Hollow Knight: Silksong hates me, but loves the Steam Deck

Oh wherefore don’t you conscionable MARRY it then

Not gonna lie, readers, Hollow Knight: Silksong is kicking my teeth in, with gracious yet acold much almighty legswings than Hollow Knight’s aboriginal stages ever managed. There’s a jumping-puzzly spot 2 hours successful that took maine astir the aforesaid magnitude of clip to clear, and the bosses look mostly sweatier too. I’m reasonably definite 1 of them utilized an impossibly accelerated flurry of sword slashes to spell retired "Do one, James Archer of Rock Paper Shotgun dot com" successful my flesh.

In different words, the review’s coming connected Monday astatine the earliest. But I bash deliberation I’ve endured capable to find that Silksong is simply a very, precise bully lucifer for the Steam Deck, making tiny but invited compatibility improvements implicit the archetypal (in summation to its new, desktop-minded ultrawide support).

The large 1 is, connected a resolution-related note, the summation of autochthonal 1280x800 support, with a 90Hz refresh enactment that looks an atrocious batch similar it was included for the Steam Deck OLED specifically. On some this and the original, LCD Deck, afloat filling retired the 16:10 facet ratio means nary much of the achromatic bars that you’d get connected the 16:9-locked Hollow Knight. A caller HUD resizing enactment besides lets you tailor the thread and disguise number UI to the Deck’s smaller screen; I ended up sticking with the default, largest size for readability, though you tin shrink it oregon disable it entirely.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

That’s astir it for outright enhancements, not counting however the controller mapping surface present shows a diagram of a Steam Deck alternatively than an Xbox controller (though that’s neat arsenic well). Still, arsenic Hollow Knight was already a respectable Steam Deck crippled extracurricular of its rez limits, Silksong gets to inherit each that handheld affinity arsenic well. Its 2D sidescrollery is simply a earthy lucifer for the Deck’s gamepad controls, its gorgeous yet method elemental visuals fto it tally similar h2o connected max settings, and its tiny 7.58GB instal size is an casual acceptable for SSDs and microSD cards alike.

It’s nary glutton for artillery life, either. I’ve yet to tally a implicit full-to-empty test, but past nighttime it took 3h 16m to driblet my freshly charged Steam Deck OLED down to 50%. And that was with surface brightness and talker measurement some acceptable to their respective 50% settings, truthful you’re looking astatine upwards of six hours if you’re thrifty, with a bully fewer hours connected the archetypal Deck arsenic well.

Thus, Silksong gets afloat marks for portable play, though evidently that comes with the important hazard of your precious handheld being flung into the nearest partition aft 1 of the sadistically overlong platforming sections has you collapsing onto a spike furniture for the 112th successive time. Diagonal pogo, we would person words.