Hollow Knight Silksong

The first thirty seconds of Hollow Knight: Silksong dedicate themselves to teaching the player one thing: the body they are operating is not the body from the previous game. The Knight, the mute small figure who in the 2017 original walked at a deliberate pace through Dirtmouth and descended into the Crossroads with the unhurried gravity of someone who had nowhere else to be, is not who the player is anymore. Hornet runs where the Knight walked. She wall-jumps in the first minute of input. She dashes in the second. She binds enemies with silk-thread at speeds the Knight could not have produced and would not have been the kind of body to produce. Within the opening sequence, the player has been physically informed, through the body in their hands, that the new game's protagonist has a different relationship to the world than the old game's protagonist had.

This is not just animation. This is the part of game design the surrounding criticism vocabulary has been mostly unable to name. The protagonist's relationship to the world they move through is almost always more legible in how they move than in what the script says about them. A character's walking speed, jumping height, traversal options, animation timing, and the small specific moves their body is good at, are not stylistic decoration on a narrative. They are the narrative, told in a different language than the cutscenes use. The body that runs through a place tells the truth about whether the place is the body's place. The body that walks through it tells the truth too. The two truths are different.

The frame this essay wants to give the reader: any time a game character moves, the movement is doing narrative work the script may or may not be doing alongside it. Once a player has this frame, the way protagonists move starts to read as evidence about what the design has decided their situation actually is. The Knight in Hallownest walks because Hallownest is home. Hornet in Pharloom runs because Pharloom is not. The same player, in the same controller, in the same hours of attention, is being told two different stories by the bodies in their hands. The stories are not, on a careful read, secondary to whatever else the games are about. The stories are what the games are about.

This frame travels. The reader can apply it to almost every game with a protagonist whose body moves. The slow protagonist in a survival-horror game has a body whose relationship to the surrounding world is one of vulnerability and reluctance. The fast protagonist in a movement shooter has a body whose relationship to the world is one of confident command. The protagonist whose body has been deliberately given limited mobility in the early game and expanded mobility late is a body whose narrative is the acquisition of competence in the place. The protagonist whose body starts mobile and gradually loses options is a body whose narrative is the loss of competence. None of this is unfamiliar; most players have intuited these distinctions for years. What naming them does is make the design choice visible as the narrative choice it actually is, and the conversation about what a game is doing gets sharper as a result.

The Metroidvania genre, of which the Hollow Knight games are recent canonical entries, is one of the medium's most thoroughly developed forms for telling protagonist-relationship stories through movement. The genre's defining structure is not, as the casual conversation often holds, the interconnected map. The defining structure is the slow acquisition of body-capabilities that gradually expand what the protagonist can do in the world. Each new ability unlocks territory the previous body could not access. Each new mobility option changes the protagonist's relationship to the geography. The form is, at its purest, a long story about a body learning to live in a place. The map is the substrate; the body's changing competence is the actual content.

The original Hollow Knight is, in this register, one of the most accomplished entries the genre has produced. The Knight's slow opening gait sets the relationship. The world is mostly bigger than the Knight is, mostly inaccessible to the Knight on first pass, mostly waiting for the Knight to develop the competences required to enter it. The relationship is one of patience, accumulation, and slow inhabitation. Over thirty hours, the Knight comes to know Hallownest as the body comes to know a place where it has been walking for long enough. By the campaign's end, the player has not just defeated the game. The player, through the Knight, has come to live in Hallownest.

Yi-Fu Tuan, the Chinese-American geographer whose 1977 book Space and Place remains one of the most cited works on how humans relate to specific locations, gave the vocabulary the analysis needs. Tuan distinguished between space and place. Space, in Tuan's account, is abstract, undifferentiated extension that the body moves through without depositing meaning. Place is space that the body has been in long enough to know, with the accumulated meaning the knowing produces. Place is where dwelling happens. Space is where transit happens. The same physical area can be either, depending on the body's relationship to it. A tourist moves through space. A resident dwells in place.

Tuan's framework maps onto the Knight-and-Hornet contrast with unusual clarity. Hallownest, in the original game, became a place for the Knight through the slow accumulation of body-knowledge of its specific geography. The Knight learned where things were, what the paths felt like, which rooms held what. The body came to know the place. By the campaign's end, the Knight was a dweller in Hallownest.

Pharloom, in Silksong, is structurally different. The body Hornet operates is not a body that has been given the time or the conditions to dwell. The map is, in many of the game's regions, more vertical and more transit-oriented than Hallownest was. The pace of traversal is faster. The mechanical vocabulary rewards speed and reactivity rather than patience. The body keeps moving. The body does not, in the same way the Knight did, come to live in the place. Pharloom remains, across the player's many hours with it, more like space in Tuan's strict sense than like place. The body knows the layout. The body has not made the layout home.

