Silksong and the Biblical Apocalypse

0:05 The wait…was agonizing.

0:07 At first, it was supposed to come imminently—

0:14 the original timeline was… a little unclear, sure,

0:17 but the community kept finding hints and clues

0:20 that indicated that it must be just around the corner.

0:25 And yet, at each expected event, no news.

0:28 Just a handful of vibrant images to pour over again and again,

0:33 looking for something, anything novel.

0:36 The strange thing is,

0:38 these seeming disappointments didn’t reduce the excitement.

0:41 In fact, every time it didn’t show up, the anticipation for it redoubled.

0:46 Its very existence seemed to recontextualize the original,

0:49 the wait now a vital part of the community’s story.

0:54 Surely, we haven’t been forgotten about.

0:58 Surely, this time, it’s for real.

1:02 I’m speaking, of course, about the biblical apocalypse,

1:05 foretold in the Book of Revelation by John of Patmos.

1:09 Since its original writing nearly two thousand years ago,

1:13 the book of Revelation has held a bizarre

1:16 and thorny place in biblical canon— its promises,

1:19 of falling stars and lakes of fire,

1:22 of dragons, virgins, and horsemen of the apocalypse,

1:25 are frightening and violent even within

1:28 the context of the old and new testaments.

1:31 Revelation has long been the territory of fringe movements,

1:34 homegrown offshoots of traditional Christianity that claim to have

1:38 found a new secret code within its dizzying text,

1:42 sometimes flaming out spectacularly and sometimes

1:45 working their way back into the mainstream.

1:49 For some, its bombastic conclusion to the new

1:52 testament reshapes the entire purpose of their belief.

1:57 Also, there’s a game called Hollow Knight: Silksong.

2:02 Though not as protracted as the wait for the apocalypse,

2:06 the anticipation for Silksong’s release burned

2:08 with a fervor rarely seen in the gaming landscape.

2:12 And then, Silksong did the one thing the prophecies in the Book

2:16 of Revelation have thus far failed to do— it actually happened.

2:22 When Silksong released in September of 2025, reactions were swift and many.

2:27 It’s beautiful!

2:28 It’s hard!

2:29 It’s huge!

2:30 And also it’s…about religion?

2:32 This was, for me, the most unexpected part of my first hours with the game.

2:38 The quality of its art didn’t come as much of a surprise,

2:41 nor, initially, did its size or difficulty.

2:44 But in all my excitement for Silksong, I truly did not predict that it would

2:50 shape its entire narrative around a religious pilgrimage.

2:53 I did not expect the currency of the game would literally be rosary beads.

2:57 I did not expect that you would find automated confession booths,

3:01 or that so much dialogue would circle around the topic of faith.

3:05 The original Hollow Knight was a game about memory and ruin,

3:09 about gods and time and ultimately purpose,

3:12 but this specific theme— a constant focus on an organized religion

3:17 reinforced in the very structure of the world— was something new.

3:22 And after my original surprise at the presence

3:25 of the theme came the next question: so, what’s it doing here?

3:30 What is the game saying with such an omnipresent motif?

3:36 The first believer most players will

3:38 encounter in Hollow Knight: Silksong is Sherma,

3:41 a wonderfully noisy little bug determined to make

3:44 pilgrimage to the fabled citadel of Pharloom.

3:47 Sherma is standing in front of a closed gate,

3:50 banging his bells together and singing.

3:52 He is absolutely, totally stymied on forward

3:55 progress until you open the gate for him.

3:58 And then this guy has the absolute nerve to say “the gate heard my song,

4:03 that’s why it opened” uhh brother,

4:04 your song didn’t hit the switch on the other side of the wall, that was ME.

4:09 Throughout the game, we will encounter this type of naivete—

4:13 pilgrims that seem almost completely in denial of reality on their quest through

4:18 the incredibly hostile and perilous lands of Pharloom.

4:21 That Sherma isn’t killed on his random wanderings through swamps, towers,

4:26 and lava fields seems due to random luck more than anything else.

4:32 Further demonstrations of faith can be found

4:34 in the rosary beads held by the creatures of Pharloom.

4:37 Many enemies drop rosaries upon death— but not all of them.

