How Long to Beat Silksong: Where the Hours Actually Go

Hollow Knight: Silksong takes most players 20 to 25 hours if you push straight through the main path. Explore properly instead of beelining objectives and you're looking at 27 to 32 hours. Chase full completion — every biome, every Crest, every Memento — and that climbs to 50 to 60 hours.

The gap comes from how Pharloom is built. The map doesn't hand you shortcuts, so finding your own way back to a branch you skipped costs real time, and the game rarely tells you which door leads somewhere that matters yet.

How long to beat Silksong

Goal	Time
Main path (efficient)	20–25 hours
Full exploration	27–32 hours
100% completion	50–60 hours
Speedrun	Under 5 hours

HowLongToBeat's own tracked data has settled around 27–28 hours average and 58–60.5 hours for completionists, which lines up with the exploration and 100% rows above.

What affects your playtime

A few things move your number more than others:

• Boss retries. Hornet has less defensive room than the Knight did in the early hours of the original game, and Silksong leans into that. Tough bosses eat retry after retry, and the harder ones can cost an evening each.
• Exploration depth. Pharloom spans 28 biomes, and the game doesn't mark which routes are dead ends until you've walked them. Beelining the story cuts hours; wandering adds them, along with Mask Shards and Crests you'd otherwise miss.
• The Crest system. Each Crest changes Hornet's toolkit and unlocks new traversal or combat options, which means fully committing to 100% means circling back through old areas with new tools — the same backtracking loop that makes every Metroidvania's completionist run longer than its story run.
• Genre familiarity. Players coming straight off the original Hollow Knight adjust to Hornet's faster, more aggressive combat within a few hours. Newcomers to the series take longer to read enemy patterns, especially in the back half where the difficulty spikes.

Boss retries are the single biggest variable. The main path itself is a steady climb, but a handful of wall bosses can turn a 20-hour clear into a 25-hour one.

Is it worth the time?

Yes, if the original Hollow Knight worked for you. Silksong keeps the handcrafted world and the same instinct to reward exploration over hand-holding, but pushes the combat harder — Hornet moves faster and hits faster, and the game expects you to match that.

The honest caveat: it's a harder game than its predecessor, and that difficulty spike front-loads onto players who haven't built up Hollow Knight muscle memory yet. If Hollow Knight was already a stretch for you, Silksong's early bosses will feel like a wall rather than a challenge worth climbing.

Silksong vs Hollow Knight: length compared

Category	Hollow Knight	Silksong
Main story	25–30 hours	20–25 hours
Full completion	55–65 hours	50–60 hours

Hollow Knight edges out Silksong on both ends of the scale. Its main story runs a touch longer, and the true Radiance ending tacks on another 10 to 20 hours of optional content that Silksong doesn't mirror one-for-one. Silksong's main path still moves faster despite spanning 28 biomes, but the two games land within a few hours of each other for full completion — Hornet's Crest system creates the same backtracking loop that pads out Hollow Knight's 112% run.

How it compares to similar games

Sizing Silksong against the games it sits next to:

• Hollow Knight runs a similar 25 to 30 hours for its main path, with a comparable jump to 55–65 hours for full completion — the two games track closely on length, which makes sense given the shared engine and world.
• The best metroidvania games that share Silksong's DNA vary a lot more in length, from Ori's tighter 8-to-12-hour runs to Blasphemous's 18-to-25-hour clears.
• If you finished Silksong and want the lore payoff, the true ending explainer for the original game is worth reading — Silksong builds on threads the first game only gestures at.

If Silksong's mix of tight movement and a world that rewards getting lost is what you're after, KUTO: The Lock of Time is worth a look too. Tight movement on a connected map, with rewind and slow-motion instead of Crests. Wishlist it on Steam so you don't miss the launch.

Already through the main path and wondering what's next? Team Cherry's free Sea of Sorrow expansion is coming in 2026 and will add hours back to that total once it lands.