects: by reversing abjection, forcing her wicked stepmother to show her original Gorgon-esque figure—while wearing the holy attire (unmasking the fraud, pantsing the prude, etc)!

Like a good Gothic novel (e.g., Lewis' The Monk or Radcliffe's The Italian), Silksong kept getting better and better, and I loved nearly every second of it—nearly. The experience isn't completely perfect. Instead, it feels like two different games, at times (or three; e.g., Metroid and Castlevania, but also Castlevania, Simon's Quest and Dracula's Curse, rolled into one); and while these hold out very well and generally mesh to an organic degree, transitioning between them is occasionally rough—i.e., can lead to some unfortunate mid-game confusion, meaning after much of the map is filled out and you have to start completing the main quest (re: boss keys).

I think it's also worth noting that your mileage may vary—meaning with the "White Palace 2.0" bits, after the exploration elements have dried up. Personally I'm not a fan and never was; i.e., my criticisms from the first game still hold up; re: "If you don't like intense platforming challenges (and Myst-level puzzles-in-puzzles), then fuck you!" Luckily there's more combat woven in, to spice things up this time—and various charms make it easier than it could be, otherwise—but that's still not the kind of challenge I was hoping for, this time around. It is what it is!

There also remain elements of the main quest that feel "jank"; i.e., bits and pieces that result from trying to be multiple games at once that don't really gel; re: various bottleneck progression points that—ensconced Russian-doll inside a labyrinth-in-a-maze—led to, along with a frustrating lack of clues and surprisingly unintuitive pathways, more frustration that I want to admit, by the end of Act II.

A huge part of this was the map function. Whereas Metroid maps or SotN each let you know if you've missed single parts of a given room, Silksong maps do nothing of the kind; i.e., making it very easy to think you've explored an entire area when you haven't! This was a recurring problem in the game for me, and one that felt more frequent here than in OG Hollow Knight. Many of the sequel's Act III areas felt especially cryptic—as much if not more so than the original!

Even so, the Gothic has loved a giant "hard to get" medieval since Horace Walpole—less David vs Goliath and more a family reunion, one held between Hippolyta and the Gorgon (or vice versa, mid-Amazon-confusion). I loved the game's Gothic themes, including a frank return to a dark pastoral, one whose Freudian uncanny reflects in cryptonymic, female/monstrous-feminine honesty on life and death; i.e., in scapegoat language that feels more descriptive than not—not dogma, but a provocative slice of alternate history whose confounding albedo remains reflective regarding our own world-in-crisis: graveyards, but also places of fresh life amid the rituals of reunion with death-as-alien. Silksong handles it all with Gothic maturity but also spectral enchantment and a seemingly elegant innocence—what the Catholics call "grace" (I think): big city nights, small town blues.

Again, the game—while certainly ambitious and unrestrained to an unprecedented level—isn't perfect; i.e., Team Cherry made exactly the kind of game they wanted to make, one that mixes and matches a lot of different ideas that don't initially feel "for me"; re: the pacing issues, mid-mental-stack, overwhelming me through a concentric learning curve; e.g., one minute, you're playing classic Metroid, the next you're playing Dark Souls—solving for X, then learning a fugue before juggling sticks of dynamite(!). I felt like a young Austenian heroine, being asked to adopt a variety of "female accomplishments" by an overbearing Mr. Darcy (closer to Northanger than Prejudice): "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"; i.e., not in design, but in going from challenge to challenge: constantly having to readjust on the fly until I felt a bit… thin ("like butter scrapped over too much bread").

But doubtless that's just the maiden voyage. I've no doubt subsequent playthroughs will smooth the rough patches out; i.e., after Medusa's giant cunt has been well-and-truly "broken in." However, I can't say that it's been the smoothest experience, until then (a bit like having really nice sex and then repeatedly hitting the cervix out of the blue—ouch)!

(artist: Vansik)

All in all, Silksong ends with some blemishes on a really nice fruit, but only superficial ones. Given the incomplete parts of the map (re: Act III), I have lots left to explore (thus secret endings and bosses to uncover). I look forward to it—mostly!

Note: Despite having RPG elements, Silksong didn't have much grinding in it—with my playtime (including some AFK moments) clocking in at ~55 hours. I can't honestly remember the last time I spent 70-80 hours in a game (not including MMORPGs like Everquest or Team Fortress 2, 1999 and 2007). Maybe FF7? —Perse

**First Impressions for Silksong (factual observations and opinions)**

These are my initial, basic impressions of the game; i.e., as I initially play through it, writing down semi-chronological statements of fact and opinions before combining them into my overall experience, post hoc (which the review is for). For now, I'll list them as bullet points (dividing them between acts, below):

Note: This game is fucking huge. For real, I did not expect it to be so massive, but didn't want to skimp on the details, either! So I just decided to write everything down. I'm glad I did, too, because there's a lot to enjoy/archive! —Perse, 9/15/2025

P.S., I didn't write this portion as a strategy guide, but it kind of acts like one. Also, if you don't want to be spoiled to Hell and back, kindly skip this part!

Act I and Base Game

The game is very Alt+Tab friendly, making it easy to take notes while playing.
While I have old woman reflexes, the game plays nicely on a keyboard; apparently the same is true of a controller (according to a friend, though it's so addicting they've tired their thumbs out[!]: "100% thumb death; my thumbs don't wanna thumb").
I love the mixed currency system (shards and prayer beards), and the fact that your silk (the game's mana system) doesn't regen by default; you have to hit enemies to refill it (or attack silk threads).
To this, benches don't recharge silk, either, making it all the more precious (this will come into play much more, during Act II)!

Hornet is not a silent protagonist; she doesn't talk-talk, insofar as she reads her lines, but the VA is good. This straw dog has bite and bark!
Amazons are not modest; when Hornet heals, her skirt flies up and you can see her naked(?) body (nudity is strength, for Amazons).
Air heal is nice (and you can do it by default, too). It's especially useful with the double-heal charm, which takes longer to use. Simply jump away/over your enemies; heal and watch as they struggle to reach you!
Double-heal feels amazing, especially during bench droughts. Furthermore, some enemies only respawn at benches, while others respawn when you enter/exit a room (useful for the same reasons).
Your silk spool breaks on death, meaning your spool upgrades won't work until you reclaim your cocoon (a stationary object versus the shade copy of you, from the first game). Your cocoon always gives you full silk when you collect it (which is useful for boss fights—for the fight, itself, but also for healing at the start of the fight if you've taken damage on the way back).

Lava areas are a classic of the 1982 Pitfall-style action/adventure (say nothing of the monomyth sending players into hellish, Numinous territories for thousands of years). They appeared perhaps most famously in Super Mario Bros. 1, adopted soon after by Metroid 1. Silksong borrows from the same tradition (above), having more lava areas than before, but also cold areas (more on this, deeper in). The lava areas also include: heated floors that literally keep you on your toes, as well as bomb-like enemies that explode on death (one example basically being enemies that throw bombs at you, which you can deflect with your nail during "dynamite baseball").

(source: "'The Map Is a Lie': the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Origins and Lineage," 2023; artist: Devilhs)

Per the Promethean myth, power is something to steal from the past (above); i.e., per a Protestant ethic that abandons its principles to let the middle class slum. Puzzle-based action/adventures allude, Tarzan-style to Pitfall (and Tomb Raider's sexpot Lara Croft [re: above], 1996)—with Hornet hanging over lava by a literal thread (these sections actually letting players take advantage of silk's from-zero-to-one regenerative qualities):

Speaking of Lara Croft, Silksong seemingly has no underwater swimming like her first game famously advertised (the trope of the "expert treasure hunter" from Tolkien onwards, but sexed up per the usual "damsel-in-distress" Gothic tropes afforded a masculine [monstrous-feminine] element):

The crafting alloy (which I presume is eventually for upgrading your nail's damage) is much more obvious than in the first game (which just had them generally appear as white glowing item dots); you also have to mine the ore, which—while not the most engaging thing on the planet—adds just a touch of interactivity to the exchange (and which certain enemies can rudely interrupt while your health is low and your back is turned, below):

You don't have to sit and watch a bench or waypoint fully open/unlock after you pay the fare.
The graphics are definitely an upgrade from Hollow Knight. Everything appears as lush as that game did with its final update, and then some (tons of lighting effects and multiple planes of vision).
For a fantasy game in a fictional place with a megachurch tied to a dead god come back to life and worshipped by little bugs (a metaphor for size difference), Silksong is largely lite on goofy fantasy names; e.g., nothing as remotely silly (and awesome) as Merv the cat and the almighty Bagagwa. Instead, it's mostly portmanteaus and basic English nouns (with "Pharloom" sounding rather like a Super Metroid nod, specially to that game's Phantoon boss).

In keeping with the medieval tradition, it has many areas that are ostensibly monotone—only for different colors of the characters to stand out against these drably "Puritan" backgrounds; e.g., the blue of the Pinstress and Hornet's red feeling like a tourney of female knights (or Amazons wearing dress-like "tabards," above); i.e., Bakhtin's medieval chronotope, one of outdoor pageantry (and signature shows of force) that medieval knights were known for (what Jim Carrey would refer to literally as "Medieval Times!" in The Cable Guy [1996]—the difference between the medieval and Gothic chronotopes being the focus: the knights [and damsels] versus the castles, themselves)!
For a game about bugs, this game doesn't have many "bugs" in it—glitches, that is! That being said, I haven't noticed many spiders (apart from Hornet, who's a chimera), nor butterflies nor scorpions; I have seen red fire ants and little purple bees this time around (many of the bugs—while noticeably more colorful than in OG Hollow Knight—seem kind of generalized and cartoonish, but many more seem based on real-life species):

Bone Bottom (this game's starter town area, making it a Zeldavania of sorts minus an open world/only having closed space) has piano music that sounds slightly like Resident Evil's save rooms.
Like Zelda II, each town you encounter in Silksong has quests to perform, and which the game calls "wishes" (making the gameplay wish fulfillment, making Hornet a granter/fulfiller of wishes—a demon).
The Act I gameworld appears non-linear, making it a maze in function (re: "Mazes and Labyrinths"); i.e., multiple towns in closed space, and with various RPG elements to enact and mission objectives to complete, Zelda-style (quest-style hunting bosses in that franchise, versus minibosses in Metroid 1 [1986] onwards): destitute frontier towns in an ongoing post-apocalypse, which the heroine—right out of a Western—returns to restore order to. In keeping with the medieval into the Western, such spaces would combine aspects of the currently forbidden out in the open—brothels, but also graveyards turning a boom town into a ghost town, mid-bust (with Persephone something of a tour guide, below): a "curse" to lift (and distance from Capitalism).
I found myself using the menu teleport from Metroid 1 or Zelda II (exit game; return to starter area—though here, it's return to last bench).
The start of the game is a little slow-going (no movement upgrades), but really starts to open up, into the mid game; i.e., after you upgrade your cloak (letting you glide on thermals).

The game is predominantly melee-based; i.e., making it a Castlevania-style Metroidvania, in terms of combat, but spatially maze-like, not labyrinthine (unicursal, linear); re: as Metroid-style Metroidvania are.
That being said, the "clocktower" sections in Greymoor are straight out of CV3(1989).
The exploration feels easy enough to do, while the combat feels nicely balanced (not too hard, not too easy). Hornet's something of a "scrappy" gymnast—athletic and graceful, but able to stand and bang if she needs to.
The bosses hit harder than in Hollow Knight, and many of the enemies and environmental pitfalls do double damage (also, the game has tripwires that you'll learn to spot and manually disarm).
Many bosses have multiple phases, and make better use of their environments than OG Hollow Knight did; e.g., Moorwing giving you a whole stage (lit all spooky like Jack the Ripper) to move around, inside.
The crest system allowing for different builds is cool (and changing your needle effects with them reminds me of the Mega Man Zero series); e.g., it not only adds ludo-visual variety but serves as a reliable money sink, too.
When acquiring new crests, the game automatically equips them, forcing you to use them without any charms equipped (familiarizing yourself with new tech while at a disadvantage).

You can upgrade crests, too (above), allowing for even more synergy and player choice.
You get less overall charms, but can combine them more diversely through charms and CV-style sub-weapons (the latter which require hearts acquired by hitting handles—a nod to Catholic miracles and Neo-Gothic anti-Catholic dogma). There's loads of tradeoffs; e.g., spamming sub-weapon attacks can do a lot of quick "burst" damage, but you don't recharge silk. As such, he combat feels more simple at the start, but becomes deceptively advanced (and more fun)!

The quests are better, all-around. Not only do they organize by type (above), but they introduce and evolve as you go—giving you a gradual sense of progression (and demand for upgrades); i.e., one that evolves alongside your discovering of crests.
The quest mobs factor into the environment well; i.e., they're as good as the bosses are (optional minibosses, essentially).
Health upgrades feel scarce, early on, making it hard to fall back onto cheesy "tank" builds, right out the gate. That being said, the game handsomely rewards you for exploration, too; i.e., backtracking lets you find items you can't always buy in stores; e.g., charms, but also craft metal. Areas that seem useless early on reveal hidden puzzles and rewards later (a Metroidvania classic).

Hornet's movement powerups (and variety the crests offer, in that department) are less jarring and more nuanced than the Crystal Heart from OG Hollow Knight. In short, there's more choice regarding movement, less big areas you sail through; re: ones where you're historically unable to move dynamically so much as watch yourself move through a single cinematic-style motion.
You can pogo spikes, but not thorns (an environmental movement nerf to pogo).
The screen doesn't go black/partially stun you when you get hit, which I prefer.
The Gothic is a site of decayed power, including left-behind churches with a carceral feel to them; Silksong speaks to an Orientalist flair of the holy traveler (on silk roads).
Metroidvania are called "search/action," in Japan, but the same idea applies in America: there's a map; fill it out and find shit, especially power as Numinous. There exist multiple areas, each with its own flavor (the polish really shows, everything gorgeous and fully fleshed-out). Silksong doesn't just have areas, but objectives and—on top of that—multiple acts (not currently sure if areas share the same map or not).

This game is huge, its spaces feeling far bigger than Hollow Knight (which is nuts, because that game was one of the biggest Metroidvania ever). Everything is color coded, but also lush (for the green areas) and foreboding (for the fiery zones), etc—the Elden Ring (2022) treatment, in other words (re: quests, enemies, and closed/open areas that feel contained, regardless)!
To traverse the giant sprawling spaces, the game has waypoints (appearing in SotN, onwards); when Hornet uses them to mount the Bell Beast, she somersaults like Samus Aran does.
The Bell Beast is basically the luck dragon from The Never Ending Story (1984), but grounded (the bell rooms basically leaf piles for it to jump through). He's best boi.
Being able to look at your map while moving (the quick map feature) is a nice touch; i.e., not quite Super Metroid's permanent minimap, but also more engaging from a gameplay standpoint.
Silksong is more of a platformer/vertically designed than Hollow Knight was; i.e., it's less "search" and more "action," Hornet more mobile and less glass canon (explosive) than the original protagonist was.

Despite having the ability to heal, I constantly want to both: top myself off after losing only two masks (for fear of ambushes), and wait until my health is lower to heal more The variety of enemies (and environmental hazards) has me never feeling fully secure or safe—I like it!
You can't rush through areas, but have to take your time (at least early on). It's very engaging—insofar as you can't wall-climb or -slide like the OG hero, but can ledge-grab. Eventually you get wall-slide and wall-jump, opening up the game, but you can only jump on smooth flat surfaces (which many in the game aren't).
Unlike a ledge grab, you can also dash over short elevations (about half Hornet's height) without
Crests also have unique secret attacks; e.g., the reaper crest's dash uppercut.
Striking enemies can interrupt your heals and attack spells; however, you can also interrupt theirs (most enemies in the game cannot heal themselves).
In rare cases, a boss scream animation (at the start of the fight) can eat your heal. Some enemies can even eat your mana (the ones that do suitably rare and semi-random, below)!