4:42 The vermin of Silksong’s world,

4:45 the unthinking bugs and beasts, almost never drop beads.

4:48 We only get them from semi-sentient creatures,

4:52 ones cognizant enough to wear clothes and wield weapons,

4:56 ones— basically, ones that seem capable of feeling shame.

5:01 Can they fear God?

5:02 If so, they’ll probably be carrying some beads with them.

5:07 But the beads serve another purpose too— they are, of course, currency.

5:12 Everything is bought and sold in Pharloom with rosary beads,

5:16 often at exorbitant prices.

5:18 500 beads?

5:19 For one small key??

5:21 80 beads?

5:22 For a place to sit??

5:25 The rosaries demonstrate another aspect of religion in Silksong:

5:29 for every true believer,

5:31 there is someone willing to take advantage of their belief.

5:35 One shopkeeper who charges for the privilege of merely entering his shop,

5:39 warns that your collected rosaries may “weigh you down

5:42 on your ascent”— so you should give them to him instead.

5:47 This extractive economy is pushed to its breaking

5:50 point once you enter the holy citadel itself,

5:52 in which you’re required to pay every single time you’d like to sit on a bench,

5:57 where you can feed rosaries into an automated confessional

6:00 that will only ever tell you to work harder,

6:03 where ludicrously expensive vending machines will

6:05 deliver a criminally small parcel of resources.

6:08 And inevitably, despite our best wishes, the system works on us too.

6:14 The rosaries become a measure of self-worth.

6:17 Hornet’s life feels far more valuable with 200, or 400, beads in her pocket.

6:22 She leaves them in a tidy little bundle wherever she dies,

6:26 but die again on the way back and the whole collection goes down the drain.

6:30 I perish in a pit of spikes on my way back to retrieve my beads and I scream,

6:35 my concern not with Hornet herself but with all the currency I just lost.

6:43 Life is cheap.

6:45 Religion is not.

6:47 And if this was the sole method of religious exploitation

6:50 in Pharloom— every bug convinced to hoard rosaries as an indication

6:55 of their belief while simultaneously compelled to spend them for basic

6:59 necessities— the target of Silksong’s indictment would already be pretty clear.

7:04 But all of that is before we get into literal thought control.

7:10 When we first arrive at Bellhart, a stop along the road to the holy citadel,

7:14 we’re met with an alarming sight— all of the bugs

7:18 of the community strung up in a web of shimmering silk,

7:22 suspended, helpless, frozen in the midst of some unwilling rapture.

7:26 It binds not only their bodies but their minds.

7:30 After you eventually free them, one resident tells you that it was

7:34 a horror— although they were “connected to something

7:37 greater,” their own thoughts were “smothered amidst

7:39 the tangle.” You’ll move on from Bellhart,

7:42 but the possibility, the image of the bugs caught in a web, cannot be forgotten.

7:49 Which other threads could bind what other beings?

7:53 In the first Hollow Knight,

7:55 the bugs of Hallownest were gradually stricken with “The Infection,”

7:58 a sort of queasy fungal growth that drove them into a frenzied,

8:03 uncontrollable rage.

8:04 But, as pointed out in an excellent post by RafflesiaArnoldii,

8:08 what’s happening to the residents of Pharloom is almost the exact opposite.

8:13 Yes, they too are losing their minds.

8:16 But rather than a plague driving them to madness,

8:19 the sentient beings surrounding the citadel are being struck

8:22 with something called “the haunting,” the influence of their god,

8:26 their religion, closing like a vice around every conscious creature.

8:31 As that vice tightens, their individuality is squeezed out.

8:35 The haunting leaves them just as husk-like as their infected brethren,

8:40 but with a crucial difference.

8:42 Instead of a frenzy, the haunting turns them into unwilling puppets,

8:47 mindlessly going through the motions of servitude.

8:50 The nature of this haunting is more slippery than the infection however,

8:55 because of the multifaceted way it exerts control.

8:58 Some bugs, afflicted with the deepest

9:01 levels of “haunting,” are being literally controlled,

9:04 like marionettes, directed by some higher power via the silk in their shells.

