Hollow Knight: Silksong Should Learn One Valuable Lesson From Unsighted

Summary

With the Indie Metroidvania genre consistently hitting new peaks as more and more smaller developers jump into the field, upcoming titles likeHollow Knight: Silksonghave no shortage of contemporaries to borrow stellar ideas from. One great game to pull from when shopping around forunique features isUnsighted, a hidden gem from 2021 that boasts an open world for exploration with a critical amount of pressure layered on top.

The feature in question is the time limit imposed on both NPCs and the player throughoutUnsighted, which pushes players through to the end before they lose all of their allies and run out of time themselves. This is exactly the type of ticking clock that could keep players engaged inHollow Knight: Silksongas they explore the lands outside of Hallownest and race to get Hornet back home.

Unsighted - The Doctor And Alma Looking At The Crystal

Hollow Knight: Silksong Could Borrow While Innovating

How Unsighted Uses Time Against Players

Time is the ultimate factor inUnsighted, as the entire game’s story and progression system is built around the fact that every character in the game, including the player character, is on a time limit and at risk of becoming unsighted. This means that players have to move fast and hopefully collect a series of meteor dust in order to keep themselves and their favorite NPCs alive long enough to reach the end of the game. However, it also eventually imparts an important lesson tobeginnerUnsightedplayers, that a first playthrough most likely isn’t going to end with everyone surviving through to the end, and that is simply part of the experience.

Even with very limited interactions with many of the available NPCs inUnsighted, this timer does a lot of the leg work to keep players invested in hurrying up to save everyone they can. To add insult to injury, these NPCs don’t just disappear off-camera either, they turn into aggressive monsters that the player needs to kill to ensure the safety of the other characters. It all helps to supply some much-needed urgency to the Metroidvania genre, which normally allows players to wander around at their leisure without too much risk of missing out on events while searching for thesecrets hidden around games likeHollow Knight.

Bell Beast Fast Travel Silksong

How Hollow Knight: Silksong Could Improve on the Time Limit

While lifting the NPC time limit out ofUnsightedand dropping it directly intoHollow Knight: Silksongcould work to keep players invested in the new characters, which is rarely the best option when it comes to adapting features and mechanics from other titles. Instead,Silksongcould further iterate on the mechanic, with something similar to the interactions with Myla in the original title, where the character became less coherent as the player progresses through the game before eventually becoming hostile. So, combining the degradation seen in the originalHollow Knightwith an actual in-game timer rather than a check for progression flags could help to push players to seek cures forSilksong’s NPCsor reach the end as quickly as possible.

Alternatively, many of the quest lines in the originalHollow Knightalready approach grimdark, as is custom for the Souls-like genre. So, instead of using the time limit to urge players forward with the promise of saving anyone who survives long enough, the timer could be a touch crueler and make beating the game before NPCs start falling nearly impossible. This would keep in line with the darker motifs ofHollow Knight’s worldand explain why many of these prequel characters don’t show up in both games. It could be a risk to dangle hope in front of players inSilksong, only to pull the rug from under them at the end, but it could make the dark story stick all the better to imply the deaths are part of Hornet, and the player’s, own fault.

Hollow Knight: Silksong Tag Page Cover Art