This game's upgrades are less plentiful, but higher in demand; i.e., compared to Super Metroid (and that whole franchise), the balance of quantity and quality (of non-movement items, namely health and ammo) is much better in Silksong. To it, you're incentivized to go and explore beyond just, "because I'm supposed to." Even with the spool halves, you don't get enough mana for double heals, anytime soon (I think you'll need all of the spools for that, but I'm not sure). Bottom line is: items that permanently increase your health and mana are exceptionally rare (mask piece = this game's version of the heart pieces from Zelda); items that change how you move or attack are far more common (though as of Act II and exploring much of both maps, I still haven't found a way to upgrade my nail damage).
Animals drop shards, and possessed "human" bugs—called "pilgrims," this time around—drop beads; i.e., when returning to older spaces, you adopt older forms of exchange: barter but also theft through force (rapine).
Shards and beads work better than geo or exp, which you could just stockpile. Here, you can't just endlessly level up (e.g., Alucard from SotN) but can choose to use beads for different items, abilities and keys that impact play more greatly. Shards—while relatively cosmetic and minimal, in the grand scheme—lend combat more interaction and choice, as well.
Stockpiling beads that survive, postmortem, can be done if placed on necklace strings, but you can't use them until you break the strings again. Both have costs, again giving your actions further weight (also, just having the option for peace of mind is nice; the game has a lot of small quality-of-life choices that really enhance the experience).
You can heal more, but less often (three masks once, versus two masks, multiple times); traps hit way harder (and are more frequent); and I found myself using the "look down" function more often in Silksong than OG Hollow Knight. I also found myself thinking about resources more, but not to such a degree that I minded.
You can eventually make/upgrade your own traps (which, again, I'll call sub-weapons because of their requirement on ammunition), which remind me a bit of the trap skill tree for the Assassin, from Diablo 2's 2001 expansion, Lord of Destruction ("They'll never see me coming!"). Fancier sub-weapons are more expensive, but whose investment with bosses feels worth it provided you don't repeatedly die (sunk cost); i.e., burning your potions and sub-weapons into a boss can really be spammed, making you feel like Eric Bana's villain in Star Trek (2009): "Fire everything!
Traps are deadly but ambushes are deadlier (and rarer); boss ambushes are the worst.
The creepy bug world is oddly beautiful, reminding the player they—while being a huntress—are not at the top of the food chain.

Candles are a good visual marker for chapels; re: where crests are found; i.e., giving better battles than OG Hollow Knight, whose best fights were locked away in a concentric boss rush DLC (the sword masters in that game normally just giving you new abilities, "pretty as you please"). The Numinous is grounded in worship (e.g., convulsionnaires and rapture), these entities from Silksong's chapels—defeated in knightly combat (duels)—something of an explained supernatural reduced by arguments of force (re: Radcliffe; e.g., Ludovico vs Emily St. Aubert arguing about ghosts being real, in Udolpho).
As Ginger points out, many of the changes feel similar-but-different; i.e., on par with Ocarina of Time (1998) vs Majora's Mask (2000).

Hornet is a badass, but has a "maidenesque" side (the game even calls you one, above—a quality common to Amazons despite their fetishized origins). Specifically she has a chance to leave the castle, but doesn't because she has unfinished business; i.e., she's "in danger" and will forever be unless she "does her duty." The price of her freedom? Catching the cult leader, the rapist, the freaky bondage expert literally stringing everyone up (the vampire, in terms of the spidery implications demonizing arachnids). It's very Radcliffean/damselesque, save that Hornet combines the militant fighter with the nosy sleuth:

Sub-weapons are handy for killing a near-dead enemy without using silk (so you can heal after).
Impaling dead enemies on spikes—only for them to go "ah!" when they land on them—is very Environmental kills extend to drowning your enemies or dunking them in lava (which makes them explode).
Being able to dash while in water is a nice upgrade from OG Hollow Knight.

Slow-mo kills—especially after hard-ass fights (e.g., the savage beastfly being really challenging, above). In a world where the strong survive, you either gotta look stylish while kicking ass, or catch your enemy flat-footed/on the hip!
Hornet's iconic red clothes help her stand out more from the blue-ish grey backgrounds (extra points for it being a turtleneck, too).
Floating like Mary Poppins is admittedly hilarious, but also an oddly useful combat dodge (also, being able to slowly float downwards makes blind drops easier to handle; re: versus looking down)!
Alongside the shard system for sub-weapons (currency for ammo)—and heal restricted to a full bar of silk (re: mana)—the Zelda-II-style pogo has been swapped out for a less abusable diagonal attack (for the first crest; the Reaper crest gives you OG pogo).
There's a ton of ability variation as the game progresses; re: pogo—first not having it, and then unlocking it in different orders; i.e., discovering crests is non-linear, meaning different kinds of pogo jump depending which way you ultimately go: diagonal, diagonal roll, straight down with cleave, and straight down with increased speed but reduced range (maybe others, not sure).
This variation includes crest, sub-weapon and charm builds, some more optimal than others. Most are viable.
Not all the variation is my cup of tea—e.g., on par with the blue laser from Raiden II (1993) barely being viable comparable to spreadshot, in that game—but more variation (and synergy) adds to replayability and that's never anything but good, in my mind!

The beautiful singing of Shakra the map keeper (above) travels through the maze; i.e., in ways that, along with other voices, besides, help guide the player towards someone if they don't have a map (useful for speedruns)—or out of the maze while inside it, inverting the siren myth. Shakra seems vaguely African-coded, but in an ostensibly culturally appreciative way, relaid in Gothic space and time!
Edward Said's Orientalism is combined with a bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) per the warrior detective (which hunters classically were, in hunter/gatherer societies): lands of a mystical exotic full of warriors; re (from the Poetry Module):

My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn't so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray's creation of sexual difference). I'm hardly the first person to notice this:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng's "'The Most Powerful Weapon You Have': Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita," 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, "Commy-Mommy" means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the "rape" castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others. I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn't reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien (source: "In Search of the Secret Spell," 2024).

On one hand, the Numinous atmosphere has an element of the Sublime to it; i.e., of nature to a chthonic, underworldly yet still animalistic, "of the jungle" degree. This reflects in the architecture as seemingly made, but also grown (making buildings seem haunted by a human defense mechanism, but one borrowed from a primordial past; e.g., moths and bird spots, the forest defending itself from invaders): consent does not exist in nature, only fight or flight (and flop, freeze or fawn, which are classically human rape defenses, ergo anti-predation mechanisms).
On the other hand, the "civilization" side of the coin is more manmade—the discarded sewer or mineshaft, but also derelict catacombs, underground lairs, untended churches, and seemingly haunted crypts (all that gloomy inhospitable-amid-the-hospitable shit). There's also highways traveled by pilgrims, either overcome by Otto's sense of the alien divine, the colossal, the cyclopean (itself an architectural stone-laying technique from Antiquity, meaning "to have been placed there as if by giants"). As a huntress in a postapocalypse, you're delving into what nature has partially reclaimed (the jump-scare monsters in tight claustrophobic tunnels, below, are a nice nod to the City of Tears sewers from the first game):

There appear to be non-insect enemies, like small mammals and birds (corvids)—implying you're out of your element. The corvids—unlike other animals—drop beads (loving sparkly things, just like in real life). Also, bird ninjas!
The game does not appear to have a torch, like the candle in Zelda II (which the first game required in certain areas, with the firefly lantern).
Being a churchly "other" land piloted by an Amazon, Hornet steals rosaries from people hypnotized by a foreign peak (nods to Jerusalem or Mecca, perhaps); i.e., maps are tools of conquest, treasure maps to be navigated through theft and force: breaking or otherwise lifting the curse through monomythic violence while "starting in Hell."

The pilgrims are wound in silk and driven, mid-partition, to attack the huntress—similar to the orange moss of the Radiance, from the first game except one is a hidden infection (madness), the other a hidden servitude, or bondage (conversion therapy): "You'll float, too!" It's very spidery (above)!
The music is a little less engaging than OG Hollow Knight (so far).
The muttering of the converts sounds like the parasite-controlled villagers from RE4 (2005).

The lava area in Silksong reminds me of the Dragon Room from RE4, too (above).
There's also bigger bosses in Silksong comparable to that game's larger bosses; e.g., Fourth Chorus—the size of a cathedral—rivaling El Gigante in terms of sheer terrifying size (rawr):

Certain bosses are harder from lack of equipment, early on; certain bosses are harder (or easier) depending on your equipment, which changes how you move and attack.
There's less variation with charms, and more with crests and memory seals; i.e., that force the player to try again later/on a different playthrough, and all because builds have a limit to what you can hold at once (no overcharging).
Some bosses are optional (from quests or chapels), and tend to be hard while also changing how the game plays substantially if you beat them (re: chapels and crests). However, plenty of bosses are gatekeepers to main-quest progression and still offer a good challenge. I only fought one boss where I thought afterwards, "Well, that was underwhelming."
The Bell Hermit is basically Diogenes critiquing Alexander (a false god, but also gods alienated from their humanity via godhood; i.e., the Frankenstein problem, insofar as the Creature is physically impervious but mentally cut off, stunted or otherwise ostracized from those around him by the equally alienated Victor):

I'm not through the game yet, but the standout improvement over the first game is bosses. In OG Hollow Knight, they tended to be afterthoughts/feel unfinished—with only Nightmare King Grimm or Radiance being a challenge prior to Godmaster (2018), whose boss rush feels far too divided from the rest of the game. In Silksong, everything integrates much more smoothly and has a lot more variety from the ground up (not to mention any emergent challenge offered by "iron man" playthroughs and harder crest builds).
Too early to say if the game is more or less linear than OG Hollow Knight, but it does have a clear mid-game moment where it opens up and offers different paths!
There's simultaneously more and less to do with currency. Even if I died and lost everything I had, I never once found myself farming like in OG Hollow Knight. Instead, I found myself focusing on gameplay through platforming and exploration (the most I ever "farmed" being while dying multiple times on the way to a boss/said boss repeatedly killing me).

The game has plenty of single-use interactions, usually tied to the environment and breakable objects (e.g., this silk spool before facing the Skull Tyrant, above); i.e., the farming character is tied to prayer beads, which you harvest from the game's NPCs. By comparison, many breakable objects (not characters or silk spools) do not respawn, but do give you a much-needed leg-up the first time through (making them useful for speedruns, which backtrack less).
The game makes better use of false/fake walls than OG Hollow Knight.
The bell enemies can deflect your attacks in certain directions, adding some tactical variety to combat (while parries slow down time but do no damage).

Certain quests unlock as you go, but are not accessed through towns; instead, the gameworld lays them along your path (often in color-coded ways, so they stand out, above). I'm not a fan of the Easter Egg hunt fetch quests, but variety is Needless to say, the game's old areas change and evolve both in terms of content, morphology, motion and enemies throughout the game. It's fabulous.
The singing bug in Bellhart is basically a town crier (or court jester). He'll sing to the town leitmotif, which is bell-themed (slight nods to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells," 1973); i.e., in keeping with the church bell motif. It really ties into the Amazon power fantasy needing music (to go with her cape-like dress).
Like any Metroidvania, you don't need most of the items to finish the game. But exploring the world to find them all is a reward unto itself. That being said, not all rewards are created equal; e.g., Super Metroid (and later entries in that series) fall into the "more missiles and e-tanks" trap. By comparison, the items in Silksong really change how the game plays; i.e., further variety happens when you find them, mid-sequence-break—the sequence break something to seek out for variety as intended: the beauty of Metroidvania a healthy nuptial between intended and emergent play (the oldest Metroid games—with their spatial approach and hidden reward systems—still being built for speedrunning alongside casual play).

Slight audio clues will notify observant players if an item is near.
Visual clues will also let you know if secrets are nearby, or if striking a terrain directly will yield treasure (e.g., color-coding and texture variation, above). Quests, by comparison, will put clues in-game for the player to track:

Following these through requires time (and motion) within space. The rewards are as much build-related items that alter combat as motion (e.g., the Pollip Pouch adding a fast-acting passive poison to your sub-weapons, but also poisonous synergy to your active-use flea draught, below):

Some bosses are short and sweet. Some, like the bug moms (above), are more endurance-based.
The Needolin is a harp-like instrument. Similar to the dreamnail but stationary, you can use it to temporarily tame wild animals (whereupon you can read their thoughts). This makes Hornet not just an Amazon, but Muse!

The harp also unlocks certain doors (similar to the Golem in OG Dragon Warrior being lulled to sleep, or the river monster from Zelda II—gaining access by raising a bridge, opening a door [above] or quelling a guardian).
The areas not only look and sound different, they control Some offer better resources; e.g., Deep Docks having portions that are better for farming beads (should you want to), but carry more risk (tough, more-aggressive enemies with AoE [explosive] attacks + awkward terrain). Expect knowledge checks.
There's a spotlight monster that feels like a nod to Super Metroid after collecting the Morph Ball:

Unlike Super Metroid, Hornet never gains a "Screw Attack" kind of powerup that makes her too powerful; e.g., the Silkspeed Anklets giving you higher-than-usual speed at the cost of silk (making silk-based interactables in the environment useful for fueling speedrunners).
Speed charm is actually useful in this game, helping with certain platform sections (for when you need an extra running start).
Bug bodies don't decay (as fast as human bodies, anyways). Like the original, the world around you is littered with the shells of decomposers.
In keeping with the Promethean Quest, the world is littered with the remnants of an older, more advanced alien civilization; i.e., seemingly destroyed by its own hubris, on par with Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness or the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic (1972) taking Frankenstein to an astronoetic extreme—one Silksong brings home to roost among nature; e.g., Weavenest Atlas having both computers and burly bug moms, the latter tag teaming you with their endless brood of green little guys (cute, but spiky)!
Obligatory Ozymandian sand area (the "scary" part of the game):

TThe above area is meant to be desolate, thus blinding in its sandstorms. Most areas don't fuck with the player's eyesight too much, but this one does. Whereas other areas have plenty of resources, this one is the opposite: tight jumps, obscured field of view, lava ground (no pogo) and plenty of annoying enemies that tend to duel the player versus walking mindlessly into their attacks. It's hard to recharge silk, too, making the Blasted Steps a difficult area to survive/navigate. That being said, you can skip a lot of the enemies and just focus on platforming. It's a very "slow and steady wins the race" obstacle course. Dash is your friend.
Had a boss run away after you kill its sibling. That's new!
The Pinstress reminds me of a particular kind of Amazon: the hatpin-wielding kind from the early 1900s (e.g., Leoti Baker)!

Note: Below are some bigger points that came to me, after reaching and completing the end area of Act I. These cross over from observation and opinion, discussing Amazonian/Gothic theory alongside observation. —Perse

Frankenstein is rooted in Orientalism; or rather, the early Orientalism of the 1800s could be seen in British Romantic poets like Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias" (1818) but also Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816), who shared a similar fascination with the area their country called (and treated as) "the Orient." Furthermore, this revival happened in the Romantic movement, which overlapped with the Gothic (often at odds). A similar love for the exotic is seen today in Silksong (whose name potentially alludes to the Silk Road of yore): a place of combat, sin, and, among other things less down-to-earth, gambling[27]!

"Ozymandias" parallels Frankenstein, and you can see its roots in At the Mountains of Madness and, later, Alien and Scott's prequels: a site of perceived Numinous power that is home to false gods, or those who played with fire only to be supplanted by those they created (wicked servants, but also rebellious ones). I suspect Hornet and the pilgrims' will to power ends in a similar rude awakening: a false church, with a lot of star-struck hoopla surrounding it (re: like Dorothy and her companions, "off to see the Wizard"). It's not so different from Radcliffe hating on Paris (a city of sin, with brothels and casinos), but in this case has an Orientalist flavor demonizing a foreign church promising great things: an offshoot of a monstrous-feminine Numinous (the Gorgon's avatar) doing nun-fu (the trope of the battle nun, but overblown to a Walpolean degree; re: the giant suit of armor, below).