9:10 But others are controlled more insidiously,

9:13 their behavior not directly puppeteered but still

9:16 manipulated by the stubbornness of their faith.

9:20 Deep in the machinery under the citadel, we can find a creature named Loam.

9:25 Loam is not afflicted by “the haunting” in the way other bugs are;

9:29 he can think, and speak, and doesn’t try to attack us.

9:33 But Loam is not, by any measure, well.

9:36 When we find him, he’s providing power to the citadel by running on a treadmill.

9:41 There is no telling how long he’s been there, but his clothes are ragged,

9:45 his breath is short,

9:46 he stumbles like a horse about to drop dead from exhaustion.

9:50 And yet Loam has no intention of stopping.

9:54 “Me can not rest,” he says.

9:57 “Us works, and Citadel breathes, and thems above do sing, and all is right.

10:02 And when us works enough, thems see it...

10:05 Hrrr...

10:05 thems see it, and us gets us holy reward…” He is sure, absolutely convinced,

10:12 that one day his backbreaking work will be noticed by…someone up above.

10:18 He’s too distant to even guess who that would be.

10:22 But he won’t accept Hornet’s suggestion that he

10:24 may have been forgotten by his masters,

10:26 nor will he allow her to play music that reminds him of his life before.

10:32 Loam is not “haunted” in the most explicit sense,

10:36 but he will run himself to death

10:38 before he reconsiders his duties to the citadel.

10:42 What is Silksong’s perspective on the religion that permeates the game?

10:46 Very clearly, it’s highlighting belief’s potential as a coercive force.

10:51 It can convince pilgrims to make an exceptionally

10:54 dangerous and ill-advised journey to a salvation-less cathedral.

10:58 It compels them to hoard money,

11:00 only so they can later spend it on what should be freely provided services.

11:05 It traps them in an endless cycle

11:08 of uncompensated labor with false promises of eventual recognition.

11:12 And while this is a strong stance to take, it isn’t particularly novel.

11:18 Many stories, of all genres and mediums,

11:21 have highlighted the potential exploitation of dogmatic belief.

11:24 When I first played Silksong, I wasn’t struck by the nuance of this theme,

11:29 nor did I think I’d be motivated to write much about it.

11:34 And then I finished Act 2.

11:37 The most straightforward ending to achieve,

11:39 the one most players will probably get upon first attempt, goes like this.

11:44 You ascend from bone bottom to the top of the glittering citadel,

11:49 fighting many monsters and meeting many creatures along the way.

11:52 You learn the pieces of a secret song,

11:55 clash with the angry daughters of this land’s god,

11:58 then finally do battle with the god itself— Grand Mother Silk.

12:04 And then you win, and everything else loses.

12:08 Hornet plunges her needle into Grand Mother Silk and seems to absorb her power,

12:13 and suddenly the camera pulls away from them

12:16 both and refocuses on the colossal citadel itself,

12:19 as chunks of rock rain down and then countless silken threads lash out.

12:23 We’re reminded of haunted bellhart, of threads ushering in violence and control,

12:28 but this time, their impact only means death.

12:32 The camera lingers on a dessicated shell mummified by the thread,

12:36 then pulls out to show the entire citadel,

12:39 the entire kingdom, entombed in a catastrophe of silk.

12:42 We move into the cocoon and see Hornet caught in the center,

12:47 unfurling into something new and terrible and other.

12:50 And then, CREDITS!

12:53 There are many ways to read this ending.

12:59 For fans of the original,

13:01 this conclusion clearly echoes the “first” ending of Hollow Knight—

13:04 after defeating what we assumed to be the Big Bad,

13:08 the player finds themselves unwittingly taking their place.

13:10 In the context of Grand Mother Silk’s godhood,

13:13 we could read this supplantation by Hornet

13:16 as a villainous turn for our character:

13:18 she becomes a young deity, more deadly and terrible than any of the previous.

13:24 Perhaps a new cycle begins, awaiting a new hero to come slay this new god.

13:29 All of which are valid readings of what happened here.

13:33 But I saw this, and had a different initial reaction.

13:37 Ahh, I thought.

13:39 The apocalypse.

13:40 This is where Hornet’s pilgrimage has landed her: at the end of the world.

