CG on Silksong

I've got about 60 hrs into Silksong and am probably only about two-thirds through the game. Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight, a game you might know from Game Pass. The series falls into the metroidvania genre, meaning it’s a 2D Dark Souls–platformer hybrid with lots of shortcuts, a maze-like world, enemy ambushes, and the occasional tough boss.

The premise of the story is that you play as Hornet, an antagonist from the first game, with the simple goal of reaching the top of the citadel, a huge structure that takes up a massive part of the open world.

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Difficulty

The feedback about the game being too hard is accurate. Silksong is drastically harder than the first Hollow Knight, and much harder than similar titles like Ender Lilies or Bloodstained, in my opinion. You should try one of those games, or better yet the first Hollow Knight, before attempting this game. The early game is very unforgiving, though the difficulty actually gets easier as your health, damage, and move set expand slowly in the mid-to-late game. There was a recent patch that nerfed some difficult early-game bosses, so some of my criticisms may not be fully accurate anymore, but regardless, it’s still a very hard game.

Most of the difficulty is a result of a lack of health or damage upgrades. You can't increase your damage at all until beating the first major boss, and health upgrades are very rare. Bosses deal 2 damage with most attacks, which is a ton considering you’ll only have 5 or 6 HP in the early game.

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World & Atmosphere

Silksong's world is surprisingly diverse, at least compared to the first game in the series. There's every biome you can think of, as well as a decent range of ambiences. Atmospherically, exploration is a bit tense due to your small health pool and the abundance of traps and strong enemies.

Finding shortcuts and hidden items is really fun once you get past the early game, where upgrades and useful items are rare. A big criticism I have of Silksong, and this genre as a whole, is that there’s no way to determine when you’ve found all the items in a particular area. This forces you to either look up a guide or waste your free time exploring old areas. This game is particularly bad in that regard due to how well-hidden health upgrades (you need four items to upgrade your health once) and essential shortcuts are.

The world is massive, and after 60 hrs, I’m still seeing new locations.

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Mechanics

Silksong plays similarly to the first game. It’s a souls-like platformer with a heavy emphasis on parkour, exploration, and memorizing boss attack patterns. Where it changes things up is it’s a very fast-paced game if you want it to be. I actually found playing cautiously to be much harder than opting for a quicker play style.

You can change your play style by swapping out various crests (a minimalist class system) and tools (things like throwing weapons/buffs).

One upside of this game only having four total damage upgrades that apply to all your classes is you can switch freely without having to resource grind too much.

Unfortunately, buying all the items from every shop requires a ton of currency farming due to how steep prices are and how little money enemies drop. Silksong is a game where every item sold by a vendor has a purpose, so you’ll actually need to buy at least most of them. I only found one viable farming spot in the entire game, and it wasn’t fun to use.

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Bosses

Silksong bosses will generally kill you within a few seconds of seeing them before you make the runback to their arena and figure out that it only has a few moves (usually 3–5), then take it out. I never got stuck on a boss beyond the early game, outside of random side bosses that I was probably under-equipped for. If you stick to the main path, you likely won’t get stuck on anything too unfair.

Something you’ll find annoying is that for several main story bosses, you’ll have to make a long runback to their arena past various enemies or traps.

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Final Take

Overall, Silksong is a solid 8/10 game. It’s far from perfect, but if you want a game with a world that feels endless with dozens of hours of story content, it’s a great game. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’m still doing new stuff 60 hrs in. I’m not trying to 100% complete it either; I’m just doing main story stuff.

CG on AI Limit (2025 Souls-like Game Review)

AI Limit is a new souls-like game that came out earlier this year (March 2025). The premise is that you're playing as a robot girl in a post-apocalypse with amnesia and tasked with recovering her memory by repairing these branches scattered throughout the world that connect to a mythical tree.

The story is a bit more convoluted than that. There are several factions, including the Church, which provides protection to the few humans left on Earth from the Necros (weird big zombie-like creatures), and Seed, comprised of other robot girls (called Bladers) like your character, Arissa.

In my playthrough, I only encountered two bugs: one which was fixed by verifying the Steam files, and the other being a recurring fall damage bug, so you should have a decently bug-free experience if you pick it up.

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World & Atmosphere

Unlike most games in the genre, humans actually comprise a big chunk of the enemies you fight. There's a decent variety in landscapes/environments, despite plant life being canonically extinct in-game. There's poison swamps, underground caverns, a futuristic palace, and more.

The NPCs you encounter are all interesting, and I felt compelled to finish their quests and listen to their dialogue, something that's rare in this genre in my experience.

Humans survive by exclusively eating Mud, a magical substance that's visually identical to normal mud, but has some weird properties like spawning monsters known collectively as the Void. It also serves as a secondary healing item and is mysteriously linked to the Church and Necros, as you'll discover by reading various bits of lore throughout the game. Some of the lore items you pick up can even be sold for a lot of money, so there's a real incentive to read it all.

The level design in this game is very strong, easily on par with games like Dark Souls 1 & 2, Lies of P, and sections of Elden Ring. There are tons of shortcuts, areas that loop back around, and enough challenging enemies guarding hidden items to keep exploration rewarding. The world is about as interconnected as it can be.

One huge downside of the game being offline is there aren't messages on the ground to guide you (like those found in Elden Ring) to where secret areas are, so you'll almost certainly need to consult an online guide if you want to find all the weapons, armor, and upgrade materials.

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Mechanics

This game is pretty difficult and unfortunately borrows a lot of bad mechanics from other souls games, but also strips away some of the more outdated features like stamina and carry-weight limits.