This all might seem quaint or random, but Gothic was popular (and new) in a time when paintings and poems were standard. Called "miniatures," the idea from Walpole onwards—and frankly an idea borrowed from medieval thought, and before that from Plato (re: the simulacrum)—was the portrait coming alive; i.e., the conqueror walking out of the painting or poem to walk around, doing so like any inanimate thing might; e.g., a suit of armor, effigy or reliquary possessed by some kind of spirit (often a former ruler/tyrant; re: Bakhtin). This includes Numinous spirits; re: the Numinous afforded different characters to it, hybridized within a variety of anachronistic elements, then and now. More than anything else, the Neo-Gothic previously feared an imaginary past (specifically a conqueror) come back to life—itself something afforded a historical character to walk through (re: Bakhtin). Instead of God and Moses, you have a profoundly non-canonical invention—proudly iconoclastic and borrowing whatever palimpsest it likes within the larger mode. Iron Maiden did so, with Powerslave (1986), and Team Cherry have done it now, with Silksong. Each presents religion both as highly bogus, and as something to regress towards and fear, mid-fascination; i.e., a kind of pseudo-archaeology whose architecture (and actors) walk the line between silly and serious: the ghost of the counterfeit courting reverence and ridicule to achieve a revenge of the "Pharaohs" (re: "Of Darkness and the Forbidden").
From Caesar to Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) to the United States, what follows is a conversation with power-in-decay changing Team Cherry's Amazonomachia invokes the present exchange as tied to smaller and bigger exchanges, onstage and off. And overhanging all of them is the self-same Gorgon; i.e., whose extension seeks to bar you entry from the forbidden queendom, thus enacts her own anti-predation maneuvers (the golem, above, rendering death sentences to the unworthy and cursing those who survive Her Majesty's wrath; re: versus seemingly Cartesian agents like Hornet).
It's as much an imaginary foreign culture or religion associated with violence as much as a religion of violence, the latter communicating through force versus Think Black Panther's (2018) Wakanda but also Wonder Woman's Themyscira or the various Chozo ruins guarded by effigies of those Indigenous-coded conquerors—a Paradise protected from invaders (the player). In turn, it's a dialog of invasion fears from a perceived outsider's fortress mentality but also insider's in duality (the Nazi and Commie sharing the same kayfabe zone); i.e., there's no concrete interpretation for the violence, which itself is constant (as is the fear, stigma, what-have-you); re: terrorist/counterterrorist in anisotropic, ergodic, concentric, recursive duality (fractal recursion under Cartesian dualism into the Gothic).
Ozymandias is a cryptomimetic echo of giants, of dead empires conversing through hauntological sex and force, of Numinous transference during the Promethean Quest (canonically furthering abjection, mid-cryptonymy inside the chronotope). There is always another castle, capital-in-small denoting a cycle of endless misery trapped apocalyptically inside itself (e.g., the Ringed City and duel with Slave Knight Gael, in Dark Souls 3, 2015): a cartographic refrain, a tool of conquest something to salvage from capital's endless death and decay by camping it (and Capitalist Realism, mid-loop).

Speaking of which—with the guardian dead, a new palace of conquest and plunder (above) opens up; i.e., to our little Caesera, therefor us; re: the player is piloting the villain posturing as the hero, per the Promethean Quest (see: my master's thesis: "they were the Destroyer all along"). But, just as well, there's room to interpret Hornet as something of a Satanic, shapeshifting rebel, too: the Commie cunt dressed in tell-tale red, effectively "burning Rome" as projected onto an exotic other where we can "Wolfenstein the shit out of this situation." Die Nazis!
In keeping with kayfabe (and Gothic ambiguity), colonizer and colonized occupy the same Miltonian space, the same avatars and arenas that unfold throughout the dialectic of shelter and the alien (therefore Capitalist Realism). Moreover, this is merely the end of Act I—with Act II implying more than two acts; i.e., lending the size and scale of this game to massive degrees all but alien to AAA gaming (which tends to deny its spaces of play by whoring them out, piece-by-piece)!
As always, the way out is through the labyrinth (see: block quote, below), transforming ourselves—but specifically our ability to think critically about the world and its fantastical projections—while piloting Hippolyta; i.e., in Metroidvania (and similar stories) giving a rare chance to learn from history through play with the imaginary past; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping the canon mise-en-abyme to radically alter the retro-future; e.g., the heroic Amazon invading the castle of the Gorgon (or false Gorgon, in Silksong's case): as a morphological extension of potential maturity and agency taken from an feudal imposter sacked by a dead ringer "going in."
Here, the duality of morphology plays out, insofar as the castle represents what was, is, and could be—as traded between the virgin and the whore, but also two warring whores completing for territory as repeatedly scouted, stormed and stolen! A black planet preceded by the home upon its surface, it's whores all the way down, babes (and they're totally "in danger"; re: placed in abyss, per calculated risk)!

[censored by Blogger]

(artist: Hallie Cross)

The Gothic castle in Silksong is poetically no different than any other (e.g., Hallie's, above); i.e., a maze embodied as much by the heroine, naked in darkness, as the other way around—a sort of female/monstrous-feminine codpiece acting as mythical, darkness-visible (read: pareidolic) extension of one's body (and bodily power) taken by theatrical force, mid-excursion: bait and trap alike forcing one's hand, doing so during the perceived, cryptomimetic outcome of an open portcullis—not consent, but "rape" to place back in quotes, mid-paradox; re, nudity as armor taken to its total extremes to aid our escape (from the Demon Module, exhibit 42d):

(...the paradox of rape being no one is being harmed, and furthermore, that we can use this [and the whore's] paradox to have the whore's revenge against profit: to humanize ourselves as raped by "raping" ourselves for others to see. But revolution is always dualistic and liminal; i.e., we must look into those places' of total disempowerment to liberate ourselves with; re: the way out of the labyrinth happens inside it as something to discover through found-document copies of itself.

As I write in "Out of this World, part one: What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why" [2024]:

In turn, the vivid language of war—of castles and sieges—paints both a pretty and straightforward picture regarding what to do and not do while also taking the duality of human language into account. Let the right ones into your "castle" and win-win, regarding whatever your combined hearts desire; let the wrong ones in and suffer Capitalism the Great Destroyer as usual, and whereupon genuine consent (and everything associated with it) becomes not just an alien myth (the Medusa) but a forgotten memory. Per the Gothic, its fading dream must be revived in oft-surreal ways while inside capital; i.e., as a rigged game normally weaponizing shelter harmfully against us […] often as literally toy-like; e.g., the derelict from Alien being a funerary dumping ground on par with the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). This crisis must be subverted to expose the true menace, often through the animated miniature: as something to invoke to achieve bizarre comparisons via jarringly non-fatal nostalgia [source].

or more succinctly in "Modularity and Class":

Words are easy to find if you have imagination, especially if your imagination isn't myopic because it actively resists Capitalist Realism's usual bullshit. The way out is inside, using imagination through Gothic poetics to set ourselves free [source].

so must we build and look upon that which subjugated workers dare not—viewing the Medusa with an open mind! So must we must break Capitalist Realism by facing the wax sculpture melting before us: ourselves and all our yesterdays, relaid in small and burning horrifyingly before us! We can stare and tremble, then learn from it to tremble perceptively in a dialectical-material lens that resurrects Marx as thoroughly gayer than he ever was, in life: our little pissed-off princess of the underworld. And if anyone rejects that, they're not our friends; they're cops. See how easy that is?

Despite what Radcliffe says about horror vs terror and the dreaded evil, then, Kristeva highlights the power of the abjection process; i.e., as something I argue further can be reversed in monstrous-feminine dialogs whose camp remains profoundly palliative-Numinous [thus delicious]: those touched by fire need stronger medicine, its procedure merely being to play with store-bought canon differently. And inside those dialogs, we can learn useful things about ourselves and Gothic poetics attached to the bigger picture, mise-en-abyme. It's not fear and dogma, but critical engagement with our own fabrications camping the canon to enjoy its monopolized effects; i.e., if you want to critique power, you must not only go where it is, but become able to play with it without harming people in the present moment or incentivizing systemic harm in the future [... source: "Dark Shadows: The Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp," 2025].)

As always—and especially with Metroidvania—the way out is inside, meaning going deeper inside the infernal concentric pattern to hug the alien; i.e., to learn her "sacrificial" secrets for reversing abjection, versus any sort of maiden fearing forced entry (accepting the mysteries of nature, thus life and death, by leaning from the whore teaching consent via consent-non-consent, below). Gird your loins; we're going in… to Medusa's crushing cake hole, summoning today's whore through yesterday's black magic!

(source: "A Song Written in Decay"; artist: Temporal Wolf)

Act II

Everything in Act I appears to have been prep for storming the castle, in Act II; e.g., the City of Songs, at least up front, charges prayer beads for using basic amenities (namely save stations).
The ensuing derelict mechanical city (the Torment Nexus) is like the White Palace "having an off day" (scarier looking but far less obnoxious). Specifically called the Underworks, it reminds me a little of Fritz Lang's Metropolis! (1927) and Little Nightmares 2 (2021); i.e., unheimlich spaces of danger as home/alien to explore through a capable alien tied inextricably to home, mid-dialectic. Like Alien's Nostromo, there's plenty of steam, darkness, bright lights, and seemingly pointless biomechanical factories: a place that treats workers like expendable garbage!

The usual contradictions persist, capital-as-undead mise-en-abyme a constant motif*; re, Marx: "Capital is dead labour feeding on living labor" (source: "The Limits of the Working-Day," 1867), the area-in-question full of constant reminders of that fact—that you're currently in a giant machine designed to render workers into raw materials!

*See, essay topic: "'Circular Jeopardy'; or, Macro vs Micro Vampirism in Hollow Knight: Silksong's City of Death."

The spirit of this "urban underworld" seems to be: "survive to end," not find cool items; i.e., a survival horror approach, versus the search/action approach endemic to Metroidvania normally (the two, though modular, are not mutually exclusive).

The fountains above the Underworks remind me of the Roman aqueducts—like you're scrounging in the ruins of great rulers gone to pot. The lights are still on, but nobody's home—no one friendly is, that is!
New act, new menu theme!

Explored, the sleeping city—Cthulhu's R'lyeh, the Alien Queen's reclaimed colony or Mother Brain's Zebes—begins to "wake up" (more defense mechanisms).
Nods to Paradise Lost per the Pygmalion fantasy—with Lace (angelic and white) alluding to Hornet (demonic and partially black amid the white) as Satan defying God-as-female (the Gorgon, in this case): "one needs grace to stand before the divine." One child operates under said deity's thrall, the other does not:

Music here (once the city wakes up) gives me Satie-meets-Enya vibes.
The orange tick-tocks evoke Baum's Oz, but also the Dwemer from Elder Scrolls (also orange): a lost civilization surviving its makers, its "ancient," derelict power for you (the intrepid explorer) to find that, during the Promethean Quest, resists discovery in a very literal sense (re: "Ozymandias," Forbidden Planet, At the Mountains of Madness, etc).

The City of Songs might be a ruin occupied by unwanted guests, the little tick-tocks—endemic to the city's mechanical façade—are constantly repairing it. While this is a common theme in "ancient alien" stories—ones where the civilization-in-question (and its magical technologies) survive long after the makers, themselves, have died—here, it actually affects the gameplay/story the gameplay is trying to tell. For example, one room (above) has vendor stations that are initially broken, when you find them. If you visit them later, however, the little repair robots will have fixed them (capital trying to self-repair in light of its own monumental decay)!
Using the environment to your advantage is very fun; e.g., hitting the hapless tick-tocks into the spike-style gears (walls, floors and ceilings) being a lot of fun!

Act II's map is connected to Act I's, but also contains within it Metroid-style map stations that unlock entire areas for you to explore. These are (sometimes) given at the start of a level (some, you have to find, above):

Eventually you find a waypoint, and can travel back to the larger map. Acts are spatially arranged with their own cartographic-architectural properties; Act II, aside from the Bell Beast, also has elevators unique to its areas (above): a dead mall with zombies inside, Queen Bee pulling the strings but unable to control everything with total authority (the myth of a dictator's "absolute" power).

Found something called a silkeater—a rare item that lets you collect a cocoon after death without having to travel to it!
The outfits of the city's inhabitants look like white togas with gold brooches; they feel a bit "Roman," communicating a sense of fashion whose Pagan civilization has a Catholic flavor to it, as well (a Christo-Pagan mishmash). Toga party!

Some also resemble the pilgrims outside, making this gated community feel like it was once open to the public (versus those on the inside having gotten past the Last Judge, which I very much doubt); i.e., on par with Brutus and the Rats of Nimh (making Hornet and her red cloak a scrappier [and childless] Mrs. Brisby, above).
Adding to the Castlevania feel (especially SotN and the handheld "Iga-vania" of the early 00s, on GBA and Dualscreen) are these big monsters in long open hallways; sub-weapons work wonders for them (and indeed, the whole city has a use for shards more than Act I did):

There's an arcade-like feel to this ruin, having things to buy behind glass windows (for you to break).
The ringing of the bells evoke C.S. Lewis' bells from Charn, in The Magician's Nephew (1955): waking up a hostile female tyrant when rung. Here, it seems like doing so takes more than one In any event (and per the Promethean Quest) the city is a monster eating those who follow its siren song home:

Not as many bosses (so far) in Act II; i.e., the city is the boss (making Act II feel more like OG Hollow Knight in spots).

And right on cue... a boss! Or rather, bosses: the Cogwork Dancers, who—like many of the game's bosses—have a musical theme and dance for the player to learn. Theirs is "killer windup " It's another dance-off ("They're breakdance-fighting")! Like any music (or fencing) exercise, things start slow, then pick up the pace. Here, you have to adjust to the tempo changes, which are meant to throw you off. Per BDSM, they're teachers of a strict sort—ones that you, the apprentice, can strike back against once you know the moves! It's not Battletoads (1991) hard, but works through animation and music to show you the ropes (a smaller quest for mastery inside a bigger one); i.e., a bit like Cuphead (2017) and similar revivals of older games (and novels, movies, etc). Here, though, the music is more involved, kicking it up a notch to reflect the change in battle as things get more heated/passionate (more like the "Soulsbourne" games than Cuphead, to be honest).
The fight, but also the map, reminds me of a killer music box, but also those warring music machines from Fantasia (1941). The fight feels rather tragic, too, once you reach the fourth act: one dancer without their mate, no match for the player who has killed said mate (and all so you can selfishly progress, monomyth-style). It's a swansong, and you're the siren's executioner! The dance feels very Twilight Zone (1959), commenting on the nature of the entire game; or—as I've been saying this whole time—like a Promethean Quest, ergo tragically doomed: "Are we the baddies?"

Much of Act I has movement schemes that play into the boss fights later on. It feels very "wax on, wax off," a la Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid (1984), except through an obstacle course with combat portions set to music.
Speaking of which, Act II has elements of scenic reprieve to it, but also boss rushes (a la OG Hollow Knight's final DLC); certain areas have puzzle-like combat to them, adding more variation to the "action" portion of the search/action formula.
The area music is a'ight, but the boss music is where it's at (the Cogwork Core is a straight bop, though); i.e., there's usually a point where I "have a bosses number," and then can just enjoy the "dancing" both of us are doing. Something is always lost and given, per exchange; in exchange for my energy and time, I start to enjoy the dance purely for its own
"And why should your music be unfit for these halls? Come, play us a song!" The Golden Statues portion of the game (the miniboss keys before the final boss) present as Tinmen telling the player, "Play it again, Sam." They long for greater glory—to be remembered through such remembrance as bards, skalds (and similar musical rhetors) are known for! "But you're dead; you can't taste, can't smell!" / "Ah, but I remember!"
Speaking of which, the story in Silksong (and any Metroidvania, really) is structurally quite similar to Beagle's Last Unicorn (1982); i.e., its own Gothic chronotope (the castle) housing the final monster piloted by the mad king: "That clock will never strike the right time. To reach the Red Bull you have to walk through time; a clock isn't time, it's just numbers and springs. Just walk right on through!" Per my master's thesis, any affect a Metroidvania yields occurs through motion happening constantly inside it—through the museum, Bakhtin might say (re: "time in the 'narrow' sense of the world, that of the historical past")!