13:48 It may seem like a stretch, to read the end of everything from one silk cocoon.

13:55 But in my defense: this kind of inference is

13:59 what the religious apocalypse has always been built from.

14:02 The word apocalypse itself, now synonymous with end-times,

14:06 once meant something closer to “unveiling.” Dorian

14:10 Lynskey writes that it was a genre, rather than an event.

14:14 A story of a supernatural intermediary

14:16 giving a chosen storyteller a secret prophecy,

14:19 or— as Alan Watts referred to it— “spooky

14:24 knowledge.” But despite the limitless potential of this genre,

14:39 stories of spooky knowledge, tales of unveilings, were,

14:42 irrepressibly, about the Big Event, the Grand Finale.

14:46 The end of the world.

14:49 These were the messages people were beamed directly from God.

14:53 Despite the efforts of religious authorities to keep

14:56 stories of the end out of officially sanctioned literature,

14:59 apocalypses crept their way into the canon— first in the Jewish book of Daniel,

15:05 and then, even more bombastically, in the Christian Book of Revelation.

15:11 The Apocalypse of John.

15:13 In Revelation, John introduces many elements of the apocalypse

15:17 that folks now take as, uhh, gospel.

15:20 The four horseman.

15:21 The whore of Babylon.

15:23 666, the antichrist, and separately, Satan— in the form of a dragon.

15:28 “The sun became black as sackcloth and the full

15:31 moon became like blood and the stars

15:33 of the sky fell to earth.” Revelation is the book that gives us the line,

15:38 “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.” And those words,

15:45 taken as a literary statement, are true.

15:48 Not only is Revelation the last book in the Christian biblical canon,

15:52 it provides an endpoint, a finish line, for the whole religion.

15:58 The apocalypse arrives.

15:59 Christ battles Satan and the Antichrist and Christ wins (of course).

16:03 Christ rules on earth for a thousand years.

16:06 There’s another battle where Christ wins again (of course),

16:09 and then everyone who has ever died will

16:12 be resurrected and judged and those worthy will join

16:15 God in heaven and everyone else will be cast

16:17 into a lake of fire and that’s the end.

16:20 There is no sun or no moon,

16:22 there is only the light of god forever and there should be time no longer.

16:26 Close the book, there’s nothing else that’s going to happen.

16:31 And with this, Revelation becomes, in many ways,

16:35 the most important book in the biblical story because

16:38 it gets the honor of revealing where everything is going.

16:42 The rest of the old and new testament are

16:45 recontextualized as building to this, the climax of humanity,

16:49 the end of our species-long pilgrimage.

16:51 This is where it’s all landed us: at the end of the world.

16:57 I, frankly, love to look at stories this way.

17:01 I start at the conclusion and work backwards,

17:04 identifying how each plot thread subtly pointed

17:07 us in the direction of the ending.

17:09 I think the end of a narrative gives

17:11 the clearest indication of what it was all doing,

17:13 what the work of the story actually was.

17:16 This is why I had such a powerful reaction to the end of Silksong.

17:20 Credits roll after the death of everyone we’ve met,

17:23 the destruction of everywhere we’ve been.

17:25 Surely, then, this must have been about the apocalypse the entire time.

17:30 Silksong can be played with only the finish line in mind.

17:35 The religiosity of the Citadel is cynical and exploitative,

17:38 a golden temple built to separate pilgrims from their sense of self,

17:42 but it is built around a real deity.

17:45 And you can make Grand Mother Silk your only goal.

17:49 You can— you will replace the rule of this unjust being with yourself.

17:54 At the highest levels of playing Silksong,

17:57 Hornet can move through the citadel and its surrounding lands like a bullet,

18:01 stopping to appreciate nothing and help no one until she plunges

18:05 her needle into Grand Mother Silk’s head before a single hour has passed.

18:11 You can treat the ending as the only thing that matters,

18:15 and the apocalypse that follows is

18:17 the foregone conclusion of your pre-ordained quest.

18:22 And, with the revelations of uhh, Revelation,

18:29 the temptation to reach the ending seems equally alluring.

18:32 This is the seduction of defining a finish line:

18:36 it becomes the only thing that matters.

