Hollow Knight, Silksong, and Notions of a Working-Class Underworld

This article will contain semi-detailed spoilers for Act I’s climax boss, and environmental/narrative spoilers through Act II of Silksong. There will also be a broad-strokes recap of some of Hollow Knight’s essential plot points.

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I too have been navigating the gauntlet of Pharloom in the past couple of weeks.

It’s been hellish.

I’ve had fun; please don’t mistake this introduction for a polemic. The world of Hollow Knight seemed lost, abrasive, imperfect. Silksong’s kingdom feels more than abrasive – it feels systemically sinister. So many of the difficulty mechanics I’ve heard people complaining about, from the environmental hazards to the scarcity of Rosaries (the game’s primary currency) are present to further this feeling of hostility.??I don’t belong anywhere near the far-off Citadel, nor anywhere on the arduous path through Pharloom to get there. Neither does any member of the permanent underclass, so many of whom remain adjutants to a faith that is singularly grounded upon pilgrimage. We are all sinners without a chance at repentance.

The game’s progression is, by and large, an inversion of the direction of Hollow Knight: in that game, the player character (the knight) begins in Dirtmouth, a small settlement in the higher half of the world, and much of the navigation trends downward towards the long-buried secrets within Hallownest’s detritus. It is an ever-present sanctuary, where travelers stop by during their questlines and stores only become more plentiful.

Silksong, then, is all about climbing. The introductory settlement is little more than an impermanent respite for a caravan of the faithful – and by the midsection of the game’s first act, it is almost barren. Those strong enough to survive continue moving upward – first to Bellhart, and then to Songclave, at the upper outskirts of the Citadel. The philosophy of Pharloom’s pilgrims seems to be one grounded in impermanence, in sacrifice, in insecurity. To toil is to be a believer. To find respite more than necessary is to find indolence.

The horrors of Hollow Knight’s Hallownest are largely an outside crisis. The kingdom’s benevolent ruler, the Pale King, was left scrambling to contain the outbreak of Radiance (a sort of madness plague) when the children-vessels he spawned became too ensouled to do the job. The world’s hostility is a wild and instinctive one – there are corrupted, mindless creatures, and infrastructure that has rotted into new barriers for travel. The kingdom’s collapse has been a grand tragedy, its folly built upon dozens of little decisions, little mistakes. The knight finds the road to the Void paved with good intention corrupted my mortal imperfections and (ironically enough) humanity.

In Silksong, when Hornet ascends the Blasted Steps and approaches the Great Gate into the Citadel, we find out alongside her that the loving divinity of Pharloom was all a grand lie. There are no open arms for the faithful: Having acquired a Needolin and rung enough holy bells to discern the song that unlocks the heavy door, we awaken a trap.

All of the pilgrims at the door beside us are slaughtered before they can even process the betrayal.

For most of Act I, the character of the Citadel is kept vague – most natives respond with a single-minded drive to get closer to their Mecca, uncritical of it all. We can infer some sinister elements, given the game begins with Hornet being captured, bound, mid-delivery to some sort of judgment – but perhaps we can excuse it as a protocol for an interloper or an outsider. The Last Judge shows that there is no plausible path to salvation: an oversized, bronzed automaton with a large flagellant’s mace. It puts up a hell of a fight: swinging the heavy weapon (that, of course, does two pips of damage as so many things in Silksong do), slamming it into the ground and bounding after us with a singular intent to kill. We get it to half health, and it sets its weapon on fire, threatening the integrity of the whole gate with explosions and near-constant waves of Inferno.

There’s something to be said for the notion of a religious “trial-by fire” in our contemporary media landscape. For example, Dark Souls places the Iron Golem as a barrier towards the golden city of Anor Londo. However, in that game the quest for the Chosen Undead is grounded upon their pseudo-immortality, a blunt challenge that will overtly involve combat and bloodshed. But the majority of Silksong’s faithful – those still cogent enough to keep climbing – are peaceful things, frail and insignificant. They are not combat-trained nor do they expect such a thing to be necessary.

Then, when the Last Judge is defeated, we find one last kaizo trap: The whole thing detonates to rob the faithful of their victory. The whole game has been rigged from the start.

The Citadel, ostensibly the paradise for the faithful, is closed, and it intends to stay that way.

We break the rules, though, and we navigate the Underworks, a technologically-complex maze of grinding gears and unguarded blades that are just as dangerous to the workers as to intruders. Our entrance to the Citadel shows a similarly-hostile world. Maps and information kiosks require decent sums of Rosaries to share their knowledge with us. In an already scarce economy, the player may move to sit at a bench to recover, only to find that each rest is paywalled behind fifteen rosaries. On my ascent through the bronze machinery, I found a confessional, and paid twenty beads to confess my sins. ??Whatever Hornet said would not have mattered; the answer of the Holy was pre-recorded. I am a sinner, a lowly thing, and the only way to repent is to work without rest or food for the foreseeable future. The only faithful bug is a worker drone.

I find it fortuitous that shortly before Silksong’s release, I returned to the Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, and while playing I ricocheted back to one of Marx’s most famous passages, featured within the introduction of “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Oft misquoted, it is reproduced here in full:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the sin of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (54).

When systems enact repeated violence against the underclasses, the proletariat, and remain rigid in their apathy, some turn to religion in order to provide meaning or justification to these experiences. Christianity and one’s “rewards in heaven” were and are often cited to justify exploitation. Workers who dealt with unfair conditions and danger and made the sacrifices of blood and sweat and life itself would be cosmically reimbursed postmortem by a system that does care about the suffering of the little guy. In the same way that an arthritic person may turn to chemical relief for their pain, so too does the working human turn to God to find some order in the cruelty of the Capitalist system.

The little bugs of Pharloom seem to have some understanding that things aren’t right for them. The pilgrims are not given any outside help, and have had to create their own way-stations and mutual aid networks to increase their chances of survival. The signage towards salvation has been placed by so many who did not make it.

When their beliefs are challenged, though, they regress back into the childlike iteration of faith in the Citadel and the weavers above, because the alternative is simply too terrifying for them to face.

Hornet does offer them something different; it’s a small thing, but I think it matters. Despite her apathetic attitude, she does care about these strange little religious bugs, does advocate for them, does indulge inconvenience to try and ease their journey. So many of the sidequests in Silksong thus far have been about returning some fragment of community to Pharloom’s underclass: We deliver supplies to the rest stations, to the little pop-up shantytowns, we rescue the lost and endangered, we locate new safe sites for communities to spring up of their own accord.

Bellhart goes from being webbed up to its citizens existing within a social web of their own, for example, and so far I’ve seen the game’s world find little dregs of flame within its dwindling ember. Religiosity is a fine thing, but when the metaphysical overtakes the real, the necessary, it becomes an accursed tool of the oppressor.

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J.M. Henson has been playing video games since Doom II at the age of four, and hasn’t shut up about them since. You can find them on Bluesky posting very occasionally.