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I finally played Hollow Knight: Silksong. No, I don’t mean to brag, but instead find myself having to type it out just to convince my eyes that it actually happened. Yes, it may have only been for around 20 minutes, but the long-awaited sequel shows little sign of disappointing.

During my demo at gamescom 2025, I was faced with a choice of two areas to play in: Moss Grotto or Deep Docks. Of course, I was going to try both, but first went for Moss Grotto — based on nothing apart from green being my favourite colour — which turned out to be the right decision. This sunlit grassy zone appears to be the very beginning of Silksong, as I fell into it following a brief cutscene in which a caged Hornet (the playable princess-protector protagonist) breaks free from the metal wagon she’s held captive in by collapsing the bridge it’s being paraded on. Developer Team Cherry seems keen on immersing us straight back into the world of Hollow Knight right from the very beginning, teasing lore via a passage of Conductor Romino’s Pharloom Folly.

As for Moss Grotto itself, it felt very much like a (re)introduction to the core mechanics of Hollow Knight. A mixture of rudimentary platforming and simple battles was littered across its grassy floors in a short but sweet section of Silksong’s presumably sprawling labyrinth of a world. It all ended with a boss fight against a large queen-bee-like insect that attempted to lock me in her lair. Moss Mother gave me little boss bother, though, dispatching them by unlocking that long-dormant Hollow Knight muscle memory as I leapt over darting diagonal attacks and evaded crumbling rocks falling from the sky. It was action platforming 101, but still felt incredibly satisfying.

I then swiftly moved onto Deep Docks, which turned out to be an entirely different proposition. Tools such as kunai, which can be thrown horizontally to pierce foes, were added to my arsenal, along with skills such as a familiar dash ability. Things naturally get more complex with more items to juggle, t, which is reflected in Deep Docks’ level design that comprises a maze of clanking metal elevators and the numerous semi-hidden levers that operate them. I may have only spent a handful of minutes there, but I could already see myself getting hopelessly lost without the aid of one of Cornifer’s ever-valuable maps.

Upon unlocking a boss arena, I was confronted by an enemy of far greater threat than any I had encountered yet. Lace, a balletic white insect, not too dissimilar in look to Hornet herself, dazzled me with intricate combos delivered at a speed my poor brain could not compute quickly enough. Defeated, I moved on, knowing this would be a battle for another day and not one I particularly wanted the dozens of people waiting in the queue behind to witness me losing again and again.

While it’s too early to gauge the overall difficulty of Silksong, the jump up in this later area was noticeable, with enemies capable of far more than simple prods and darts. I usually welcome added complexity and evolution of combat when it comes to sequels, so I have no great issue here. I just hope that in totality, fights won’t become too tiresome with exploration and progress being halted too often. Discovering the secrets of Hollow Knight’s world was maybe the purest of its joys to me; I wouldn’t want Silksong to feel like running into a brick wall too often.

There are concessions to make you feel more powerful compared to the original, though. Health regain is now divorced from skills, meaning you can throw those kunai liberally without having to sacrifice a potential life-saving heal. Attack is still the best form of defense, echoing some of my favourite systems from the likes of Control, Doom Eternal, and, of course, the original Hollow Knight. This is emphasised by the fact that you can only trigger health regen when your silk-white bar is full, encouraging even more offensive maneuvers to build that up quickly. Dodging will only get you so far in Hollow Knight Silksong.

All of these tweaks and changes tie together to create a more aggressive minibeast, and, although I certainly have a soft spot for the original Hollow Knight, I’m finding myself instantly drawn to Silksong more. 2018’s game often placed you on the back foot, but here I felt instantly more empowered and ready to go toe-to-toe with my aggressors. As someone who traditionally enjoys the push of faster-paced action games as opposed to the pull of more modern examples of the genre (I’m really trying my hardest not to use the term soulslike here), I’m left encouraged. Creature design is still one of the highlights in the sequel, with the borderline adorable adversaries almost being too cute to stab. At one stage, I got locked in a room with some flying nuisances with pots over their heads who lobbed molten rocks at me, as well as a pudgy little round lad with a saucepan for a shield. I almost felt bad killing them.