This is not, on a careful read, a design failure. This is the design rendering the protagonist's specific situation. Hornet is, in the game's fiction, structurally an exile. She has been taken from Hallownest, the kingdom that was hers. She has been deposited in Pharloom, a kingdom that is not. The campaign is the story of her trying to find her way back. The body the design has given her is the body that exile requires: fast, mobile, ready to move further when the situation calls for it, equipped with a tool (her needle) that is the one piece of her old home she has been able to keep.

A reader who has spent real time with the 2017 game will have an objection ready at this point, and it deserves to be met at full strength rather than waved past. Hornet was fast before Pharloom existed as a place for her to be fast in. She appears as a boss twice in the original Hollow Knight, once in the tangled undergrowth of Greenpath early in the campaign and again at the entrance to the Cast-Off Shell in Kingdom's Edge much later, and in both fights she already moves the way Silksong later asks the player to move as a matter of course: needle thrown out and snapped back like a line, quick low dashes across the arena floor, a readiness to disengage and reposition rather than stand and trade blows. None of this was invented for the sequel. If the Knight's slow walk is being read here as evidence that Hallownest was home, and Hornet's sprint as evidence that Pharloom is not, the objection runs, the comparison is rigged before it starts. It measures a body built to patrol against a body built to wander, which is a difference of temperament and combat role, not of geography.

The objection is right about its facts and should be granted in full rather than argued around. What it leaves out is what those two Hollow Knight fights were actually doing with the speed. Both take place inside Hallownest itself, the kingdom the game identifies as her father's: Hornet is the Pale King's daughter, born of a bargain he struck with Herrah, ruler of the neighboring kingdom of Deepnest. Hornet in 2017 moved fast, but she moved fast while patrolling a kingdom that was, by blood, partly hers to patrol, in two bounded encounters that lasted minutes each before releasing her back into a map she had known longer than the player had. Silksong changes one variable and holds the rest constant. It keeps the same needle, the same throw-and-snap, the same refusal to stand still, and spends that body across the length of a whole campaign, in a kingdom she has no claim to, had never set foot in before the game's opening cutscene, and cannot leave by choosing to. Speed alone proves nothing about home or exile. A fast body can patrol its own territory as easily as it can flee someone else's. What changed between the two games is what the same fast body is now doing: two short defenses of ground already hers, against a campaign-length transit through ground that is not.

This distinction matters for the frame the essay opened with, and it needs stating plainly rather than left implicit. The claim was never that a fast body always means displacement and a slow body always means belonging; boss-fight Hornet already shows a fast body can also mean a native defender, someone whose speed is the speed of familiarity with a threat rather than the speed of flight from one. What the frame actually tracks is duration and consent: how long a body has been moving through a given territory, and whether the moving was chosen. A guard patrolling home ground quickly is not the same body, narratively, as a captive being marched through occupied ground quickly, even if the two move at an identical frame rate. Silksong's opening thirty seconds do not prove Hornet is an exile by themselves. They prove she is fast. It is the other thirty-some hours, spent in a kingdom that keeps refusing to become hers, that prove the rest.

The Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2000), made the foundational argument about what spatial attention looks like under conditions of involuntary displacement. Exile, in Said's analysis, drawn from his own biography and from his career-long engagement with displaced populations, produces a specific kind of body. The exile cannot dwell. The exile is in motion, by necessity, through territory that is not theirs. The exile's body has been trained to move quickly and to keep its options for further departure open. The exile's spatial attention is the attention of someone who has not been given the time to learn the place as a place. The exile knows the place as a route, as a transit, as a set of way-stations.

Said was writing about people. The framework applies to fictional bodies too, when the fictional bodies are rendered carefully. Hornet's body in Silksong is rendered carefully. Her movement is the movement Said was describing. Her relationship to Pharloom is the relationship Said was describing. The game is, in its small commercial register, doing the cultural work of making the exile's specific bodily situation legible through the player's own hands on the controls.

This is the part of the analysis that matters beyond the game and beyond the Metroidvania genre. The world's actual political and ecological conditions are producing displaced bodies at a scale the last several centuries have not seen. Climate displacement, war displacement, economic displacement, the gentrification that displaces neighborhoods, the labor migrations that displace generations are all real, large, and ongoing. The relationship to place Said was describing as the exile's specific spatial discipline is, in the present, the relationship to place a growing fraction of the world's population is being forced to inhabit. Cultural products that render this honestly are, in their small way, doing useful cultural work: they are giving the form of attention that displacement produces a language. The language is part of how the imagination keeps the displaced body's experience legible. The medium of the video game, which renders bodies in motion as its primary content, is structurally well-suited to this kind of cultural work, even when the studios making the work do not name the work in those terms.