Per Gothic, such chronicles—as we have seen, thus far—are loaded with Numinous freight, but also sorrow, rage, lust, madness and forgiveness (among other things). In keeping with Aguirre's infernal concentric pattern, the deeper you go, the more doomed you become—have been, this entire time! Gothic implications are always dire, and generally play out through bloodshed (a cautionary element to the usual power fantasies' vengeful elements).
In the city proper while killing its inhabitants, for example, Hornet feels a bit like a raiding barbarian—uncaged and looting the locals blind; i.e., payback's a bitch, calculated risk intimating extermination fears relaid in a Neo-Gothic "medieval" (ol' Walpole would approve): the sort to cry out, "Crom, count the dead!" when push comes to shove ("Cry 'havoc!'" and so on). Hornet's literally unbridled suffering—less through a strictly female angel of mercy and more an androgynous unstoppable angel of death (re: the Destroyer chasing greatness, eager to lay a Great Destroyer low); i.e., one sitting between traditional Western ideas of feminine softness (attraction) and masculine hardness (repulsion)—a phallic woman, if you will, and one to reject and embrace, mid-abjection, inside the charnel house (through circular time, thus revenge):

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty! (source: Lady Macbeth's Soliloquy from Macbeth, 1606).

To this, people are drawn to the medieval for its closeness to death (the alien), but also vampiric (vitalistic) relationship between life and death—mainly, kicking ass and getting ass while being badass (maiden = sex to get; warrior maiden = yougetting got by a bad bitch)! In turn, heroes are monsters and monsters (of any genre; e.g., Westerns, noirs, postapocalypse stories) don't have monopolies on them (re: "An Uphill Battle," 2024). Same goes for medieval regressions like the one found in Silksong!
Again, though, Walpole's male-centric chivalry and imaginary medieval has a post-1800s femme forte/fatale approach in Team Cherry's game, but whose hauntology isn't lacking male companions to go along for the ride:

Speaking of, our resident Don Quixote makes a return (made useful for a change, above)! Here, the Amazon-meets-knight combo ("when two stood against many," to quote Conan) celebrates the very medieval feel (and love for combat) that Silksong has, at times. Also, his galumphing "steed" reminds me of Carrol's Jabberwock" (1871) poem: "And the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!" (source), indeed!
By comparison, Hornet could be this story's Lady of Shallot (from Tennyson, 1832), lending the whole ordeal a "Ren fair" feel to it. For the Brits, this ties to their ancient-to-monasterial homeland being littered with past invasions (and continental Europe's Dark Ages, across the English Channel); for we "Yanks," it's a cultural import than never quite was—a simulacrum (the whole Neo-Gothic, really).
As far Metroidvania go, it's really a mixture of the Castlevania and Metroid styles, spatially and in terms of combat. It's not something I've seen hybridized to quite this degree before (essentially two games in one), and I'm here for it! Silksong is Gothic as fuck.

Fairly Purgatorial, the empty dining hall reminds me of the ending to The Shining (above)—minus the ghosts in that film (or those seen in Aria of Sorrow's [2003] dance hall area).
For a franchise about bugs, there aren't many scenes with actual fleshy decaying going on (never mind, I just found the Slab, which is full of these gnarly fly guys—further down); i.e., few-if-any mammals, in-game, for censorship reasons (no blood and gore to worry about). This rotting food in the kitchen fixes that (more symbols of imperial collapse, thus inheritance fears from the middle class—to clutch non-exist pearls but also look in on the dying rich): a Masque of the Red Death (1842) vice narrative overseen by a ballerina thereof (the witness to the crime as much as the criminal carrying it out, Little Red Riding Hood killing the Wolf and eating him; i.e., per the Seven Deadly Sins that Se7en alluded to, in 1995)!

Act II is more about "making it" to Rome, only to find it in ruins/populated by bandits to duel with (the ability to parry more useful here, allowing you to negate various attacks without having to dodge). Act I is more rustic, all about that bucolic village life (and exploration, versus non-stop combat—the latter something to do when you get to the capital, sacking it like the mythical Goths [re: Baldrick] and historical Vandals).
Here, we get Foucault's A History of Sexuality (1980) and the panopticon from Discipline and Punish (1975)—the panopticon being a tower to observe lepers in the medieval period, which Foucault likened to sodomy accusations, from the 1870s onwards; re: during the AIDS crisis; see: "A Vampiric History Primer" [2024] for a history of this, vis-à-vis problematic love—a concept classically applied to cis-queer men, in the West).
The variety of combat in Act II is great (and partly because silk does not recharge at benches, meaning you have to manage your supply thereof, mid-combat). This includes not just the bosses, but the regular mobs, too. As someone who played vintage Iga-vania in high school and college (from '03 to '07, mid-commute), I can't help but notice how Silksong gives off strong Portrait of Ruin (2005) vibes, in spots (and Aria/Dawn of Sorrow, 2003 and 2005); i.e., sub-weapons are useful, terrain plays a role, and big enemies drop bigger drops, including "jumbo-sized" beads and shards. It really gels nicely and gives a spatial hub for this style of play versus the Metroid-style, in Act I (which is probably the simpler way to merge the two; i.e., by putting them side-by-side).

Keeping all of this mind, the City of Songs is ultimately a place to loot, effectively redistributing wealth during the Robin Hood bandit fantasy—with Hornet being a rising pirate queen; e.g., like Valeria, Queen of Thieves; i.e., offering more enemies to rob and chests to plunder when she "reaches Camelot" (a silly place). But said booty is limited (chests do not respawn).
Those fantasies are messy in the usual "Gothic" style—with Hornet killing rich and poor people (read: literal chimney sweeps)! To that, she's both stealing from the rich, Robin-Hood-style, and a "scab" (strikebreaker), punching down; i.e., the trope of the "neutral" treasure hunter upholding the Protestant ethic despite appearances of selective rebellion (a fascist quality)!
In other words, when you encounter the city's population, they're hanging out—waving to and talking among themselves, even singing (comes with the territory). Then, Hornet shows up and robs them (enacting the Crusades by sacking Jerusalem, in other words). Maybe the gated community are "once bitten, twice shy" and that's why they're not keen on letting outsiders in? Here, Hornet isn't just an outsider but terrorist who butchers the locals. And maybe they're villains; the fact remains, you never see it (though you do see it in the city's design; re: the horrifying machinery behind the holy façade).
The best place in Act II for farming beads is between the two southwestern-most benches in the Choral Chambers; i.e., they have tons of the city guards to kill, alongside a full silk spool to recharge your silk with and several "animal" bugs to farm shards with, too (and little in the ways of platforming or spikes, which means you don't lose beads when they drop from enemies).
Nods to Bioshock (2007) and its own city-in-perpetual decay hauntology, Silksong has what appears to be a switchboard operator—a classically female position; i.e., during the early days of telephone (though the name "Architect" alludes to The Matrix: Reloaded [2001] minus being narratively central like that story's character, embedded in the proverbial labyrinth):

There's so many beads to acquire that, while dying and losing a bunch admittedly sucks, it's not the end of the world; i.e., there's lots of ways to farm them (from the numerous city folk), as well as using the rosary necklaces you find/are rewarded from quests, if you need to (the "mercenary" approach from the medieval period, onwards).

The combat in the city is somewhat random, including random encounters from friendly and unfriendly NPCs (e.g., the Green Prince, if you rescue him from the Sinner's Road "horny jail," above). It doesn't happen too often, making when it does all the more surprising! This includes enemy drops—with enemies sometimes dropping silk spools that you can hit (and chase around like a cat); i.e., echoing the Iga-vania drop system from SotN onwards (re: Aria, several images above).
It's easy to burn shards in the city (upgraded sub-weapons making fights with the cleric-type enemies go much faster). It's also easy to farm beads, which, if you do a quest to unlock the merchant at the First Shrine, lets you buy a Simple Key (and various charms + a mask piece).

Fighting the pilgrims with the staves reminds me a bit of Robin Hood's merry men: Little John and Friar Tuck, in particular (warrior monks having been a thing in medieval times). In Gothic, chivalry is undead!
High adventure keeps low company—raiders and bandits, yes, but also a brothel (not all brothels are trashy, mind you, but this one's doors are locked so it's hard to say)!

Locked doors with sigils gives a slight Resident Evil 1 (1996) vibe (above).

The Slab is nice because it offers some of that Metroid-style "search" to Act II's "action" vibe (also, the level's decomposer bugs [above] give Hornet something of an exterminator feel, comparable to Samus Aran. Unlike Samus, she's paid in what she can steal [sorry, "salvage"] on-site).
…And there's a cold area right next to it that does DoT (damage over time); i.e., the longer you're exposed to the cold, the sooner you begin to freeze (similar to X-Fusion's ARC sector, though far less punishing). So-called "hell runs" are a Metroidvania staple (or chill runs, in this case, though Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell is a frozen lake). Also, it plays off the idea that bugs don't like the cold:

I keep thinking I've seen the end of things and there's just more and more stuff to find by running around. This game rules!
The main quest is big—like really big (I can't imagine speedrunners trying to "hundo" [100% category] this). If it feels too big, there's plenty of side content, as well; e.g., you not only have different fetch and hunt quests, but can upgrade your pouch and sub-weapon damage four times each (the former similar to Zelda and Link's wallet, the latter similar to the Castlevania games). None of it is mandatory—point-in-fact, I got most of the way through Act II without upgrading any of those things—but they are present for any who care/need such boons!
The game's quests focus equally on acts of charity (a Catholic staple) as acts of cruelty (also a Catholic staple; e.g., mortification of the flesh [torture] and Black Penitents).
For a game invested in the medieval, there's a distinct lack of black knights (or fatal riddles, dragons, etc). To be fair, the first game had the Dung Knight (and the other knights of the Pale King's court). By comparison, this game only has our Don Quixote clone—a wandering knight (also called knights errant, versus Grail Knights having sought and claimed "the Grrrrrrail!").

Furthermore, the closest we get to courtly love is actually Hornet herself (which the game calls "the forbidden taste," above); i.e., no playable star-crossed lovers, like Romeo and Juliet (1598). Instead, Hornet's too cool for school (the witch's daughter), she (thus the player) Tybalt killing Mercutio; re: the Cogwork Dancers dying a tragic death by the hero (similar to Sif the Great Wolf, from Dark Souls 1, 2009): "A curse on both your houses!"

That being said, there are things comparable to dragons. Knights classically prove their bravery and daring for a lady to seek favor (sex) from; Hornet has quests that, for all intents and purposes, serve no role other than to have her cake (the player's) and eat it, too: doing acts of great courage to stroke one's ergo while occupying the gymnastic body of a tall mean lady (crossdressing being a common Renaissance pastime, from Shakespeare onwards)! It's largely a matter of pride, insofar as fighting a second savage beastfly over a pool of molten lava while the floor collapses and the beast summons a little helper to spit fireballs at you that light the ground currently not under lava on fire. Simply put, it's a dare. Will you accept the challenge? Personally, it makes me question my own sanity (ready to ask "What am I fighting for!?" like Zero from MMX4, 1997).

This game is full of Gothic references, meaning of a Walpolean For an example that isn't a knight, there's a shadowy monk in the Choral Chambers (who you can't reach right away but can hear singing nonstop) that—rather than fight you, himself—hides in the shadows and, ever the dastardly rogue, sends his henchman servants after you! Pick your targets, girl!
Evil monks are another Gothic scapegoat, one seen in post-Reformation anti-Catholic dogma like Dumas' Cardinal Richelieu from Three Musketeers (1844), John Webster's Count Malateste from The Duchess of Malfi (1614), and Father Schedoni and Ambrosio from Radcliffe's Italian (1797) and Lewis' The Monk (1794), respectively. Mistrust of religion isn't always of God, per se, but of organized religion; e.g., the convulsionnaires in mid-1700s France (shortly before Walpole's Otranto) mistrusting the French monarchy and desiring a return to God by conducting various Numinous rituals (read: crucifixion); i.e., a reunion with God while rebelling against state powers. In this light, Hornet isn't just a detective (re: her turtleneck evoking Radcliffe's debutante sleuth echoed later with Velma Dinkley's four-eyed neo-nun); she's muscle, bringing the impostor to justice: a crimefighter unmasking banditti. Radcliffe's villains felt supernatural but were ultimately mundane. She explained them away but trapped them (until then) in spaces of perceived enchantment (thus her moniker, the Great Enchantress—a phrase I critique in my own work per her [admittedly annoying] value judgements; re: "In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress," 2025).

The evil priest is shown to be a spider (wearing a hat, cute): a Western symbol of evil and predation. Hornet, by comparison, is part-spider, part-other-insect(s), making her a chimera with tokenized Furthermore, the evil monk is often a rapist lusting after a woman, making Hornet's revenge a classical anti-rape narrative; i.e., the monk-in-question generally shown to be a dark outsider corrupting whatever office(s) of clergy they hold; re: Silksong's spider monk profaning his station, a proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing who bribes others to do his dirty work (those who serve him wear nicer clothes than the pilgrims, having more health from presumably better housing and diets).
When defeated, the monk fucks off and you unlock a new area: the whispering vaults (the church-in-question housing multiple suspects tied to murder and rape; e.g., Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose, 1981). Such stories, from Radcliffe and Lewis onwards, supplied a "terror" flavor to their backdrops—both a commentary on daily life through the "Romance" qualifier (yes, a proper noun) and blockbuster entertainment, to boot. Per Crawford, churches (and similar structures) became less and less spaces of wonder, alone (during the mid-1700s), and more spaces of concealment tied either to queer outcry (in Lewis' case; re: Broadmoor) or moral panic in the face of fomenting revolution, overseas (in Radcliffe's case; re: Groom[28]); i.e., places to expose for their concealed brothel-like qualities—including the pimp-in-disguise the virginal detective is unmasking (re: Radcliffe's refrain)!

The priest returns (above), requiring you to fight him deeper in his lair; i.e., where the bodies are buried—historically there being little difference legally or morally in terms of murder and debauchery of a sexual This makes our priest a kind of Black Penitent, or (male, affluent) criminal/assassin housed by the Church to protect the criminal from justice (some things never change); re: Radcliffe's final (and best) novel being The Italian; or, the Confessionals of the Black Penitents—a story where, once caught, Father Schedoni commits suicide with a vial of poison, but not before uttering a terrible scream that no one in the room can bear to witness (with more than a passing resemblance to Hollow Knight, in that respect)!
Classically this is done by some meddling kid swearing. "Jinkies!" says Velma; "Holy Saint Francis!" swears Ambrosio (that story's villain, to be fair). Compared to them, Hornet keeps quiet, only shouting when she needs to yawp, cast a spell, or otherwise kick some (un)holy ass!
Befitting the classic fate of such a villain, the monk's death has no fanfare; it's merely ignominious (turns out, there's more than one of him).
The area in which he lives (thus hunts) is labyrinthine and, worse, gives no bench or map, up front. It's far too easy to go deep into it, die, and then have to travel incredibly far to get your corpse (making those silkeaters more and more useful, in the bargain). The vampire analog—which a spider is, but also for which the monk (and similar characters) symbolize—would seem to have you on the hip (at a disadvantage)!
Speaking of vampires, the game has no mammals, but does have some fairly bat-like bugs in the abbey (echoes of Grimm, who I think was a moth—the evil bugs from the first game; i.e., for classically being symbols of death; e.g., the death's head moth from Silence of the Lambs [1991] being a symbol of queer transformation linking homophobically to a serial killer).
The area itself, which doesn't show up on the map before you download it, also feels secret the way that homosexuality classically was; i.e., the Vaults are as much secretive as they are a secret for you to uncover. It is—to use a Renaissance term—a "mystery" or trade secret (also, pedophilia and homosexuality being treated differently in that period versus now, though not entirely differently). The Vaults were so dark and architecturally confusing that I felt momentarily dizzy exiting them and entering the bright city, outside (an inner city versus an outer's concentric prison).