But in truth, combat was never the highlight of Hollow Knight for me anyway, but rather the layers of exploration and discovery lurking beneath each of its beautifully crafted environments. And while I’ve barely scratched the surface of what secrets Silksong has stored in this regard, initial impressions promise a similar bounty of nooks and crannies packed full of insect friends and foes. Platforming through these mazes is still a joy; a delicately delightful balance between precision and floaty jumping that tests your skills, that crucially never feels unfair when dropping into a gap unwillingly. The addition of mantling in the sequel helps this massively, with edges freely within grasp even when slight misjudgments are made.

I was instantly taken by how much more colourful the environments are this time around. Cinders dance around caves dripping with lava and glowing green moss dresses earthy overhangs, themselves floating precariously above pools of glistening water. Hornet’s red cape billows against the painted backdrops, both acting in harmony to form the sort of Saturday morning cartoon look you’d expect if one were to hang in the Louvre. Hornet also feels bigger on the screen, dominating the frame to a greater degree than her meeker-yet-still-mighty forebearer. That visual design feels like a deliberate choice, one aimed at creating more of a power trip sensation this time around. It’s these ideas — from revamped combat design to its repainted world – that appear to be acting in concert to a magical degree, and impressive proof, even in this small dose, of what Team Cherry has been brewing.

Yes, we’ve been waiting many, many years for this sequel, but everything at this stage points to it being worth it. Each aspect feels authored and prescribed to a clear vision — a piece of playable art that is as fun to wield as it is to watch (I should know, the gamescom queue was very long). It may have been the shortest of demos, but so far, Silksong is very much singing to me, maybe even more than the original.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Since 2017’s Resident Evil 7, a regular staple of Capcom’s horror series has been the inclusion of an enemy that stalks you. Jack Baker burst through a wall and into our hearts, the world fell in love with Mr. X, and Lady Dimitrescu provoked *cough* her own kind of online adoration. Resident Evil Requiem appears to be keeping up this tradition with its own take on the hulking, relentless pursuer. And so far, from my small 20-minute sample at gamescom 2025, it feels like Capcom has created a new, lumbering foe that more than lives up to the mantle of a Resident Evil stalker.

The short demo takes place at the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center and stars our latest protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, who creeps through the dimly lit and suitably spooky setting armed only with a lighter and glass bottles. While I expect combat will be part of the full game, there are no firearms to be seen in this demo, so there’s an inherent emphasis on caution while creeping around the clinic’s handful of rooms and a single long connecting hallway. If you think that sounds like an incredibly small location to explore, then you’d be right. My sample of Requiem lacked any real kind of exploration and was largely a task of collecting item A to open item B, which allows you to get item C and so forth. All sounds simple enough, right? Well, in classic survival horror fashion, your uneasy confidence is quickly jump-scared out of existence upon the arrival of the as-yet-unamed stalker enemy.

After Grace discovers a lifeless zombie (or “infected,” in her words), a hulking claw lurches into frame to manhandle the corpse. The camera lifts just as the creature plunges its teeth into the zombie’s skull, both demonstrating the beast’s sheer mass and how it has little consideration for the series’ iconic fodder. This new stalker is Lady D tall, with the frame of Resident Evil’s Lisa Trevor, and the vice-like jaw of a Wendigo. She has bulbous eyes, claws for hands, and a hunched posture. Once unleashed, this stalker – like its recent relatives – is persistent, promptly reacting to the sounds, sights, and smells of Grace. And like her Xenomorph stalker cousin from Alien: Isolation, this monstrosity can and will travel above you through the ceiling space, dropping down as quickly as it can scarper up. Basically, she’s relentless and can easily out-manouvre you.

Fortunately, there are a few tools in Grace’s arsenal that can help you survive, the first being the aforementioned glass bottle. As you might expect, they are primarily used as a distraction tool, drawing the stalker’s attention to the other end of the hallway and buying you time to slip past. It can also, in theory, be used as a weapon, although I’m not sure I’d recommend it – as with most stalking enemies, you can’t damage or kill Grace’s pursuer.