18:39 Whereas Silksong can work Hornet’s

18:41 single-minded determination into a fictional narrative,

18:44 Revelation seems to encourage the reader to work

18:47 the knowledge of the oncoming end into their life.

18:51 For instance: The original text suggests that everyone on Earth will be

18:55 subject to the many horrors of the apocalypse before God’s reign can begin.

18:59 “Men will seek death and not find it,” until the forces

19:02 of Hell are defeated and Christ can rule in Earth and in heaven.

19:07 Because of this, Revelation encourages its devotees

19:10 to be heartened at news of disasters,

19:13 as this indicates the approaching end-times.

19:16 Any catastrophic event could be— and has been— viewed through this lens.

19:23 Wars, plagues, volcanoes, eclipses.

19:25 The nuclear bomb, the AIDS crisis, the election of Barack Obama

19:29 or a thousand other purported “antichrists.” Anything

19:32 could be read as an indication of the beginning of the end.

19:38 This desire for apocalypse is combined with the irresistibility

19:42 of calculating the date that the grand finale will begin.

19:46 Shortly after any apocalyptic-seeming event— that is to say,

19:50 virtually any day over the last several hundred years— someone will return

19:55 to the book and recalculate the day that Revelation is set to begin.

19:59 Inevitably, this day will be within a few months or years of the current date.

20:06 Recently, tiktok decided that September 23, 2025, was the first day of the end.

20:11 This, like every other date,

20:13 was based on some reinterpretation of the hallucinatory

20:16 and inconsistent writing of the book of Revelation itself:

20:20 “Each new generation of readers is convinced that God planted a secret meaning

20:24 in the text that was meant only

20:27 and especially for them,” Jonathan Kirsch writes,

20:30 a secret numerology that can be unraveled with the right

20:34 combination of dubious math and historical confirmation bias.

20:39 All of this, notably, contradicts the words of Jesus Christ himself,

20:44 who says in Mark that “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars,

20:48 do not be frightened… that is not yet the end,”

20:52 that many false prophets will claim to identify the return of Christ,

20:55 and in fact not even he or the angels

20:58 in heaven know the true date of the return.

21:01 But whatever contradiction it has with Christ,

21:04 the apocalypse makes a perfect accompaniment to those attempting to gain power.

21:09 Many movements have risen on the promise of the encroaching end times.

21:14 The Anabaptists in 1534, for example,

21:17 were led by a cult leader who promised that only

21:20 they would be safe from the apocalypse (he took many wives,

21:24 feasted while his subjects starved, and was ultimately tortured to death).

21:29 The first wave of televangelists, Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell,

21:34 frequently used the imminent end-times

21:36 in their all-encompassing fundraising efforts.

21:39 Even QAnon adapted a distinctly Revelations-style of numerology and delusion

21:45 into a constantly-encroaching yet ever-delayed

21:49 “coming storm.” “Totalitarianism,” writes Dorian Lynskey,

21:54 “demanded apocalyptic myths of a golden past,

21:58 an accursed present, and a glorious future.

22:01 Whenever the violence of the elect is purported to purify

22:04 the world and give birth to a new society,

22:07 the mythic logic of Revelation is at play.” It makes sense,

22:13 then, that the apocalyptic ending of Hollow Knight:

22:16 Silksong is also the one in which

22:19 Hornet becomes an all-powerful, all-terrifying God.

22:21 It is, actually, the easiest ending to achieve.

22:26 But it’s not the only one.

22:30 For many games, achieving a “true” ending

22:33 requires a fairly specific set of steps.

22:36 Maybe you make a crucial choice in a cutscene,

22:38 or find a hidden item and ask a character about it.

22:41 In Hollow Knight, you assemble a legendary charm, fully awaken the dream nail,

22:46 and explore the abyss in order to fight

22:49 the “true” final boss and witness a more satisfying ending.

22:53 The list to progress past the apocalyptic finale of Silksong,

22:57 by contrast, seems almost random.

22:59 Among the required tasks for Hornet to accomplish are:

23:03 building a frail bridge across a small gap.

23:06 Rescuing Sherma from a frightening location.

23:09 Helping a cartographer reach the end of her journey.