The Pakistani-American psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar, in Immigration and Identity (1999), gave the clinical version of Said's argument. Akhtar's three decades of clinical work with immigrant patients documented specific structural changes in the body's relationship to space, time, and other people under conditions of displacement. The displaced person, on Akhtar's evidence, develops a particular kind of mobile attention: the body learns to scan its surroundings continuously for cues, to maintain options for further departure, to take at-rest postures that permit fast movement. These changes are real. They are not pathological in the dysfunctional sense; they are adaptive responses to the displacement condition. The body has, in the strict clinical sense, learned to be in transit.

Hornet's body, on Akhtar's framework, is the body of a displaced subject. The constant motion, the readiness for further departure, the specific small idle animations that always look ready to move, are the clinical signature of displacement rendered with unusual precision. The game has rendered the signature without naming it, and the rendering is what produces the specific emotional weight of operating Hornet through Pharloom.

The claim generalizes past exile narratives specifically, and it is worth testing against a case where the reason for the transit is not displacement at all but something more structural. Dead Cells, Motion Twin's roguelite from 2018, gives the player an ooze-animated body that reanimates a fresh corpse every time the last one dies, moving through a castle whose rooms are reshuffled into a different order each run. There is no home for this body to be exiled from, because the game never lets the question arise: there is no fixed geography to come to know, in Tuan's sense, since the geography itself declines to hold still long enough to be known by anyone, including the player. The body that results is, if anything, faster and more continuously forward-moving than Hornet's, built around a dash-and-recover vocabulary suited to a world that will not exist in the same arrangement the next time the player sees it.

The comparison tests the claim rather than defeating it. Hornet's speed answers one specific displacement: a kingdom taken from her and a kingdom substituted in its place. The Dead Cells body's speed answers a harsher and more general condition, a world that has removed the possibility of dwelling for anyone, permanently, as a structural feature of the game rather than as a plot event that happens to one character. The two bodies move in related ways for a related reason. Neither has been given a place willing to hold still long enough to become one. But Pharloom could, in the story's own terms, become home to Hornet if the campaign let her stay in it. The Dead Cells castle could not become home to anyone, under any circumstance the game allows, because it is dismantled and rebuilt before the question of staying is able to come up. Exile is a condition a story can resolve. Procedural impermanence is a condition a game is built from at the level of its engine, and the speed it produces is what a body looks like once even the fantasy of arriving somewhere has been designed out of the possibility space.

The comparison also clarifies what question to ask of a game before asking what a body's speed means within it. Hollow Knight and Silksong both allow dwelling in principle; they differ only in whether a given body is permitted to reach it inside the story that has been told. Dead Cells never allows dwelling at all, for any body, which is a fact about the game's construction rather than about any character's circumstances. A reader applying this frame to a new game should therefore check the ground before checking the feet: whether the world on offer is the kind that could become a place for anyone, and only then whether this particular body has been given the standing to make it one.

The reader who finishes this essay can carry the frame into almost every future game with a protagonist whose body moves. The questions to ask: how does this body move, what does the movement say about the body's relationship to the world it is in, and does the body's movement-story match the script's story about what the body is supposed to be doing? The three questions, asked together, are one of the most useful tools available for evaluating what a game is actually doing as a cultural object. The movement is rarely arbitrary. The design has, in almost every case worth taking seriously, made specific choices about what the protagonist's body says about the protagonist's situation. Once a player has the frame, the choices become visible. Once visible, they become evaluable. The conversation about the game becomes sharper, and the conversation generalizes to almost every other game in the form.

The reader can also notice, when the frame has become available, how often a game's body and a game's script are saying different things about what the protagonist's situation is. The cheerful protagonist whose body is rendered as exhausted is telling a different story than the cheerful dialogue suggests. The bereaved protagonist whose body runs as fast as it did before the bereavement is telling a different story than the script's grief-arc suggests. The displaced protagonist whose body moves like a dweller is, by the body's testimony, not actually displaced in any way the design has chosen to honor mechanically. The mismatches are common in commercial games. Noticing them is one of the more useful critical skills the medium rewards.

The Metroidvania genre, in its better-realized entries, is one of the medium's clearest sites for this kind of body-narrative attention. Hollow Knight, in 2017, gave the genre one of its most accomplished dwelling-bodies. Silksong, in 2026, gives the genre one of its most accomplished transit-bodies. The two are not in competition. They are different kinds of work the form can do. The form, after Silksong, has reopened its range. The genre is, on the evidence of this entry, capable of rendering more kinds of body-place relationships than the patient-dwelling register of the first game had previously demonstrated. The opening is useful. It expands what the next decade of Metroidvanias can attempt.

The frame the reader can carry forward, in shortest form: watch how the protagonist moves. The body tells the truth the script may not be telling. The truth is usually the part of the game most worth knowing.

The needle Hornet throws into Pharloom and pulls back to her hand is the form's most economical single image of what the design is doing. The body in transit and the body that dwells have, in the medium's most patient working version of the Metroidvania form, been shown to be different bodies in different conditions, and the genre has opened far enough to let both versions be legible at the level of the protagonist's hands.