Speaking of secrets (and Gothic pastiche), waiting for you at the end of this one is Trobbio, who I'm fairly certain is a drag queen (and a moth or butterfly of some sort, above). So much glitter (and jazz hands)! It practically screams, "This stage ain't big enough for the both of us red queens! Get lost, nerd!" A Phantom of the Opera (1909) vice character (not the madwoman in the attic or closeted witch; e.g., Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch House," 1933), he's the lycanthrope/vampire the vaults are whispering about—with homosexual men being hushed secrets cryptonymically gossiped about in Gothic fiction; i.e., problematic love, aka "the love that dare not speak its name," more whispered about in the early 1800s versus screamed about as "degenerate," later on; e.g., Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) versus Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), culminating with post-1870s "bury your gays" media like Stoker's Dracula (1897) into fiery purification under fascism (an acceleration of sodomy laws' older pre-1870 pogroms, in England; re: Broadmoor).
Furthermore, a woman versus a gay man? It's Radcliffe vs Lewis, all over again! In the 1970s spirit of things (when queerness in America began to visibly emerge), it feels very Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974)! I won't complain; vampires are basically gay ninjas, the two of you fighting over the stage (the show must go on, one gay burying another in ways the game doesn't strictly endorse)!
Despite all this business with bells (and gay men), there's no thirsty hunchback on par with Victor Hugo's Hunchback. Also, no werewolves (a thing featured—albeit figuratively [as a symbol of depravity and criminal lust, therefor sodomy accusations]—in stories like Webster's Malfi, but also Lewis' Monk, arguably); i.e., classic symbols of rabies, which bugs cannot get (the closest thing being the cordyceps motif, per the series villains—oddly demonizing female monarchical insects considering insects are matriarchal, from an evolutionary standpoint). They can, however, be gay, it would seem!

While the clocktower + church combo is classic Castlevania, there's a puzzle in the Vaults (above); i.e., based on darkness and sound, and which would feel right at home in a Resident Evil game (the one I thought of was RE4 and the Ashley puzzle section).

Act I is both the time and space before and after you go to the City of Songs. The city itself is mostly a place to commit violence, while the map around it is dedicated to finding essential early-game items; i.e., movement To this, it bears repeating that, outside of those powerups, much of the area for Act I contains additional secrets that you don't need; e.g., silk spool halves (above), but also incredibly varied mid-game areas whose discovery and exploration is optional (while arousing the player's curiosity and sense of adventure, mid-Promethean-Quest).

To that, an area like the Sinner's Road doesn't seem to be a prerequisite to beating the game/the win condition (though Silksong has multiple endings, thus multiple win conditions); it still has plenty of neat additions that—for those not determined to go looking off the beaten path, will invariably miss out on (e.g., the silk-eating maggots in the pools of green slime, above).

This includes Simple Keys for Simple Locks (above—a nod to Zelda's small-key system and the keys from Resident Evil 1 and Dragon Warrior 1, onwards, but also Tolkien's capture-happy orcs and goblins); i.e., smaller areas of interest to mark on your map using the marker system (a system I never really used, in the first game).
Beyond items to find or NPCs to engage with, the areas themselves have individual motifs; re: the Sinner's Road, whose "silk maggots" mentioned earlier," actually prevent healing on top of eating silk. The only way to heal is to "shake" the maggots of you, which "eats" a heal with no healing gained!

Furthermore, the enemies in that area tend to throw projectiles at you, which you can knock out of the air. In short, it—and similar optional areas, besides—provide extra incentive to explore through everything in them you encounter. It's a tough zone, and one whose aesthetic and overall experience reminds me of far harder (and less fun) games; e.g., Shadow of the Beast II (whose gameworld is called Karamoon [above] versus Silksong's Pharloom).

Another example is a pilgrim who, when rescued, goes to the flea caravan with a giant bell that, when entered, contains a small hot springs that heals you while soaking in it (the tradeoff being you have to pay to use it and endure the voyeuristic ogling of the Peeping-Tom owner (above; though you can smack him in the face, leaving him bruised and humiliated, below).

The beauty of Silksong is that all these fantasies (and their outcomes and poetic varieties) exist in the same space; i.e., across multiple acts in a larger gameworld's single map. Cataloging all of this (as I've done, here) is all part of the fun!

Some areas are green and lush, some are gloomy and "loud" about it (e.g., Greymoor), others feel imprisoned by an invading sense of the barbarian (re: Sinner's Road, who has houses and a similar sinister "enter if you dare!" vibe, but also action/adventure HUD, above), and so on. Silksong nails all this through disparate vibes (and their respective lapses and spikes in action) to evoke a good balance of safety and danger amid familiar/foreign; e.g., I loved being reminded of Shadow of the Beast II with Sinner's Road, meaning just enough to get a similar feeling without plunging headlong into the older game's frustrating difficulty and cryptic puzzles (at least in Act II): "They say this land was green and soft, once, but moment King Haggard touched it it became hard and grey." The area looks cool, has enemies that feel novel (the big spiky bruisers who hit for double damage, below), and ultimately feels satisfying because it seems scary at first, only to become easier to navigate/understand. Even the music sounds similar, the game's composer Christopher Larkin subtly borrowing from Tim & Lee Wright's 1992 OST when writing his own track for Sinner's Road. Not having the map, being teased to go into deeper dangers while surrounded by tough-but-fair enemies, platforming and pitfalls—this might make Sinner's Road my favorite area in the entire game, and it was the last area I discovered in Act I (until beating the final boss in Act II)!

To that, Silksong is far less esoteric than even the first Hollow Knight was, thus more accessible in all aspects of itself (re: until Act III). Its diverse content is more spread out/evenly distributed, making finding it all the easier/more satisfying as a Goldilocks challenge. Furthermore, documenting it is dangerous—with me trying to take photos of things that want to kill me, mid-safari (above). The thrill is there, but no one is harmed, and the game isn't automatically bigoted because the metaphors are literally (and functionally) "dead." That's the beauty of Gothic, and what Silksong understands very well: letting off steam without harming others, mid-calculated-risk (the colonial language divorced from earthly territories and human/non-human analogs for "insect politics" more so than District 9 [2009] was); i.e., its areas will punish you for not being careful, but demand you explore their dangers to uncover its forbidden secrets, devil-may-care. The paradox strikes a good balance, mid-oscillation, its onus as much on the player seeking "danger" in quotes as it is the game providing those push-pull thrills being sought (the Western middle class chasing the ghost of the counterfeit during their own anxious inheritance; re: Punter).

Often, the dominator in Hollow Knight is monstrous-feminine, thus probably female in ways that speak to nature-as-matriarchal (e.g., the Radiance, above, as Archaic Mother slain by the Amazonian [monomyth] hero; i.e., in a space of secret trauma come home to roost; re: "Policing the Whore"). However, it can also be the map space unto itself, sometimes gendered (re: (re: "War Vaginas," 2021) but sometimes without obvious gendered coding (a gender-neutral map). This map isn't afraid to string you along; e.g., having a sign at the start pointing to a bench, but not giving it to you until the very end (next to the giant spider, further down). This forces you to not only fight the stupid cockroach dogs (who can juke and chase you over the uneven terrain), but master the jumping mechanics over the "bug lava" that kills your heals (and the Castlevania-style pendulum spikes). If you do that, you'll get a secret item: the tacks, a ground-based, caltrops-style sub-weapon. The trap is a reward for following the game's coded instructions, including its monstrous-feminine, sometimes-exotic language of dominance and submission; i.e., its ludic contract:

My research never stops. I'm writing this post less to convey what my thesis was, and more what it's become. My thesis is about castle narrative in Metroidvania. This includes casual play and more advanced play styles like speedrunning. Regardless of which, a Metroid player must master their surroundings to survive until the end.

Game mastery is a large part of my research. However, I'm interested in players being dominated by the game, not the other way around. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in "Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots" (2008). They write:

conventional assumptions that players learn the game system to achieve mastery over it—and that this mastery is the source of the prime pleasure of gameplay—is in fact an inversion of the dynamics and pleasures of videogame play. Games configure their players, allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions (source).

According to them, the game prompts the player. My argument is less interested in games at large, and more in the relationship between players and Metroidvania. / The mere phrase "game mastery" might suggest the player mastering a particular game—an idea popularized by the FPS (first-person shooter). Since their inception, the FPS affords the player power fantasies by turning the game into a sparring partner, one with limited attacks. It can be mastered, but mastery of the player by the game is much less omnipresent in Doom. Metroidvania master players in so many different ways, and communicate this mastery as the game is played. This includes the audio-visuals, but also the metaplay surrounding them. This dominance is felt by casual and hardcore (re: speedrunners) players alike (source: "Our Ludic Masters," 2021).

You'll also have to face the aforementioned "spiky guards," the terrain not really letting you dodge them, either. Instead, it's better to fight them—if only because later in the area, the game forces you to duel one in close quarters! And when you do (and provided you survive), he drops a key—the very key needed for the cage at the start of the map!
Sinner's Road is just another example of Team Cherry giving each area its own themes (traps and prisons, in this case[29])—a quality that can only occur when making areas by hand (a lost art, outside of indie games); i.e., the area has been teaching you how, making it your master (re: me vis-à-vis Giddings and Kennedy): "Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they're being topped by the game" (). In other words, it's ludo-Gothic BDSM—with the Metroidvania classically being tyrannical, but just as often of a palliative female Numinous (the "perfect domme," I call it; re: the mommy domme, alluded to by the game itself and its own Amazon/Gorgon worship, below)!

In this respect Styx—the spider guy at the end of the map (above)—is something of a "sissy" (a spoof/size inversion on the mating rituals of male spiders wanting to fuck a female spider who can eat them, above). The quest for mastery (and its Numinous accompaniment) takes many forms! Whatever those are, we historically learn (and enjoy ourselves) through play! Metroidvania synthesize that reality through puzzles and combat, but also humor and exotic, Numinous, even animalistic thrills; re: nature-as-alien, but also theatrical and loquacious (talking animals dating back to Aesop, but resurrected by Team Cherry's own silly-scary bug pals, above).
The game also has different set ups for later—meaning "no obvious reward," up front; e.g., the guy in the jail cell you break free doesn't have anything to give you; i.e., having been in jail for however long (and assuming sex is off the table). That being said, you are the princess rescuing the prince, inverting the "I'm here to rescue you" trope seen in latter-day hauntologies like Star Wars (1977).

"Hurt, not harm" is the mantra of good BDSM. In Gothic, we touch upon diametrically inherited degrees of familiar and foreign, per the dialectic of the alien; i.e., depending on where we are born. It allows us to play with those variables, mid-Capitalocene, but also explore older sides of ourselves tied to life and death: humans as historically a hunter/gatherer society (which Metroidvania's search/action formula encapsulates well enough); i.e., during calculated risk, regressing to pre-capitalist frames of mind/modes of theatre that shove towards post-scarcity. Capital is bigger and badder than us, but looks can be deceiving: there's always something bigger and badder than whatever seems the biggest and baddest; i.e., when David fights Goliath, regardless of what either means, the hunter can become the hunted! Nature, compared to capital, is infinite in its size and shape, thus its ability to evolve and overcome obstacles (state shift beats state models, Communism being more stable than Capitalism is; re: Patel and Moore):

The Gothic, as such, is just as much about getting in touch with our ancient selves, belly-of-the-beast; i.e., our animal sides conveyed more honestly as, if not outright peers with the rest of nature, then certainly not superior to it. This requires exposure to our bodily functions as ancient, primordial; e.g., childbirth and eating food, but also gland secretions more broadly, like defecation and vomiting (above); i.e., alongside the usual tooth-and-claw business, but also monstrous-feminine realities of nature (we all start as female in the womb, girls shit, nature is matriarchal, etc). Rather than put such things out to pasture (or relegate them to taboo spheres, mid-abjection), they become a dialog of "dog eat dog" that speaks well to the kind of Gothic Silksong adheres to: nature and civilization coming to a head—a reckoning with nature versus the state, in and among ourselves (to burst the usual bubbles using the very stark contrasts that nature, through Gothic, is known for)! Whatever spaces we explore, we're also exploring what they represent: as dialogs on nature vs civilization, per the Promethean Quest!

Like Tolkien, this game fetishizes spiders, placing them alongside images of mad science/surgical addiction (with the face-bandages guy [above] reminding me a bit of James Whale's Invisible Man, 1933). Then again, you're still the hero, and reconciling with your animal side as abject; re: in ways that reverse said process: "embrace the spooter."
In keeping with the Little Nightmares 2 vibes—and borrowing similar uncanny ideas cryptomimetically from stories like Jacob's Ladder (1990) and the Silent Hill franchise's fixation on evil hospitals (re: exhibit 43a, "Seeing Dead People")—Silksong continues a similar motif (of medical malpractice/state bodies figuratively [or literally] cannibalizing labor, including doctors eating patients, for profit); i.e., one tied to a mistrust of institutions of healing that serve state masters, the first game seeing the Soul Master kill an entire city to try and "solve" the madness of the king (which gets blamed on the Radiance) and the second game, with its ominous Whiteward, evoking images of death-camp-style Holocaust ovens (and Auschwitz' angel of death—with a very phallic-looking surgeon evoking vaso vagal[30] with his scalpel-like "knife dick," below): gradual overwhelming unease within anachronistic symbols of damnation tied to silent-scream symbols of sudden rape, physical violence and murder (e.g., outdoors, with Cormac McCarthy's 1973 Child of God, or various indoor examples afraid of the inhospitable hospitable, funeral home, church, bakery and so on).

This area is kept under lock-and-key, implying a degree of shame (and shameful state secrets; e.g., the inmates running the asylum, the secret military project, the toxic waste spill, etc). You get the feeling you shouldn't have seen it—that you're not welcome and will be killed if you stay and investigate. It marries to black humor (sitting next to a dead guy on a bench, above) but also images of fire and darkness beckoning and begging to gobble you up (the furnace having a human face, mid-pareidolia, its fuel pipe evoking that very animal fear of dark claustrophobic places from our collective ancient past, while marrying them to more recent hauntologies; i.e., of a sinister Western origin): the final boss/meal being the player for the older decaying empire to try and devour (to preserve itself from a long-overdue death).
Trobbio is literally a cloistered queer/drama queen, and when he dies, he goes out like a queen—bemoaning prurient violence (and explosive rapture, below): "O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die." Gahhh!

The cryptic nature of the Whispering Vaults is a little too unicursal, distracting and dark for my liking; i.e., if you don't go the right way at the start, you'll get turned around and skip the bench and the map, then have to go through the whole area completely blind—like I did! It's not the worst thing in the world, but it is a test of memory-under-duress that some won't like (read: me). This being said, the area is basically a giant puzzle, and thinking about it as such helps navigate and approach its singular It is faithful to the Gothic's idea of confusing spaces disorientating the heroine—i.e., while her walking through them, a morphological-architectural metaphor for the fear-addled brain, "activates" the memories therein (re: Bakhtin; e.g., the decaying leaves on a library shelf or some-similar data storage device from the medieval past)—but remains an acquired taste, all the same. Sometimes the fantasy is more fun than actually doing it, you see, and here, the simulation is a little too faithful/devoted towards confusing the player! That's the challenge, I guess, but I still don't like it!

One smaller example are these knobs sticking out of the ceiling (above). They're actually ladders, but you wouldn't know it at first; i.e., they originally face at a 45-degree angle, and hitting them causes them to correct, pointing towards the ground. You lower the ladder and then climb up it, but it feels very unintuitive (who skips up ladders?). The idea is certainly neat, but for a game where you spend much of it not having to wall-hump or solve puzzles quite like these, it's a pretty jarring tone shift; i.e., from the combat elsewhere in Act II, and the more movement-based "search" side of the formula in Act I.
The larger puzzle isn't exactly Myst-grade (1993), either, but can be a bit of a head-scratcher, at first (the giant sliding blocks you control something like a Rubik's-cube-meets-a-sliding-bookshelf/secret-stairway). Unlike vintage Myst, the game gives you prompts and cues[31](above). Even so, it remains possible for players to take a wrong turn in the organ pipes; i.e., under the vaults (which you access under the elevator after beating Trobbio)—skipping the way to the top because it's too dark/you're under attack (from steam and spikes—again, like I did): the one area in the game (up until that point) where I used a guide(!). I do so even though the way forward was basically right above me. I just wanted to get out of there!

The Psalm Cylinders (a nod to phonographs and wax cylinders, above) speak to the decay of written law/dogma and memory (re: Plato's Phaedrus, c. 370 BC), whatever remains passed on through oral traditions and the thieving, mid-rememory, from written ones. Per the cylinder's rotational design, the Vaultkeeper is actually two puns—a bookworm, but also, "the worm turns!"

