Hollow Knight: Silksong has been out for—let’s see—19 hours and 43 minutes at the time of writing, so it’s time to absolutely snap the whole thing over our knees. The speedrunning community is already at it (via Eurogamer) with Silksong, rapidly uncovering a myriad of techniques that we’ll all one day gawp at during an upcoming Awesome Games Done Quick. It’s cool as hell, but I will never have the manual dexterity or mental energy to use any of these tactics.
The work is taking place anywhere two or more Silksong fans are gathered, of course, but (oddly enough) you can get a great overview of the Silksong speedrunning community’s work in the speedrunning channel on the Hollow Knight Discord and in the Hollow Knight Speedrun and Racing Community.
So far, the mad lads have uncovered strats to travel at faster-than-sprinting speeds by combining jumping and sprinting, access ability-gated areas early by cunningly bouncing off well-placed flying enemies, and figured out you can just jump off spikes, I guess. That last one feels like it might get patched, but who knows? These early days are anarchy.
My favourite, though, is this method for just absolutely clowning on poor Moorwing, trapping the poor fella beneath a bit of level geometry and stabbing them repeatedly in the head until they’ve had enough.
I’m not sure it really counts as a speedrunning strat—plenty of seasoned ‘runners note that it’s likely quicker to beat the bug a different way—but it is quite funny. Also, Hollow Knight bosses are hard. I welcome any opportunity to make my life easier.
I expect all of these will become refined to hard diamond as time goes on and people get more experience—that is, if they aren’t chucked out altogether as speedrunners develop entirely new methods—but it’s kind of fascinating to watch the incipient Silksong speedrunning community already begin to take the game apart. I’m eager to see what the community produces in the next 19 hours.
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