Perhaps Grace’s most valuable weapon though, as you might have gathered by now, is sneaking. While crouching, you are afforded some moments of mercy, as you take advantage of whatever small pockets of space you can find, be that under tables or behind corners. It’s a useful skill, particularly in the Nurse’s Station room when drawing the attention of the beast is inevitable due to a scripted sequence. It does, however, only buy you a moment to slip by, and even when you reach a safer spot, flicking open your lighter to illuminate the darkness will draw the stalker’s attention back to you. Creep as much as you wish, but your pursuer is always hot on your heels, no matter how carefully you tread.

Interestingly, this new enemy type does have an Achilles heel, though: Light. Or, more specifically, the bright white light of a room’s ceiling lamp (the lighter’s tiny flame didn’t appear to make any difference). When chasing Grace into a well-lit room, the monster’s skin visibly burns, causing her to scream and retreat. Not only does this put some of the power back into your hands, but it’s also a nice interpretation of Resident Evil’s safe room rules. If you’ve ever seen Mr. X’s bizarre backpedalling when he’s confronted with a safe room, you’ll know this change is a welcome one, adding some well overdue logic to the classic gameplay trope that magically blocks the stalker from entering your safe haven.

While there was neither much space nor opportunity to explore, thanks to the small environment and constant presence of the terrifying stalker, what little exploring I did do felt – perhaps to no surprise – very familiar. Like Resident Evil 7, Village, and the series in general, you’re managing inventory slots, examining items, finding strange keys to unlock strange doors, and fitting fuses into circuit breakers. It’s all very traditional and fans of the series will feel completely at home. The first-person perspective of the more recent mainline games also remains, and at the suggestion of both the developers and myself, it’s the optimal way to play a horror sequence like this one. However, following in line with the upgrade Capcom provided Resident Evil Village, you can also play Resident Evil Requiem from the classic third-person perspective. Your choice of camera can be changed on the fly in the menu anytime you wish, allowing you to freely switch and create a different atmosphere. It’s an interesting choice for a non-remake Resident Evil game, and certainly doesn’t feel like an afterthought, even if it may cynically appear to be at first. In a way that perhaps only a triple-A budget game can, both viewpoints are extremely well-designed, with moments tailored for each experience to maximise the player’s fear.

In first-person, the stalker looms larger and feels significantly more imposing, the restricted field of vision allowing for scripted scares to have more impact. During the demo, you’re forced to make noise by moving a cart across the room to create a step to reach your next item of importance. With the more focused first-person viewpoint, mid-action, you’re treated to a giant, claw-shaped signifier of the beast’s impending arrival scraping past the window. It’s a panic inducing moment, and one that loses its power when your hyper-specific point of view is opened up by a wide, third-person camera.

It’s clear that Capcom is aware of this, though, and has made an effort to maintain scares despite your preference. In this short gameplay slice, that ethos was perfectly demonstrated. In first-person, just after the stalker’s introduction, you simply turn around to smoothly run down the hallway as fast as you can, leaving the stalker in your wake – it’s only the sounds of her shambling that follow you that remind you of the danger. In third-person, however, perspective-specific animations have Grace stumble and fall, ratcheting up the tension to make up for the reduced level of threat produced by the wider, vision-granting perspective.

It’s a lovely touch, and something I hope to see a ton more of in the full game – hopefully providing ample amounts of horror despite your perspective preference. My short playtime was such a small sample size of Resident Evil Requiem that it’s very hard at this early stage to know where the ninth entry in the mainline series will fit in comparison to its predecessors. And that’s assuming that the scenario in this demo will even feature in the full game at all – there’s the possibility of this being a bespoke demo, something Capcom has prior experience in with Resident Evil 7’s “Beginning Hour” demo. But even if this is just a tonal example, it’s very hard to not be excited for what horrors Resident Evil Requiem has in store for us when this unstoppable beast arrives early next year.

Dale Driver is an Associate Director of Video Programming at IGN. Be thoroughly bored by following him on Bluesky at @daledriver.bsky.social