Speaking of worms, my earlier complaint about the Whispering Vaults also applies to the Wormways; i.e., if you're not paying close attention, you can skip the quest giver at the start of the area, then wind up at the bottom of the maze with no idea you're standing at the end of a quest you don't currently have! In my case, I did everything backwards, wound up in that position (above), and had no idea where to go or what to do (re: without a map for the Wormways because Shakra the cartographer is pretty random in where she'll appear—I really wish she had a shopkeeper spouse to buy the same maps from; re: like in the first game). I would have found it eventually but the fact remains, something relatively as simple as taking a wrong turn becomes ten times worse from being in a dark claustrophobic maze without a map or a guide!
I suppose the above hassle about the Wormways quest is offset by the fact that it lets you boost your health up to four maskers higher with the Plasmium Phial (which is a lot, given how rare health upgrades are—though there's anti-synergy with the poison charm, which makes the health points decay). Not only is there the maze to contend with, but the maze itself is locked behind a door you need a Simple Key for. And if you've used your Simple Key elsewhere, in Act I, you'll have to explore most of Act II in order to find the merchant for the First Shrine, then buy the key off her. It's frustratingly inaccessible/esoteric, but I do like the sorcerer's apprentice theme; i.e., the mad scientist sending his former aid down into the predator-infested tunnels (essentially slave labor to harvest rare ingredients from inhospitable environments). When the aid reliably dies, four-eyes is like, "Well, you'll do!" and sends you down there, next! It's a little Re-animator (1985) with the syringe*, too (below—with Herbert West from Lovecraft's original short story being a Nazi metaphor). Again, the fantasy is fine; experiencing it a little too faithfully is rather annoying.

*Making me want to shout "overdose!" when stabbing myself (above). The game's Estus flask, its blue glow is significant in different ways. One, it glows not bright green (re: Re-Animator) but cold blue like Bilbo's Sting—looking a similar color if not for the same purpose ("when orcs are near") then with the same spirit of caution ("and it's times like that, my lad, when you have to be extra careful"). Two, it glows blue like Cherenkov radiation, "a form of energy that we [humans] can perceive [with the naked eye] as a blue glow emitted when the electrically charged particles that compose atoms (i.e. electrons and protons) are moving at speeds faster than that of light in a specific medium" (source: IAEA), most famously while underwater (which tends to be transparent, thus more visible). Third, "plasmium" itself is a nod to "plasmids" from Bioshock ("my daddy's stronger than your daddy!"); i.e., death takes many forms, as does the Numinous, mad science, Amazons, etc.

The one-way routes don't just affect side quests, unfortunately. The map was so big that, in trying to figure out where to go, I had gotten turned around and missed this specific air vent (above); i.e., by thinking I'd been here before, I didn't use it, and spent a good hour (or so) scouring over parts of the city I'd already been to, thinking I'd missed something (and many of which also have one-way paths that go nowhere, me tripping over those while backtracking towards the next guess, and the next). This problem is seemingly quite similar to Metroid I, where you can't progress in that game unless you go to the left versus the right to get the Morph Ball, first (notably breaking tradition with Super Mario Bros., where you can only move to the right, below). However, Morph Ball is literally at the very start, while I encountered Silksong's exploratory problems deep into the second Act/map; i.e., the latter stemming from a smaller labyrinth embedded by Team Cherry into a larger maze (re: the infernal concentric pattern going inwards; see: "Mazes and Labyrinths" for all of the following distinctions being made).

In other words, if Act I is a maze (non-linear), then Act II is definitely a labyrinth (linear)—one filled with monsters, but also a prison-like space that is much more restrictive than the surrounding countryside. Apart from the lack of a minimap that fills in "per square," this issue owes its headache to the labyrinth design; i.e., that Team Cherry borrowed from Konami—meaning after the older developer's Castlevania 1 (1986), whose levels were linear and sequential, beaten in tandem. In Simon's Quest (1987), Konami fashioned a gameworld that—like Zelda II (of the same year)—is far more cryptic.
When SotN took elements from Zelda II, for example, it largely took the sword-and-board + RPG elements while favoring a closed, Metroid-style space; i.e., doing so over Zelda's open-world approach (with multiple dungeons accessible per that game's overworld map, below). From there, the Iga-vania handhelds adopted a labyrinthine approach to spatial architecture that—while linear in their approach—were relatively straightforward to get through; i.e., no bottlenecks per labyrinth embedded in a larger maze, as Silksong does (this problem kind of unprecedented, given many games don't mix-and-match quite like Team Cherry have done, here). The same of SotN and the Iga-/Zeldavanias cannot be said of Silksong—at least, not part of the time (re: the left/right coin toss ensuring you can get very lost if you're not vigilant/aware of the map not filling in the way Super Metroid and SotN do).

So while the maze-like or labyrinthine areas in OG Metroid, Castlevania or Zelda (re: dungeons) are far from perfect, those games were also made back in 1986! By comparison, Silksong takes the same "go left, go right" mentality and embeds its worst aspects (re: the bottleneck) into its concentric, "sometimes maze, sometimes labyrinth" map design; i.e., so that if you do go the wrong way in a given area, it's entirely possible to get lost for hours, afterwards!
Except, you're not lost so much in the smaller space, but in the larger space while trying to figure out where to go between smaller spaces that limit exploration more than they should (think Borges' "Garden of the Forking Paths" [1948] except with single paths; i.e., in spite of the forking paths, one way is correct and the other is not, in Silksong's case). It's not very much fun, meaning it interrupts what is otherwise a completely awesome Think coitus interruptus—one perpetrated by an overly ambitious map design; i.e., one that works most of the time. When it does, it's great; when it doesn't, it sucks all the more for detracting from the aforementioned jouissance. Orgasm denial is only fun when it's consensual (re: per the ludic contract). Through its own flawed cartography sending me on a wild goose chase, Silksong is a bit too CBT for my liking (different strokes, 'n all that). In short, it's not what I signed up for!

(artist: Joshua Reynolds)

Now, you could say it's my fault for not picking up on things—me being neurodivergent and struggling with spatial awareness/navigation; i.e., despite having played Metroidvania all my life. But also, I think that it's bad map design, period. Point-in-fact, it could have easily been prevented (thus preventing the issues outlined above) by having more than one route; i.e., to some of the areas in Act II, specifically the one's I'm critiquing. Silksong's diverse approach to map design is half-and-half + some checkered elements, and I'd say ~95% of it is completely fine! But if getting needlessly sidetracked from a wrong turn that is basically a coin toss (re: left or right)—meaning that, part of the time, you're taking a chance that you don't even realize can waste tons of time/force you to resort to using a guide you didn't want to use, taking you literally out of the game (only to facepalm, afterwards)—then my conclusion remains firm: bottlenecks in labyrinths, including labyrinths inserted into larger mazes, are simply bad design on top of more bad design. The individual maps are mostly great (except for Wormways and, to some extent, Whispering Vaults); the path to progression between them is, at times, hit-or-miss enough for me to comment, however tangentially, on it.
Despite these flaws—which only are a first-time problem, I think—the game remains absolutely incredible, overall. But it just goes to show how no honeymoon lasts forever!

Another way to think of it is, once you know where to go (and have been shown the ropes/gotten the hang of things, above), the prior critiques are largely null-and-void; i.e., the gameplay styles (and architecture) are mostly gated between Acts, preventing too much abrupt genre-swapping from happening all at once. To that, Act I is more fun for its non-linear, open-ended-but-closed space; Act II, for its better music and combat married to the platforming—in short, Act I feels more like Metroid regarding how everything gels, and Act II feels more like Castlevania. Maybe Act III is more Soulsbourne/Zeldavania?
I will say that waypointing between Act maps (the city/outdoors) requires you to switch gears pretty hard, ludically. The teleport is instant, but after which you still have to remember the playstyle of the area in question/switch gears on the fly. It can feel a bit "running into a brick wall," at times; i.e., a sudden change of pace combined with big spike in difficulty. This is especially problematic when trying to explore the game's side content, Act II, onwards; i.e., you want to branch off and explore, but often run into insurmountable obstacles you can't acquire outside the main quest—meaning you have to do the main quest to do the side content (e.g., like Metroid Fusion forcing you to wait until the end of the game [or close to it] before you can explore every nook and cranny of the environment around you).

And what's worse, the "White Palace" sections in Act II (above) are mandatory and have you suddenly engaging in a movement scheme that you haven't had to use, up until then; i.e., there's been no preparation, ahead of time, the game throwing you "out of the frying pan and into the fire": a similar complaint I had with the first Hollow Knight trying to be two radically different games in one. Here, it's less abrupt (and the charms help), but there's still no rushing through it; i.e., it's the game's Green Eggs and Ham and you gotta eat up. I can't say I'm a fan, but then again, I never was. Part of the difficulty stems from switching gears (so to speak). I just think there are better (read: more fun) ways to make a game hard than asking the southpaw boxer to get a hole-in-one on a par five, first try. I feel like Arthur's knights being asked to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring(!), except here, I'm a fish-out-of-water being asked to climb a mountain. Bottom line: I hate mountain climbing and this game takes "go to the mountain" quite literally!

Worse, it seemingly demands you beat the boss keys in a particular order (something OG Metroid didn't do)! When I reached the top of the Cogwork Core, for example, I was greeted with a Myst-level puzzle I felt like I had no hope of solving: four pillars with four switches each, four sides per block engraved with music notes. Instead, I had to leave after climbing to the top with nothing to show for it. It felt very trial-and-error and more to the point, unsatisfying (unless you're one of those people who just loves platforming puzzles, which I'm not). The only thing I could think to do was try for the Conductor's Melody in the High Halls, and hope I could access something music-related there to take back to the puzzle room, afterward. Able to access it with the Clawline ability taken from Whiteward, I found myself in boss-rush territory when the game switched gears on me—lots and lots of those city dwellers in their pale cloaks for me to slay (murdering zealots, essentially—above). And while this sounds like a nice change of pace, the fact remains that my brain's pushing forty and doesn't really have the mental stack[32]; i.e., for jumping between genres, mid-game, and doing so multiple times like Battletoads. It technically felt like progress, at least: having an idea of where to go and like I was getting somewhere, however slowly (and painfully)!
Put a pin in that; we'll get back to it, in just a moment (switching gears because that's the direction the game led me in).
In meteorological terms, the weather comes into play in certain outlier zones—less storms and more hot and cold; re: the lava areas, but also the chilly areas in the Slab mixing fire and ice: to test one's mettle when it weathers the elements!

And again, I really wish Shakra had a map vendor like the cartographer's spouse, from OG Hollow Knight! She sold me a map for the Wormways and Mount Fay but not the Slab, despite being right next to it! In short, I think the Slab is part of Act II, being "indoors," whereas the others are of Act I, thus "outdoors." And you can only find Act I maps in Act I, and likewise for Act II. It's a bit too much to juggle, in my opinion.
Speaking of too much to juggle, here's another map complaint, this time concerning the nail upgrades (about time). After killing the Widow, you unlock Bellhart, thus the Pinmaster and his weapon upgrades. But remember those critiques of the game making certain things not obvious and, furthermore, making them completely inaccessible unless you go a particular direction; re: while giving you multiple ways to go? This includes the Pinmaster who hangs over the center of the town. You can access him after the Widow fight—i.e., by using a mechanical unfolding ladder that reaches down after Widow is dead—but it's not clear he's up there and frankly I never noticed the ladder (re: from no "fill in the square" map design).

And again-again, maybe that's my fault, but that is the only way up to him; i.e., there's no clues he's up there or reminders that I missed Instead, I got all the way to the Conductor's chambers (and the boss gauntlet, there), only to ask myself: where the fuck are the weapon upgrades in this game? I had found the oil, only to come up short when taking it to the Pinstress; i.e., I had played through most of the game with the base weapon, hence reduced damage for physical attacks and spell attacks (upgrading the nail upgrades damage for both); re: I have a one-track mind, and follow trails to their conclusion before changing tracks, and this game gave me so many trails that I had exhausted all of them (and carried myself far away from Bellhart) before I realized I needed the weapon upgrades to finish the gauntlet!

Much to my infinite chagrin, I had learned the nail upgrade was in Bellhart, but that I had missed it for the same reason I had previously missed ways to progress; re: bottlenecks and one-way routes to progress, inside embedded labyrinthine spaces. The prior examples were paths to new items, and this was the path to better damage for a current item, but it's the same basic idea. Furthermore, the game wasn't above giving me clues about other stuff; e.g., the steward at the First Shrine literally waving his hands in your face and saying "Hey! Hey!" until you answer him. So the fact that the game let me go all the way through it without so much as a clue—i.e., that I was playing without nail upgrades that were waiting for me like Odysseus' wife back in Bellhart—really pissed me off. A similar problem happened with the original Hollow Knight and I don't think it's too much to ask to include a small reminder. The fact that the game lets you progress this far without one is, frankly, absurd. It doesn't have to be Navi the fucking fairy from Ocarina of Time (1998), just something.

Given this is a recurring theme in the game's fundamental design, I can't really write it off as a one-off or edge issue, either; it's literally par for the course (at least for me; re: neurodivergent person with situational awareness and hyperfocus problems). And in light of everything happening in the world right now for trans people and other minorities, in-game frustrations like these really don't help my stress out-of-game! I want to play the game to enjoy it, but also write about it to warn about the dangers of fascism in and out of the game; and doing so feels, sadly like a race against time: "The sands of time, for me, are running low!" So don't fuck with me, Team Cherry!

As for the aforementioned music puzzle at the top of the Citadel (above), it's not something as logical as "get clue from the Conductor"; the puzzle really is "just line them up, stupid," which is not intuitive and prone to wasting giant amounts of time. Case in point, finding that out after coming back down to access the Conductor (the man behind the curtain, below)—i.e., while knowing I'd have to make the climb back to the top of the Citadel, afterwards—really took the wind out of my sails.

Connecting them wasn't exactly intuitive, either—a fact not exactly helped by one, the combining of different game spaces (and movement/combat styles within said spaces) forcing me to switch gears; two, a failure for these different elements, while more or less perfectly fine on their own, to ultimately gel/add up; and three, the fact that the puzzle itself isn't just annoying vague, but also frustrating to implement (dark, not enough platforms, the switches are too close together and sometimes double-activate, etc). In regards to the third point in particular, having this at the end of what essentially amounts to a giant platforming puzzle (versus a puzzle-puzzle) is toxic frosting on a poison cake. To quote Ace Ventura, "Three darts is too much!" (also, making it save after I learn the melody so I have to climb back down instead of menu-teleporting is a dick move).

The learning of different melodies to progress is very similar to Ocarina of Time. In this game, however, the Zelda-style music keys are framed as a group; i.e., like the Metroidvania boss keys from Super Metroid, but three instead of four with Team Cherry's own golden-statue Russian Doll:

Dueling Lace (second fight)

And with this out of the way, Act II—mercifully—appears complete (each statue representing a different gameplay style: search maze, search platform, and action)! The statues sink into the ground and you—this story's Charlie Buckets from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)—take the flying machine (an elevator, in this case) to go and see Willy Wonka (a repeat of the Wizard of Oz, of Hilter, of the Pale King, Snowpiercer [2013] and so on)...

...only to have to fight Lace. God damn it! I assume she's the gatekeeper for Act III, but we just had three of those (making her the de facto fourth of the Super Metroid statue, above)!
At least the Vivaldi-style fight music sounds cool. But still...
Some thoughts on that duel, since we're here:
- The dueling opposites are a common Gothic trope. Often involving a maiden (whether present or not for the actual duel taking place), the rogue, bastard or black knight squares off against the white knight(-in-shining-armor); i.e., during courtly love as something to play out (a fairly brutal enterprise despite its regal trappings). One side, per the Radcliffean model (re: Woolf, 1979) is a demon lover, the other the classic goody-goody hero saving the maidenesque reader "from evil" by proxy. But the rape fantasy is always there, sex and force hyphenated through hauntological mergers under modern moral panics fixated on present struggles relaid as "past"; e.g., a woman's virtue, ero desire, as divided virgin/whore between the two men (the good guy and the bad-boy rapist) fighting over her passive stand-in; i.e., the Gothic heroine classically a damsel with a bit more nosiness—a detective exploring the feelings of her divided self, including the operative (and operatic) castle itself that said knights occupy, mise-en-abyme. The same goes for us; i.e., felt offstage when viewed onstage (or vice versa, if you're the actor), such maneuvers are always, to some degree, half-real.

