Hollow Knight: Silksong
Nineteen ninety-nine, nothing for sale inside, and an answer to “how long is it” that runs from five hours to sixty-five — including a two-fold disagreement between the developer and the players.
- Is Hollow Knight: Silksong pay to win?
- No. There is nothing for sale inside the game at all after the purchase price, so the question does not arise.
- How long to beat Hollow Knight: Silksong?
- About 28 hours to reach the ending, based on aggregated player-submitted completion times.
The cost, in short
Pressure
000
To ending
028hrs
Scripted ending exists
Hours, depending on what “finish” means
- To the ending
- 28 h
- Everything, all achievements
- 65 h
How this rating was reached
Score of 0 matches the Hollow Knight, Portal, Hades, Stardew Valley and Elden Ring anchors: no purchase of any kind exists inside the game after the one-time price. Verified against Steam’s store API for the US region, which lists no in-app-purchase category and exactly one paid addition, typed as music rather than game content. Hours come from aggregated player-submitted completion times read on 22 August 2026: 28 hours main story, 47 with side content, 65½ for full completion. The sample is self-selected — people who log completion times are more engaged than average — and an aggregate of this kind moves as more players finish, so a figure copied from an earlier write-up will not match this one. The intermediate 47-hour figure is deliberately not stored in a field. None of the three fields means “main story plus some side content”, and forcing it into one would label the number wrongly. It stays in the text, where it is explained. Same decision as the 42-hour figure on the Hollow Knight page. The mandatory-content-only field is left empty rather than filled with the sub-five-hour speedrun achievement. A memorized-route run is not the required content measured at a normal pace, and the two are not interchangeable. The wording of both time-based achievements is taken from press coverage quoting the in-game text. Steam’s public achievement page for this game lists 52 achievements with completion percentages but withholds names and descriptions, so we could not verify the wording at the source and do not claim to have. Platforms list PC and Nintendo Switch only, because those are the two we confirmed at the platform holders’ own stores. PlayStation and Xbox listings could not be reached when checked, so they are omitted rather than asserted — absence here means unverified, not unavailable. estimatedCostToProgress is blank because nothing exists to progress toward beyond the purchase price, so the field does not apply.
The monetization, in full
Nothing is for sale inside Silksong. Steam’s own listing for the game carries no in-app-purchase category at all, and the single paid addition attached to it is the official soundtrack — sold as music, at $11.99, not as game content.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A soundtrack is the one thing a studio can sell after release without touching the game itself: nobody plays worse for not owning it, and nothing inside the game mentions it. This is a true zero on the pressure axis, and it is the second Team Cherry game on this site to score one.
What it costs, next to its neighbours
Silksong is $19.99 on Steam in the United States. Its predecessor is $14.99 on the same store, eight years older. Elden Ring, also on this site and also selling nothing inside itself, is $59.99.
So the sequel to a hit arrived at a third of the price of the biggest premium game we track, and five dollars above its own predecessor. We take all three figures from Steam’s store API requested for the US region, which returns the currency explicitly — the reason we can restate a Steam price here and could not on the Hollow Knight page, where the store served a euro-localized listing.
Why published answers run from five hours to sixty-five
Aggregated player-submitted times put the main story at 28 hours, roughly 47 with side content, and 65½ for full completion. Those are three different questions, and the gap between the first and last is the useful part: well over half of this game is optional.
A fourth figure exists and belongs to nobody’s playthrough: the game contains an achievement for finishing without full completion in under five hours. That is a speedrun with a memorized route, not a measurement of how long the required content takes at a normal pace. It appears in search results anyway, which is most of why the range looks incoherent.
The developer and the players disagree by a factor of two
Silksong has a second time-based achievement: reach 100% completion and finish in under 30 hours. Team Cherry, in other words, treats thirty hours for everything as a challenge worth rewarding.
The aggregate of players who actually reached 100% sits at 65½ hours — more than double it.
Both numbers are real and neither is wrong. An achievement threshold is a target set by people who know where every secret is; an aggregate is what happens to players discovering them. The distance between the two is the honest answer to how long this game takes, and no source in the search results for this question puts the two side by side.
If you want one number: budget thirty hours to see the ending, and understand that finishing everything is a second game roughly the same size again.
What we could not check
Steam’s public achievement listing for Silksong shows 52 achievements with their completion percentages but hides every name and description — a deliberate choice by the studio, and a reasonable one for a game full of secrets. That means the wording of the two time-based achievements above comes from press coverage that quotes it, not from a page we could read ourselves. We are naming that rather than implying we verified it at the source.
Sources
- 01Hollow Knight: Silksong — Steam store listing, price and purchase categoriesValve (platform store, US region) ·
Full method behind these ratings: see our methodology.
Ratings are editorial judgments based on the sources cited above. They are not a guarantee of current pricing or mechanics, which can change after publication — check the source directly before making a purchase decision.