23:12 Reuniting a bunch of fleas and finding them a suitable home.

23:16 These are tasks deliberately disconnected from someone seeking the finish line.

23:20 These are acts of generosity— literally within the game,

23:25 “wishes granted”— of someone who values the present

23:28 more than the target of whatever comes next.

23:31 After all this work, all these wishes granted,

23:35 Hornet acknowledges her change of heart.

23:37 “I’ll not deny that part of me desires” to overtake the citadel, she says.

23:43 “Dominance, it seems, is baked deep in my blood… and yet another part

23:49 resists… that part wishes not to claim a monarch’s mantle,

23:53 rather it would see my freedom regained,

23:56 and this kingdom’s bugs unshackled from their pale chains.” An outcome,

24:01 outside of control and outside of apocalypse.

24:04 Not to rule a thousand years on earth or heaven,

24:07 but to imagine a way forward in the here-and-now.

24:11 It’s a beautiful sentiment from Hornet,

24:13 one that recenters the game on community rather than usurpation.

24:18 It is shocking, then, to enter the fight with Grand Mother Silk,

24:22 holding this ideal in mind, confident in your new direction,

24:27 and be met once again with apocalypse.

24:31 “Revelation,” writes Jonathan Kirsch, “is the history of the end of the world,

24:36 and… the history of a world that refused to end.”

24:41 When you decide to not claim the monarch’s mantle,

24:44 decide to free yourself and the kingdom from its pale chains— well,

24:49 a series of complicated things happen.

24:51 Basically, you help another bug construct a trap to constrict Grand Mother Silk,

24:57 and that trap ends up pulling the god into the abyss.

25:00 I do have to point out that this also mirrors Revelation,

25:03 in which an angel appears with a chain and the key to the abyss,

25:07 binds Satan, and throws him in.

25:09 But unlike Revelation,

25:11 in which this battle is followed by a thousand years of divine rule,

25:17 in Silksong, we witness…almost the same apocalypse as before.

25:22 The void expands.

25:23 The kingdom shakes and crumbles, creatures still fall and die and dessicate,

25:29 threads burst forth once more,

25:30 not white but black and dripping, threads from the abyss itself.

25:35 And then, once again, credits.

25:39 The difference is in what comes after.

25:44 Before, the ending was seemingly all Hornet desired, but now,

25:48 with our investment in the land and its people,

25:51 we’re compelled to go back, even after credits.

25:54 Go back into your save files and tear the threads from your corrupted game,

25:59 re-enter the world that others may have resigned to the apocalypse.

26:04 Act 3.

26:05 No one is yet saved, no one is yet free.

26:10 The work is still not done.

26:13 I went over, fairly exhaustively,

26:15 Silksong’s arguments that religion can be wielded as a coercive force.

26:20 None of this is contradicted by the unveiling of act 3.

26:24 And yet, what I realized as I wandered back through Silksong’s demolished world,

26:29 is the force that keeps Pharloom’s flickering compassion alive.

26:34 Not religion, per se, but uncorrupted faith.

26:38 Sherma, the previously naive pilgrim,

26:41 has seen the horrors and false promises of the citadel,

26:45 has indeed seen the entire structure crumble,

26:47 and yet has devoted himself to the shelter of others.

26:51 “Though kingdoms may fall, life endures still,” he says,

26:55 “and we bugs can build our lands anew.” Shakra,

26:59 the cartographer, protects one of the few remaining

27:02 enclaves from the dangers of the abyss outside.

27:05 “If you are working towards the venom's end, I shall fight,” she says,

27:10 “with faith renewed.” And, not least of all, there is…you.

27:16 Set aside all the acts of generosity Hornet had

27:19 to perform to even reach this point in the story,

27:22 set aside her resisting her desire to rule.

27:25 Think of what it means for you to have reached this point.

27:30 Silksong is a brutally difficult game.

27:33 A game in which nearly every single fight

27:36 could be the moment someone decides they’ve had enough,

27:39 a game that requires an insistence on your own

27:42 ability above and beyond most of the medium.

27:44 And more than that, it is a game that relentlessly conceals itself.