- A straightforward example is Ken versus Vega, from Streetfighter II V (above 1995): the redheaded, bare-chested and barehanded hero forced to fight the equally bare-chested "matador" (killer) armed with an unfair advantage—a knife for a hand, jousting the rich kid (with a wild side) whose only weapon is his hand (the boxer rebel literally punching up)! Dueling for the honor (thus virtue) of the hypnotized lady of the court (Chun Li, in this case), Ken pulls off the seemingly impossible feat of strength ("I'll finish you with one punch!"), fighting through the pain to send the dastardly rogue sailing skyward. It's a reversal, in fighting-game parlance—said rogue's penetration meant as much for Ken, homosocially and homoerotically, as for Chun Li (the "strongest woman in the world" by her own metric, benched ignominiously on the sidelines): pure Force of Will, personified by the usual knightly contest presenting in an underground gladiator fight for the elite. All sit in attendance, rooting for Vega—the masked local lothario/vampire thirst trap—to skewer the ginger scrapper and exotic damsel-in-distress; i.e., in a grotesque show of toxic love for their shameless/shameful amusement. Oh, how dashing (and in 4:3 aspect ratio, too)!
- The historical fact remains: You can't defeat fascism with love, alone (as William Blazkowicz points out, below), but you can combine love and force mid-cryptonymy to disguise your attacks as the Gothic Romance do; e.g., with the very Amazons that fascism will make extinct; i.e., as "medieval," its "mere play" a kind of terrible poetry that everyone loves, discussing dueling forces through useful codelike abstraction: "I call it 'Cupid's shaft'!" There is no monopoly (or clear cut) boundaries on anything in Gothic; e.g., Hornet is wearing black-and-red, which could just as easily mean "fash" as "Commie," and Lace's white has a "trouble in Paradise" feel to it, as well; re: liberation and exploitation occupy the same complicated zones of play (the opera, the Metroidvania, the danger disco).

- Concerning Hornet and Lace's duel, the male version of a maiden (a twink) is absent, the two women dueling, mid-Amazonomachia, per the psychomachy of a Star-Wars-style scrap: "Search your feelings; you know it to be true!" Except, instead of a long-lost father, we have two siblings fighting over an absentee mother. They don't have to be literal siblings, but "sisters" on par with Hippolyta and the Gorgon, the Unicorn and Celano, and similar doubles denoting Beauvoir's "woman is other" as a suitably divided refrain; i.e., a long-lost sibling rivalry. In this case, the hero (the player) is the daughter of the Gorgon; i.e., controlling Hornet the warrior-whore dueling its lacy inversion, the daughter of Athena.
- Regardless, the fundamental jacket of their warring coats-of-arms, whether white-and-black or black-and-white, is still monstrous feminine in a knightly ACAB, but what about AKAB? What if it's in quotes, "knight on knight" violence a poetic exchange performing power to convey different points (with points; i.e., the knights' lances, mid-joust)? What if the Obi-Wan-lookin' motherfucker is an actual motherfucker and the scary clown from outer space (Darth Maul, below) is the Commie? What if you're not sure? Gothic begs the question, "who's the rapist?" and then makes the investigation (and mythical evidence) ambiguous for different praxial aims that Gothic Communism focuses on for workers (re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State's Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression," 2025). Heroism is always dubious, in Gothic (re: all heroes are monsters, be they Amazon, whore, or otherwise, below).

- All that being said, the most immediate comparison that leaps to mind, with Hornet and Lace, is Guts vs Griffith (below): a genderswap of the rough-and-tumble, Conan-style antihero (the savage barbarian) versus the false hero who looks knightly in a Lancelot-kind-of-way but feels off. In other words, Lace is unheimlich, just as the castle By sacking it, Hornet must face its champion before she can come at the queen, personally. So does the Gothic enjoy the playful hypocrisies/ambivalence of feudal debate; i.e., the classic dichotomy may invert, but its basic function remains one of "dynastic primacy and hereditary rites" (re: Bakhtin). Assimilation is poor stewardship; can Hornet salvage said power without punching down against nature as monstrous-feminine (re: scapegoating the whore); i.e., Lace ultimately a vessel for shadows Hornet purifies with silken light? "Long is the way and hard, that out of darkness leads up to light."
- Like Guts and Griffith, Hornet and Lace demonstrate that aesthetic doesn't matter, function All the same, reality is more complicated than the black-and-white binaries Gothic fucks around with: Griffith was the rapist before his transformation; Guts was a war criminal before/after his friend is raped; and determining who's actually the hero and the villain in Silksong is no more cut and dry! The difference is good faith vs bad, hypocrisy the deciding factor when hugging the alien; Gothic maturity is the ability to not only interpret such things dialectically-materially "when in Rome" (camping the Romans), but recreate them in code used fluently by au fait workers for workers, mid-cryptonymy! Basic though she was, Radcliffe showed us how bitches love knights and castles; Metroidvania took that a step further, playing with Amazons to touch upon reality piercing Capitalist Realism, vaso vagal! Pierce this! Sack my city (or I'll sack yours, muhahaha)! Such is camping the canon, fighting fire with proverbial fire: the violence in the language itself as something that threatens to escape.

[censored by Blogger]

(exhibit 47b2 [from the Demon Module's "Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives," 2025] Artist: Calm. Rape pastiche is liminal, like porn, but not strictly negative. For one, it's cathartic regarding systemic issues, thus incredibly popular for being able to explore said issues. Rape is everywhere in the Gothic [and often campy "disco in disguise" to boot; it's a party!]. Furthermore, no one really says, "I hate the Goth look!" Why? Because it's powerful and stylish; but it is tangential to fascism as something to enjoy and/or endorse, meaning we have to consciously reclaim it from Hugo Boss in ways that go beyond Sontag's quaint, second wave fascination; re: "the fantasy is death" regarding an unironic master/slave scenario...)

- That being said, people faced with reality will historically deny it, more often than not; e.g., some random genocide apologist[33] who criticized me for my review, "Fuck id, Free Palestine" (2025); i.e., after genocide was recognized by the UN, saying id and Doom (1993-present) have "nothing to do with real-world politics." Quite the contrary, the devil is in the details (the trade secrets laid bare, mid-cryptonymy)!
- A good example of this—in small, mise-en-abyme—is Hornet, grinding up the city population to conduct her own conquest of the Ozymandian ruin (re: Jerusalem changing hands). It's an Omelas refrain, a factory of death where genocide is the industry and one that renders (grinds up) organic and inorganic material, alike. Hornet (and her quest) embody that; i.e., she might not be a hypocrite, but she's still a barbarian demonstrably pimping nature-as-zombie; re: the Gothic denying resolution by having all of these devices be dualistic, anisotropic, what-have-you: versus enigmatic ambivalence, it's die-by-the-sword. There's no such thing as perfect victims; the same goes for perfect abusers (who often use food as a weapon, sex, media, or anything else, but often struggle to see their own felonious work through; i.e., the state and its models have the belly/demand for slaughter per the profit motive, but workers often lose their nerve partway through).

- Conversely, Hornet's the purifier of a zombie police state ruled by an evil monarch; i.e., nature come home to roost. Even with more charitable interpretations, Hornet's still a rapist. To that, Team Cherry seem to be falling into the same trap that OG Hollow Knight did: blame the whore, the mythical she-wolf of the SS (or Red-Scare bugbear), nature as monstrous-feminine doing the zombifying, not The bugs of the dead city are revived to protect Her Majesty (whoever that is); and Hornet is the slayer of corpses to sustain herself, mid-apocalypse (an uncovering of secrets through force): the rapture (and horror) of grinding up zombies with mechanized implements—both war machines in miniature, but also factory-style (assembly line) implements of mass death; i.e., debriding and harvesting the recycled dead for parts anew (making Hornet not just a vampire but necromancer)!
- Furthermore, slapping an alien queen on the fallen colony is just scapegoating a given "other" for capital's demise, be it Nazis or Commies; i.e., on either side of the inside/outside equation (though I think, in hindsight, Hornet is more Commie-coded than fash): "Out of the rapture myths of early Christianity, undeath has been a metaphor for capital for centuries" (source skeet, vanderWaardart: September 19th, 2025). This includes Hornet and the gameworld (thus Lace) as equally undead, Team Cherry's Metroidvania co-starlets reflecting anisotropically and in duality on the Aegis. Violence is messy. So is sex through force as a warring ontological refrain. For twice the fun, the Gothic doubles up (and loves its puns, oxymorons, and paradoxes while doing so); i.e., through its apotropaic function, skilled workers can shield themselves from state illusions (therefore bad actors and Capitalist Realism): breaking the Gothic monopoly on the Aegis; re: violence, terror and monsters! We're living in Gothic times, and you're trapped in here with us!

(artist: Chloe Gore)

- The tradeoff dilemma returns! Charge attacks are useful against Lace under niche circumstances, but don't recharge your silk! She's a cruel mistress—slapping Hornet's asymmetrical head around, royal-vs-rube, if you're not careful! It's a sweaty fight, too—sweatier than these wrestling Amazon's coochies (and hotter than the friction caused by their "dummy thicc" "chub rub"); i.e., reminding us onlookers (which includes the player) what a real catfight is like: loose and tight like their kegels, olé and touché while girding and unbuckling one's loins (and so on)!

- There's more than one way to skin this cat, though (e.g., double potions for health/speed, above), and a certain amount of (eu)stress is preferable—not simply to beat Lace, but find balance mid-dance while not stepping on each other's toes (dirty dancing): Wandering Womb/the traveling vagabond musician (with feral "jungle girl" vibes, depending on which crest you use) versus the dolled-up hypocrite having pledged fealty to the highest bidder (echoes of the heated Neeson's Rob Roy vs Roth's despicable Archibald Cunningham, 1995, below)! The music of the stage is offset by the music of their war-like instruments clashing back and forth, mid-swashbuckle!

The above concepts speak to playing with "rape" (abuse) in quotes to heal from it; i.e., to take lessons from abuse, including whatever headaches a videogame dishes out (which, like Gothic novels, can't harm the audience); re: "Healing from Rape" (2024). Enjoy the violence but do not endorse its unironic varieties (re: Sarkeesian); critique the Gothic when it becomes unironic, too (or leans in that direction, from time to time; re: as Silksong does).
As for Lace, she was hard enough to make me devote an entire afternoon to her—partially because I'm writing this guide and juggling some other stuff on top of it, but also she was legit tough! Even so, eventually I got the hang of her/figured out the right build and practiced until, like Goku and Freiza, I wanted to say to her, "Your power level is decreasing with every blow! In fact, you're not even a challenge to me, anymore!"

Much to my delight (and with some Gothically poetic justice), the game humiliates Lace, showing her to be a false husk—a Pinocchio fake/empty shell that was never a bug but given life like one; i.e., made from lifeless stuff stolen from life to serve a cruel master for all time; e.g., as Victor made the Creature, and God made Lilith, Adam and Eve. There's no love lost between parent and child, in that case. And in Numinous fashion, Lace asks us to face the divine (versus Gabriel the Archangel, in Paradise Lost, basically telling the Arch-Fiend, "fuck around, find out"): a false divinity, in Lace's "mother's" case—one guarded by a hollow shell of a daughter/female white knight gone a bit mad, herself (the kowai/kawaii binary)!
Similar themes are present within the Green Prince and Cogwork Dancers, the latter two of which were copies of a former living bug stolen from the prince by mad science (and imperial abuse): conversion therapy (also, allusions to Baum's Tinman and its own queer [friends of Dorothy] themes)!

Concluding Act II/the Final Boss(?)

A new act, a new menu theme? Not yet! Unless there's an Act after this, is this the final area (thus boss) to the main game? Not sure!

Update (9/25/2025): There is an Act III after this, but I have yet to reach it as of writing this. —Perse

The final area in Act II is called the Cradle, home to a dark creator that looks holy (note the full, child-bearing hips, below); i.e., Team Cherry blaming the dark Madonna, the Immaculate Conception combined with the Promethean Quest's wombly infernal concentric pattern; re: Creed's murderous womb, the witch's daughter come home to roost (as suggested by the cages of former weavers/offshoots of the Numinous, above). It's literally blaming the whore as God-like—a female mad scientist/prioress/fallen angel with delusions of grandeur!

She's literally hysteria personified, the "this is why we can't have nice things" motif placed on the shoulders of an angry queen/wicked stepmother (whose banshee-like shrieks and vaso-vagal fetish is adorned with oversized Freudian surgical symbols of abortion and castration, above; re: Otto's abortive offshoot of the actual Numinous). Then again, Hornet absorbs her Other Mother's power and ascends to said throne (for what I presume is the first, thus "worst," ending); i.e., to become the next-in-line, echoing "The Queen is dead; long live the Queen," ipso facto. This isn't just a feudal enterprise and the trope of the prodigal daughter come home to roost, but the way many insect societies operate in our world: the killing of the current queen to replace her through rapacious, incestuous, cannibalistic force—the fetishizing of nature as monstrous-feminine for literally being itself. At least with this ending, Hornet isn't working "for the Man," but pursuing her would-be pursuer to the final resting place—the site of her death and rebirth calling Hornet home (with home being a place to seek revenge, the Grand Mother Silk being someone to kill out of revenge for the Weavers).
The final boss is a bit of a pushover compared to Lace, the former destined to be consumed by the vanquisher of Lace (who Hornet ultimately spares out of pity): skullduggery of a literal sort, the blinding of Oedipus turned once more on the Gorgon, the false prioress (re: The Monk), the grand profligate, etc. The theme is one of arrested development, because Hornet's final form is her leaving the pupation stage; i.e., per nature vs the state, but feudalized; re: vis-à-vis a return to Bakhtin's Gothic chronotope and its emphasis on "dynastic primacy and hereditary rites." Spider-Girl eats the Bleeding Nun to become Spider-Mom—a new Weaver/Archaic Mother, one having had its revenge versus its former slaver (and whose silk was used to make Lace and enslave the locals).

After Hornet kills Grand Mother Silk, she turns her—and the entire city as an extension of her—into a "death egg" of sorts (above and below): a place of life, death, sex and food, all in one. There Hornet falls in battle, ravishing the mad queen only to be reborn, herself, as queen. She becomes not just a destroyer of the false monarch/queen's household, but the Great Destroyer in her place erecting a new home on top of the old; i.e., with a naturalized vitalistic production (re: the witch's daughter) versus a false moribund impostor (who killed Hornet's mother for her silk). The fresh bloodline overtakes the sour batch, its reigning "top dog" reaching maturity (thus fertility) to promise, during the fertility ritual, a more brutal-if-honest-and-lively future among its canceled present—a "hard reset," if you will (e.g., like End of Evangelion, 1997): a new matriarchy (and lease on life) built on the bones of a stubborn corpse laid to rest by compelled sacrifice (a foregone conclusion). So does Communism excise and cannibalize capital's stillborn womb, our playable Gorgon (whose many arms resemble the snakes of the Medusa) aborting future genocide as nature takes its course (nods to Inside [2008] with the scissors): reminding civilization living in denial what happens to queen bees who feign divinity. An insect politician who "beheads" (castrates) the false Gorgon, Hornet eats her royal jelly to become the new queen—from white to black, checkmate!
So new life comes from old, the madwoman made into fertilizer of a potentially matricidal character (the haircut being her censored castration, mid-cryptonymy)! Brutal, yet also an act of mercy (fascism the state gone to pot)! It's a regime change, the Frankensteinian fears of replacement from the ruler side—not of the robata slave (re: Lace) but the natural one—brought to hellish fruition by a golemesque protector gone feral camping the canon; i.e., vae victis, realizing the state's worst fears being replacement, the exterminator exterminated on a structural level: the black castle turned white by the Archaic Mother... sort of. To rebel or not to rebel, that is the question Shelley asked, and which Team Cherry replied, "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven"; i.e., while bringing Hell to Heaven (re: pandemonium)!

After the ending, the credits roll, you get Steel Soul (the "ultimate challenge," says the game), and a new menu theme: threads of Ariadne, pulling you back into the maze!

After the ending, the credits roll, you get Steel Soul (the "ultimate challenge," says the game), and a new menu theme: threads of Ariadne, pulling you back into the maze!

