2017's Hollow Knight was a challenging game. Players started with only five Masks, and each hit from even the weakest enemy would strike a full one from their health bar. And thanks to Hollow Knight's hit detection, even just touching a single pixel of the enemy's model counts as a hit. But Hollow Knight: Silksong seems to have viewed the original game's high level of difficulty as a challenge unto itself.
By all accounts, Hollow Knight: Silksong is a harder game than its 2017 predecessor. Enemies hit harder, bosses are fiercer, platforming requires pinpoint accuracy, and players are forced to adapt to these challenges basically from the outset. One of the earliest skill checks in Hollow Knight: Silksong is the Bell Beast, a large silkworm-like creature who takes up most of the screen. And while the Bell Beast is far from Silksong's most difficult boss encounter, it's the perfect encapsulation of the leap in difficulty between the two Hollow Knight games.
How Hollow Knight: Silksong's Bell Beast Represents The Sequel's Increased Difficulty
The Bell Beast Is a Tough Early Game Skill Check
Located in The Marrow, Hollow Knight: Silksong's Bell Beast will likely be the second major boss players encounter during their playthrough, and unlike the Moss Mother before it, the Bell Beast doesn't wait around for the player to attack. For many Silksong players, the Bell Beast is going to feel like the Metroidvania's first significant challenge, and as such, it acts as the game's first proper skill check, ensuring that players have reached a certain level before they can progress to the next area.
The Bell Beast is a rather fast boss, with it being able to dash across the entire length of the screen in just a second or two. And due to the boss' large size, players who don't react fast enough will undoubtedly take a hit. The Bell Beast's dash also requires players to "pogo" off the boss' back mid-attack, which essentially means performing an air attack so that Hornet stays in the air until it's safe to land.
The Bell Beast's jump attack is a little easier to dodge, but hitting the boss during this window requires the use of Hornet's upward slash. The boss' falling bell projectiles can also be a tricky obstacle to work around, with them bouncing several times before leaving the stage. That's a lot of mechanics for new players to wrap their heads around all at once, and to make matters worse, the Bell Beast removes two health points whenever an attack lands, essentially killing the player in just two to three hits if they're not careful.
Generally speaking, Hollow Knight: Silksong's Bell Beast is much harder to fight than Hollow Knight's first round of bosses. The Gruz Mother of the Forgotten Crossroads is probably the best comparison to Silksong's Bell Beast, with its faster movement and larger size. But even then, the Gruz Mother only has two distinct attacks, both of which can be easily avoided without the use of advanced techniques like 'pogoing', and both of which only deal one point of damage.
Hollow Knight: Silksong Locks a Core Mechanic Behind The Bell Beast
But while the Bell Beast undoubtedly hits harder than its Hollow Knight early game counterparts, the real exemplification of the sequel's increased difficulty is that fast travel is locked behind the boss' defeat. For comparison, all players need to do to unlock fast travel in Hollow Knight is find the first Stagway and pay the small sum of Geo needed to call the speedy beast.
Locking fast travel behind the Bell Beast's defeat isn't a major issue, as most players will have only visited two or three locations up to this point, but it's a good representation of the step-up in difficulty between the two Hollow Knight entries, which is something that persists throughout the entire sequel's runtime.
-
OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 91 /100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- September 4, 2025
- ESRB
- Everyone 10+ / Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood
- Developer(s)
- Team Cherry
- Publisher(s)
- Team Cherry