27:48 Vast areas, whole plot arcs, an entire act of the game,

27:53 that can only be found through your perseverance.

27:57 Your unveiling.

27:58 Through its very design, Silksong communicates its belief, its faith, in you.

28:04 The most moving line of dialogue in the game,

28:09 to me, happens just before the actual, true, final boss.

28:13 As Hornet prepares to dive into the abyss,

28:16 not to kill something but to save another,

28:20 she has a conversation with… a ghost really.

28:24 A vision.

28:25 And the vision says, “Take the final plunge spider.

28:28 Join us in my drowning palace,

28:31 and let oblivion swallow us all.” An urging, one more time, for annihilation.

28:38 A personal apocalypse.

28:40 But Hornet refuses that last call towards the easy,

28:45 tempting, self-destructive finale.

28:46 “Oblivion may take you, child.

28:49 My own life, I shall not sacrifice.

28:51 I have survived the fury of your land.

28:54 I have borne its barbs and its blades,

28:57 and I have seen wonder behind its dangers.

29:00 But always, child, I remain a daughter of Hallownest.

29:04 And the void below all things, that darkness I will fear no longer.” In 1969,

29:12 Robert Alter, a scholar and biblical translator, wrote:

29:16 “There is no room for real people in apocalypses,

29:19 for when a writer chooses to see men

29:22 as huddled masses waiting to be thrown into sulfurous pits,

29:26 he hardly needs to look at individual faces.” In Silksong,

29:31 the apocalypse is not the end.

29:34 Like war, like plague, it’s another calamity that asks who we truly are.

29:39 Is it the judgmental opportunity we’ve been waiting for, to decide

29:43 who should be saved and who should be damned?

29:46 Or is it a time to turn our eyes to each other?

29:50 And realize that whatever’s next can only

29:53 be built from our faith in the present.

30:00 It took me almost 60 hours to reach the credits of Silksong’s Act 3.

30:05 Much of the game footage for this video was not from my playthrough,

30:10 and was instead generously recorded by one of the game’s top speedrunners,

30:14 BlueSR, who’s capable of reaching the end of Act

30:17 3 in less than 3 and a half hours.

30:20 But no one, not me or Blue or anyone else,

30:24 is capable of talking about all the themes and ideas

30:27 of this game in a mere— what are we at now— 30 minutes?!

30:30 It took me this long just to talk about a single motif!

30:35 Fortunately, this is where Nebula comes in.

30:38 Nebula is a premium streaming service

30:40 where creators like me upload original, extended, in some cases uncensored,

30:45 videos in addition to the essays you know from YouTube.

30:49 And this month, I just couldn’t stop talking about Silksong,

30:52 so I called up my friends Razbuten and Brendon Bigley

30:56 and talked for nearly 90 minutes on everything else in the game,

31:00 our experiences with its narrative, its difficulty,

31:02 its relationship with the original Hollow Knight

31:05 and our reads on what it all means.

31:08 After a long time being careful with how we discuss spoilers and stuff,

31:12 it felt amazing to just lay it all out there.

31:15 You can get access to this chat for free, actually.

31:18 Nebula has just introduced a free trial, during which you can watch this video,

31:23 and then, if you decide to continue, it’ll only cost ya 3 bucks a month.

31:29 This Silksong video isn’t the only thing available on Nebula, of course.

31:32 I’ve got, at last count, three dozen videos you can exclusively see there.

31:36 And other creators have also been doing great work— KingK,

31:39 another gaming essayist, has a new series on Nebula called “Masterful Mimicry,”

31:44 on the art history that’s influenced games’ visual style;

31:47 the first episode is, of course, on Okami.

31:50 The next episode is on— what’s this?

31:54 Hollow Knight Silksong!

31:55 And man, there’s so much more, Big Joel’s bonus videos,

31:59 Patrick Willems is releasing everything a month early,

32:02 BobbyBroccoli has a whole documentary series you can only watch there.

32:06 ALL THAT for only $3 a month,

32:09 $36 for an entire year if you sign up with my link.

32:13 If you’re looking for a holiday gift, you can actually gift a month,

32:17 a year, or even a lifetime of Nebula.

32:22 Or try out that free trial and check out what you’ve been missing.