Act III (to be completed)

If Act I was predominantly a maze, and Act II predominantly a labyrinth embedded within said maze, then Act III is the metaplay superimposed over both. To it, Act III is pure backtracking after you destroy the main boss in Act II. However, Act II doesn't end, there; it ends—and Act III begins—once you go to a secret area, called Bilewater, to defeat its froggy boss, Groal. From there, you take the Seeker Soul, do the Silk and Soul wish (quest) and then, I presume, access the Abyss (the core of the infernal concentric pattern).
To be frank, I'm not sure what any of this is, yet. Rather, this portion of the game is so cryptic and unintuitive—similar to the upside-down castle in SotN (and all the wacky shit you, as Alucard, had to do to access it)—that I had to look up the basic premise, just to write about it! It's very map-in-a-map, too—similar to Thror's Map in The Hobbit (1937) having moon letters on it, but also quest items that are, themselves, quite secret and guarded by warring parties working at odds; re (from Volume Two's "Policing the Whore"):

To revive the memory of the king, Tolkien's war-like dwarves (a whole mess of anti-Semitic clichés) embark on a goldrush through the usual business of burgling a stolen home back unto a mythology's "timeless" ownership (echoes of Zionism): waging war against the monomyth's usual enemies by unlikely heroes on a Journey thereof (Jewish-coded monsters and a closeted bachelor). In Tolkien's opinion, only Tookish assholes have adventures, generally as a matter of conducting violence in dark, deep places while wishing for it: "to wear a sword instead of a walking stick" (ibid.). Like all these little quotes, the desire for adventure against the Numinous dragon is littered throughout Tolkien's world: little things lead to big things, a covert military operation escalating to all-out war on all fronts (making Smaug this story's Archduke Ferdinand, I suppose).

The home isn't just guarded by the dragon, but by the dwarves' secrecy towards the treasure pegging them as vice characters ("the fierce and jealous love of dwarves" amounting to "dragon sickness" later in the book). And in the interim, the map and key go hand-in-hand—as a matter of code that includes the map and its runes, hidden walls, moon letters, riddles, royal flattery and so on—as a business practice among them, an omerta of sorts. The treasure, already stolen through conquest, becomes a mystery unto itself, then; i.e., a trade secret in the usual medieval sort, one unlocked with the key that was, itself, secret: "the quest to the Lonely Mountain depended entirely on a single key and a secret door that the dragon didn't know about. In fact, without the key, Bilbo wouldn't have been able to get into the mountain" (source: A Hole in the Ground's "The Strange History of Thror's Key," 2012).

(artist: the Brothers Hildebrandt)

The point, here—at least from my research—is Tolkien's story was very monomythic despite its monstrous language (much of it antisemitic, including the dwarves; re: "Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking," 2024). Furthermore, he had some monstrous-feminine elements (mainly with spiders), but not nearly as many as Metroidvania do; i.e., the latter of which are both full of monstrous-feminine elements and wholly Promethean; re: penetrating the dark womb of nature during a Promethean Quest (a dark wish, in Silksong lingo) that reveals the awful truth/fate of the Gorgon, thus the hero chasing her down: a Numinous confrontation where the quest ends (which the monomyth historically runs away from, halfway through); e.g., the first Hollow Knight and its secret ending/date with the Radiance; re (also from "Policing the Whore"):

The point in dredging up Tolkien, here, is the knight in Hollow Knight is really no different: promised by the game some kind of gilded spectacle (rewards are generally promised through tiny markers of themselves, Thror's key made of silver); i.e., to plunder through rapine (the act of taking by force) from an undeserving party by deserving ones through a casus beli. In this case, the "dragon" is Hallownest's monstrous-feminine queen, the Radiance, and your reward—as the games little, hobbit-sized hero—is to rape her and take her spectral crown for the former now-dead king. Not so different from a ring around one's finger, no (either type signifying the transfer and legitimacy of power, which Bilbo is not immune to, below)?

The Radiance's death—like Smaug's—is an honor killing met with armed robbery, but also an exorcism of something hidden to the same extent as that pale enchanted gold, Thror's key or even the dragon: a mountainous glimmer that blinds the hero and fills them with unquenchable bloodlust; i.e., drunk on glory and death, but also their own heroic brand as inherited from the home's forged, mythological sense of ownership as rooted in secrecy in deception; e.g., Samus and Zebes, but also Bilbo's hand in a larger race war that cumulates in Thorin's Viking-style last stand against Erebor's forces of darkness (arguably the author's token Jew defending an imperialist stronghold from the "ancient," essentialized enemies of Britain: "the enemy is weak and strong"): Thorin bashing Bilbo, calling him "descendent of rats" (code for "Jew" but also "thief"), whereupon Bilbo does everything he can to prove he's of the good's side (while also, it must be said, trying to prevent all-out war). Antagonize nature and put it to work as cheaply as possible (which is what the Battle of the Fire Armies [a world war predicated on racial conflict] illustrates); assimilate, gentrify and decay.

Except, the context is more different, in Hollow Knight. For one, the Radiance isn't just a vice character comparable to gold and conquest, but a tragic character whose rape fantasy is one of reversal after you've raped her to death more than once; re: "the fourth ending destroys the Absolute Radiance, but turns the knight into an even greater monster that Hornet must fight on her own." This happens while the sky weeps blood and tentacles (such black shit may as well be blood given the cataclysmic atmosphere). During state shift, then, the female sun goes black, coming home to end the king's Cartesian madness—his endless line of toy soldiers marching to their doom—by shattering the dollhouse and the heliocentric stance it has; i.e., built around a false, decaying king (the conspiratorial fascist) eaten, in the end, when the raped, hungry womb of nature goes "om nom nom!" It's simply the planet defending itself.

In turn, the colossal misogyny on display is actually a revelation about instructed rape that, until the grand unveiling thereof, was merely whisper and allegation: the true villain was the hero all along (in other words, the total opposite of stories like The Hobbit)!

(artist: Ashen Hare)

After all's raped and done, the Radiance remains the most endearing character ("She's mighty-mighty") in the game precisely because she's raped, but is also the wonderous object of pursuit with a secret to tell that lingers in undead fashion, postmortem. She's the tragically Icarian/Luciferian (and phallic), but also hidden heroine; i.e., Hollow Knight's fat lady signing passionately about her rape in Bluebeard's castle/geometry of terror (the stage being the GNC performer's classic arena to summon and voice their abuse, their insecurities, their passion—not for the elite, but for themselves as a dark god worthy of tribute).

In short, the Promethean Quest is a quest for power from the past not just to steal from, but learn different arrangements thereof; re: the "come to/for Mommy" quest for "the perfect domme," as I call it—so-called "Gorgon bondage" and release from state models of monomythic abuse by camping them, mid-cryptonymy and abjection, with ludo-Gothic-BDSM!
We'll consider these themes while beating Act III, though my doing so will be modular—meaning I'll release it in a future update/extension for the corpus, after finalizing my proofread, thus far (for the version I release between it and v1.65).

[to be completed after I get through Act III, whenever that happens]

Footnotes

[27] A Victorian no-no—one whose regressive tendencies (and Gothic invention of terrorism; re: Crawford) followed suit after Napoleon's prior (if debatable) conquest of Egypt, rise to power and subsequent betrayal of the people back into Imperialism and ignominious defeat. Frankenstein and "Ozymandias"—written the same year as Waterloo during the Year without a Summer (as the Shelleys, along with Lord Byron, stayed at a Villa Diodati, a mansion near Lake Geneva, Switzerland to write their most famous works)—both contain allusions to Napoleon as a kind of "Caesar revived."

[28] Nick Groom of Radcliffe's The Italian (from the Oxford World's Classics 2017):

Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century.

[29] Including slavers and being hunted by dogs in open prisons, etc; re: Tolkien's "orcs and goblins" (cowboys-and-Indians inversion) Orientalism channeled onto bugs, evoking a primitive "castle without the castle" vibe; i.e., an underground fortress housing underworld creatures of evil nature versus goodly races [and white Indians] from a higher moral geography—shelter simultaneously compromised and evoked to imperfect, nebulous degrees).

[30] Fight or flight for fear of penetrative violence, of pregnancy and rape, of power abuse, of death and disease, and so on.

[31] Nothing quite as obvious as the devil familiar from SotN saying to the screen, "A switch! Why don't I press it and see?"

[32] Overloading the mind with multiple basic tasks, at once. The mental stack issues in Silksong extend not just to switching areas, mid-waypoints, but also changing crests and builds between regular enemies and bosses; i.e., if you switch crests, the boss you just spent 20 minutes practicing against will also have to be relearned. Also, while sub-weapon spam is possible on bosses to burn them down, I don't recommend it when first learning their patterns; doing so will rapidly exhaust your shard supply if you die repeatedly, hence require farming attempts in between (no fun).

[33] From an e-mail they sent to me, and which I typed out my response but never sent them; i.e., because I decided I'd rather post it here:

Hoo, boy. Lotta gaslighting going on, here. You caught me if a feisty mood, and while this is undoubtedly bad-faith (ergo bait), I feel surgical, today. Let me take five minutes to dissect your letter, here. My treat:

Hi, I'm Max. I recently got into Doom and came across your review. Honestly, I don't understand how you can look at Doom and turn it into what you did. Doom has never been about real-world politics — it's a simple, brutal story about a man ripping demons apart because they destroyed what he loved. That's it. Trying to tie that to Palestine, Israel, or modern geopolitics isn't insightful, it's just reaching.

My work is dedicated to the notion of allegory, you realize. For example, Doom (1993) was literally an Aliens (1986) reskin that couldn't get the rights, so they feel back on an old ethnocentric "colonialism is space" narrative, specifically on Mars. Aliens was literally a Vietnam revenge allegory dressed up as "elsewhere"—a strategy id Studios copied to the letter, and with John Carmack saying the game is about technology versus nature: a commentary expressed in Cartesian thought since the 1500s and, by that same token, capital; i.e., through stories just like Aliens, Doom, Metroid, and so on. Capitalist Realism is just that, and someone that gaslighters like you attempt to uphold by saying "this isn't about real-world politics." Pure nonsense. Fiction and non-fiction go hand-in-hand.

Your gameplay complaints also don't hold up. Eternal's platforming? That worked fine for most players willing to adapt — if it didn't click for you, that's on you, not the game. The Dark Ages parry? The system is slow at first by design, but the game literally gives players control to adjust projectile speed, parry timing, health, and more. Sure, id Software could've done more to balance it out of the box, but one of the key points of the game is customization. It was marketed as something you could shape to be as punishing or forgiving as you wanted. Ignoring that flexibility and then blaming the mechanic for being "bad" is missing what the devs were going for.

Eh, the game mechanics aren't important to me, the politics are. Hence my focusing on it. "Fuck id, free Palestine," I believe my words were.

On the music, no — it's not Mick Gordon's level, and it was never going to be. But the team behind it still did a good job trying to replicate his energy and style. It might not hit as hard as Gordon's work, but it fits Doom's tone and keeps the momentum. Writing it off as "bad" is unfair to the people who clearly worked to carry that legacy forward.

It's a music review, one giving my opinion. The music in Dark Ages—apart from a few bangers, to be fair—is mid, at best. Also, id fucked over Mike, no lube, and replaced him with these rehires, following what they (id, not the rehires) did to him. My bone to pick is predominantly with id, but it doesn't change the fact that the new hires wrote something that largely pales in comparison. Again, mid. Sorry, not sorry.

The biggest issue, though, is that half your review abandons the game entirely to rant about Israel, Palestine, race, and "white male fantasies." That has nothing to do with Doom.

Did we play the same game? Doom the franchise is literally a Rambo (white straight European male) power fantasy punching down against settler-colonial slave revolts. That's what the aliens overrunning the colony in Aliens were (re: a Vietnam allegory for the Fall of Saigon), and it's the same exact idea, in Doom: colony falls; white savior comes to kill "demons." Rinse and repeat. Marx calls this historical materialism, and it applies just as well to Israel and Palestine—the former another settler-colonial exterminating the native population; i.e., Aliens the story was a settler colony replacing the Indigenous population (despite what Ripley insists), whereas Vietnam was a proxy war fought through a fallen settler-colony (the French) handed over to the Americans, who occupied a fascist colonial regime (South Vietnam) versus the North. Vietnam was technically not a settler colonial because it wasn't replacing the local population, but it used the same ethnocentric ideas to exterminatory levels—levels exhibited by Ripley and, by comparison, Israel vs Palestine: xenomorphs and Martian demons = "space Hamas" (or some similar target of American Imperialism, under Pax Americana, but I think you get the point). This has everything to do with Doom, because shooters— like Metroidvania and High Fantasy treasure maps—are Capitalism in small. They simulate what capital is, including its politics moving money through nature (e.g., Starship Troopers [1959] vying for the same ideas: nuking the Reds, but really any enemies of capital one can list).

Doomguy isn't a symbol of oppression — he's barely even a "man" in the story sense. He's an armored figure of vengeance, more force of nature than character. Calling him a whitewashing icon or linking him to Andrew Tate makes no sense. Masculinity in Doom isn't political, it's cathartic. It's just a dude channeling raw anger into killing monsters.

He's literally Ellen Ripley turned back into a man; re: Rambo, symbolic of a CIA advisor during Vietnam's Phoenix program (and similar interventions, in other countries): "For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was "the wrong war against the wrong enemies." Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America's historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source: William Blum's Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

And this idea that Doom's masculinity automatically equals Andrew Tate, rape culture, or pedophilia? That's not just wrong, it's offensive. It's the same lazy logic as saying all trans people are predators just because a few bad actors exist. You'd call that hateful and absurd if someone applied it to your community — and you'd be right. So why are you fine using that exact same broken reasoning when it comes to masculinity in Doom?

ACAB, my friend. Good cop, bad cop, a cop is still a cop. Doom's masculinity is toxic and has been for years (re: "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning," 2025). Furthermore, it shares the same gradient as MGTOW/the Manosphere do, white moderacy and reactionary behaviors a form of white supremacy and patriarchal thought that are historically settler-colonial, Cartesian and heteronormative. They're all connected; i.e., are all colonizers per the system such stories explain. By comparison, trans people are deeply marginalized populations historically colonized under criminogenic conditions that favor white straight men (the status quo), as usual. They are not one in the same; in fact, they're functional opposites. Tokenism still being possible, but also what bad trans actors are versus bad white straight men, token straight women, and so on.

That line you wrote — "Doom: The Dark Ages is little more than rape apologia calling itself escape and rescue" — is beyond the pale. That's not just a bad take, it's irresponsible. Doom has nothing to do with that subject matter, and dragging in the ugliest possible comparison just for shock value isn't critique, it's bait.

Critique and bait aren't mutually exclusive. And again, your only argument is to deny history, onstage and off, by saying "this doesn't have to do with [insert topic, here]. You're blind.

If you actually support the causes you claim — trans rights, LGBTQ+ representation, Palestine — then tying them to Doom in this way doesn't help. It undermines the seriousness of those issues and makes your review impossible to take seriously.

The Palestinians need all the help they can get (600,000+ dead, the vast majority women and children). I don't frankly care what you think, or if it "harms" Doom's reputation. That's precisely my point. People > profit.

[34] The music excels, here; i.e., in a very operatic way—the prodigal daughter come home to defeat the whore, the wicked witch, the false parent (monstrous-feminine), etc. Here, the songwriter plays off the idea that you're both the player and the audience, fucking with your expectations by throwing you curveballs, partway through! Same idea with areas—one instance having the jester in Bellhart sing while a bug I exorcise laughed and took flight into the sky during a musical crescendo. It wasn't wholly scripted, but saw various events come together as loosely intended. It brought a smile to my face:

About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with multiple partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone's academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Persephone's (Gothic) Insights

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Silksong Symposium Sample: Game Review and Full Gameplay Notes

**Table of Contents (Silksong Symposium)**

Persephone's Silksong Symposium!

Kicking Things Off

Pros and Cons (tl;dr)

Pros

Cons

The Verdict

Final Review (short and sweet)

**First Impressions for Silksong (factual observations and opinions)**

Act I and Base Game

Act II

Dueling Lace (second fight)

Concluding Act II/the Final Boss(?)

Act III (to be completed)

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