As the one-year anniversary of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s release approaches, some players, having now beaten the game long ago, might be left with a Hornet-shaped hole in their hearts. While there’s a free DLC, Sea of Sorrow, due sometime this year, given the series’ history, it’s possible we may not see it for some time yet. Silksong is a singular metroidvania flavored with difficult bosses and unforgiving areas that would inspire a serious case of professional envy in the developers at FromSoftware. However, I’ve assembled here 10 games that I think can scratch the same itches Silksong does.
Hollow Knight
Let’s get the “duh” choice out of the way first. Silksong is a sequel, improving on a lot of the combat and platforming systems its predecessor, Hollow Knight, established. Hornet, the protagonist of Silksong, was also originally a boss that showed up several times throughout Hollow Knight, and the two games are connected by a shared narrative thread of excess, corruption, and eventual doom. Playing Hollow Knight after Silksong kinda feels like that moment in a shonen anime when the protagonist sheds their weighted armor. The sequel’s combat is so much harder and the platforming so much more unforgiving that Hollow Knight feels like a quaint walk in the park in comparison, but one definitely worth taking.
Blasphemous/Blasphemous 2
Of all the games on this list that don’t have Hollow Knight in its title, Blasphemous and its sequel are the games most like Silksong. I’m talking combat, exploration power-ups, and an expansive world suffused with sorrowful religious imagery. Much like Silksong, Blasphemous demands that you respect your enemies lest they easily kill you in your carelessness. The two games share an air of gilded rot. In Silksong the world is crushed under the weight of a despotic yet holy figure worshiped in a crumbling temple. The same is true of Blasphemous. Made by Spanish game studio The Game Kitchen, the game pulls its inspiration directly from Catholic religious festivals and painter Francisco Goya’s work A Procession of the Flaggellants. The result is a game in which you feel lost, both physically and spiritually, while pain drips quite literally from every orifice.
Dante’s Inferno
While wholly different in terms of gameplay, art style, and even graphical dimensions, Dante’s Inferno is what you play when you want to continue to explore Silksong’s vibe of rotten religion—but also want to have way more goofy-ass fun with it. Dante’s Inferno is EA’s straight-up God of War clone, right down to the big glowy buttons that hover over an enemy’s head when it’s time to perform a finishing move. It’s supposed to be an action game riff on Dante Alighieri’s epic poem in which a knight returning from the Crusades ventures to hell to save his beloved’s damned soul. But the whole game tries so hard to tap into that hyper-violent, edgelord vibe of the late aughts that it wheels back around into a Divine Comedy that I cannot take seriously, but nevertheless enjoy playing.
Blippo+
You’re not gonna find a single thing Blippo+ has in common with Silksong. Instead of a metroidvania, it’s a—how to put this—an immersive narrative experience where the main gameplay mechanic is channel-surfing through late-night TV shows? As you flip between programs styled after The Joy of Painting, public access news broadcasts, and Svengoolie, a story starts to emerge that also has nothing to do with any of the narratives present in Silksong. So why does this game make the list? When Silksong finally announced its release date, it essentially blew a hole in late 2025’s video game calendar. Tons of games shifted their own release dates to get out of the game’s way, much like everyone’s doing this year with GTA VI now. Blippo+, which had an earlier release on the PlayDate, kept its Switch and PC launch date of September 23rd, when we were all smack-dab in the middle of Silksong fever. Chances are you missed this game. Now that the Silksong haze has cleared, you can check it out.
Animal Well
Animal Well, the puzzle platformer published by YouTuber videogamedunkey, mimics the environmental moodiness of Silksong. Much like Pharloom, the world of Animal Well is vast, diverse, quiet, and often feels haunted. This is a puzzle platformer with no combat but there are a ton of secrets you, as a blobby lil guy, can use your parkour skills to unlock, revealing hidden areas to explore.
1000xResist
While there’s an overabundance of so-called “dad games,” there are relatively few examples of “mom games.” (Imagine that.) Silksong, with its narrative themes and characters like Lace, Grand Mother Silk, Bell Beast, and more, is what I’d call a mom game. So too is 1000xResist. In it, you play as a clone of your mother, who you kill in the game’s opening moments. People who’ve dug into the lore of Silksong and finished the game might now understand why I’ve chosen to compare the two. Your task is to filter through the memories of mother, going back to a time before she became the progenitor responsible for a world filled with her clones. 1000xResist is an incredible narrative game that’s accumulated numerous nominations and won a Peabody Award for its excellent storytelling.
Super Metroid
Super Metroid is Silksong’s great-great-great genre grandmommy—for it, too, is a mom game. It is the source from which we derive the “Metroid” part in “metroidvania,” and a Silksong recommendation list, indeed any list of “things you should play if you enjoyed this metroidvania-type game,” would be incomplete without it. Super Metroid is a quiet game. Neither Samus nor any of the game’s bosses speak, and the game itself doesn’t speak to you through dialogue or hints either, forcing you, in your solitude, to figure shit out for yourself. And the trial-and-error way in which you do figure it out is glorious. The moment when a curious player decides to set off a power bomb in a room made of glass, only to have that glass shatter, revealing a new area: sublime. There is a reason there’s a whole genre named after it.
Elden Ring
Elden Ring and Silksong are kin not only because they have similar soulsborne mechanics but also because of the sheer scale of their respective worlds. Just when you think you’ve reached the edge of Pharloom, Silksong‘s second act opens up a whole new world that could be a game unto itself. That’s what it felt like exploring Elden Ring, too. There is so much depth and variety to each location that it feels decadent, like there’s no way the developers gave us this much. Every enemy is dripping with tragic symbolism—mindless zombies once human but now consumed by their vocation, zealots who’ve turned piety into monstrousness, and so much more. Silksong also contains some of the most egregious, infuriating, and patently unfair boss runbacks to ever exist in a game, ones that would put even the hardest encounters in Elden Ring to shame. At least that game was kind enough to put its respawn points right in front of the boss arenas.
Mina The Hollower
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An indie studio releases a major hit, then takes a long time to develop a follow-up, is forced to delay the new game, but finally releases it to massive critical success. While not quite following the exact story of Silksong’s development, Mina the Hollower certainly comes close. The two games share a vibe of “indie prestige,” doing so much with far smaller budgets than their AAA cousins. And where Silksong feels like a love letter to classic Nintendo games like Metroid, Mina the Hollower is just that for The Legend of Zelda, with a Game Boy-inspired soundtrack that’s nothing but absolute bangers.
Celeste
Celeste has no combat, unless you count the fights you have with yourself on whether or not to continue the dangerous ascent up the titular Mount Celeste. If you enjoyed the puzzle platforming bits of Silksong including Mount Fay, the Sands of Karak, and (shudders) Bilewater, but don’t have the patience to fight monsters in-between, Celeste is your game. Celeste is just as narratively beautiful as Silksong, and features a ton of optional challenges that increase the platforming difficulty.