You can dodge and attack infinitely, but your damage gets lowered if your sync bar (a combination between stamina and mana) gets depleted by getting hit/casting spells. The bar is restored by attacking enemies, and it's a huge improvement over the standard stamina/magic bars you see in every souls-like/RPG.

Parkour is torture. You can only jump while sprinting, and only to cross gaps because there's no verticality to it, just like in the Dark Souls trilogy. The fall damage calculations are completely random; you can fall off the same edge and lose 90% of your HP or just half.

On death, the only penalty is you'll always lose a portion of your currency (between 10–50%) depending on what items you have equipped. It's really not an issue.

Reallocating your stats is completely free and can be done at any resting branch once you find a certain item in a hidden area. This prevents you from getting soft-locked by a terrible build.

Weapon upgrading is the same as any other souls-like. Every weapon has 10 levels, with the final material being the only one that can't be bought infinitely. Fortunately, there are only 4 upgrade materials, and you actually find enough to use more than 1–2 weapons in a playthrough.

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Bosses

The bosses are a mixed bag, with only 3 having NPC summons (these are also some of the best-looking boss fights). In terms of difficulty, they're all over the place, with some late-game bosses being much easier than early-game ones. Atmospherically, there are no misses. I didn't encounter anything that felt out of place, and almost none of the bosses are reskins aside from a few in the end-game.

Healing is very limited early on, meaning you'll pretty much need to parry every boss until you get more healing items, because tanking/DPS isn't viable until mid-game, and you can't actually knock down bosses for a critical hit without parrying. In my playthrough I used a strength/magic build, so it was frustrating to have no reward for charging up big power attacks to hit a boss.

This leads to an unsatisfying feeling when you finally take down these early-game bosses because parrying isn't as hard as in games like Elden Ring, but not parrying makes the difficulty excessively high.

Around the mid-game, you start to encounter more standard souls-like bosses, and can use strategies other than spamming parry.

There are several humanoid-sized bosses as well; of course, these are also the most challenging.

Unfortunately, there are no gimmick bosses. Everything is just a straight-up fight.

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Final Take

Overall, I can only recommend this game to you if you've at least finished Elden Ring or Dark Souls 3. It's not a great intro to the genre, and at times the difficulty is on par with harder games like Sekiro. The story is quite hard to follow in the late game, and I actually had to consult guides on where to go next despite having completed pretty much every other game in this genre. It took me about 30hrs to finish the game, including all the optional content aside from one hidden boss.

If you play these games primarily for the exploration like I do, you'll have a good time. But if you're looking for a more boss-focused experience like Elden Ring/Dark Souls 3, this game probably isn't for you.

It's an 8/10 for me and I can see myself buying a DLC for it or replaying it in the future. 

Withering Rooms (CG Review)

Recently, I picked up Withering Rooms on Steam, a weird 2.5D horror game that reminded me a lot of Little Nightmares, a similar-looking horror game, from the description and artwork. I went in expecting a 2-3 hour forgettable horror game but ended up spending the next 30ish hours (currently 50) on one of the most unique souls-like games I've ever played.

The best way to describe it is a combination of Dark Souls 1 and Luigi's Mansion.

The plot centers around Nightingale, the girl you play as (no character creation—this isn't a blank slate game), trying to escape from a dream world full of undead that she gets trapped in after being put in an asylum at 14. The dream world consists of the Mostyn mansion, as well as some other large buildings, an underground section, and a few other outdoor areas. Naturally, there's a ton of lore to be found in notes, item descriptions, and dialogue.

The story actually engaged me throughout the whole four chapters of the game, which is impressive considering that the souls-like genre isn't exactly renowned for its storytelling.

Atmospherically, it's perfect, from the OST to the colors and character design. The vibe is really similar to Luigi's Mansion or cartoon horror, wherein you're more cozy and comfortable than scared.

Gameplay-wise, there are three basic builds you can spec into: melee, ranged, and magic. I've only done melee and magic playthroughs, but magic is obviously by far the best option. Since this is a horror game, there are also stealth mechanics, which I almost never used. The game encourages you to kill enemies, and past the first chapter, you won't be running into too many monsters you can't beat unless you keep dying and don't have enough items stashed up.

I did die a ton in the first chapter and a bit into the second chapter, so if this is your first 2D souls-like game, or souls game in general, I could see you needing to stealth more to avoid getting frustrated by losing all your stuff. The house's rooms also shuffle around upon respawning, but this is more of a way to keep the game's relatively small world feeling fresh rather than to confuse you.

I mention stashing items because upon death, you'll not only lose all your coins but also all your items. You can't recover them by going back to where you died either. This sounds pretty brutal on the surface, but once you get into the game, there are more than enough ways to hold onto important items. All armor is permanent, and once a weapon is upgraded, it becomes permanent.

Earlier, I described the gameplay as being most like Dark Souls 1, but because this is an indie game made by just one dev, the jankiness of the combat leads to some less-than-satisfying encounters. Bosses, while all cool-looking, feel more like you're just trying to DPS them while dodging one or two attacks every once in a while, and they never really get that difficult (at least in regular new game; New Game Plus is a whole different story). Regular enemy encounters are all good/great, though. There's a decent balance between trash mobs and things that can take you out quickly.

New Game Plus is actually worth exploring once you clear the main game. It's rare in this genre for New Game Plus to offer anything more than increased enemy health while you keep your items and skills.

In Withering Rooms, New Game Plus extends the main game's story, adds several new enemy types, at least one new boss that I've seen so far, and a few other things I won't spoil. Within NG+, you can find an item that activates hard mode, where enemies are insanely strong and a genuine challenge to take down. Beating one of these enemies/bosses gives you items to continue the story, which I've yet to finish after 50 hours.

Overall, it's an easy 9/10 game, and you should pick it up rn (right now).