I maintain that the bounties of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s drum-tight action and hyper-intricate world exploration ultimately outweigh its repeated acts of smirking sadism. It’s a fine dining restaurant where the waiters insist on bashing your kneecaps out with claw hammers before serving the most delightful, perfectly layered mille-feuille you’ve had in your life. It’sh delishush, you mumble through a full mouth and agonised tears.
Still, sometimes I’ll fancy a taste of the good stuff without necessarily having my skeleton destroyed. To that end, I’ve been taking regular breaks from Silksong’s usual heroics to pursue the simpler life of a package courier for Pharloom’s surviving insects.
(Minor Act 1 spoilers ahead)
You’re probably familiar with Silksong’s delivery quests if you’ve spent much time on urban-regenerating Bellhart, and the concept originates from Hollow Knight’s infamous Delicate Flower errand: take a package from one point on the sprawling map to another, on foot, without using fast travel methods or taking enough bumps and damage to ruin it.
In most games, Spider-Man 2 pizza deliveries notwithstanding, this kind of oddjobbing would be rightly dismissed as filler, and in truth there is a hint of that here. Only a couple of the available deliveries have meaningful impacts and/or unique rewards, while the cash rewards for the repeatable ones are too stingy to make them efficient rosary farms. The life of a Pharloom Deliveroo drone is rarely prosperous.
Still, they’re honest work. And, besides offering a much lower-stress challenge than most of Silksong’s trials – combat is actively discouraged – they’re surprisingly effective at compacting almost everything else the game does well into short, readily available side gigs.
Movement, naturally, is a vital skill for ensuring un-smashed deliveries. But the pure emphasis on evasion means clean parkour lines (and the mastery of any unlocked agility abilities) are rewarded, without feeling as punishing of precision failures as the game’s purpose built platform gauntlets. Fluff a dodge or take a knock, and it only costs one of the package’s multiple health pips – a trifling price to pay amid still-fresh memories of losing hours and dozens of lives to the spiked fuck-you pits of Hunter’s March.
Thanks to the lack of Dark Fantasy SatNav, Silksong deliveries also make for a good challenge of navigation skills and the willingness to explore. Looking for faster or safer routes can and, in my experience, will drive you into hidden or previously unsurveyed territory – territory that’s easily missed if you simply take the map boundaries as gospel. I was struggling with the sole time-limited courier quest, having been forcing myself through a silo packed with dangerous airbourne foes, before finding a tasty-looking shortcut behind a crumbling wall. This led to a further few minutes of door-unlocking traversal – enough to see my payload spoil – but with that done, my nosing about was repaid by both an ideal new thoroughfare for future attempts, and a charming encounter with one of my favourite NPCs, who happened to be hiding out in the tunnels themselves.
This also plays into another quality of delivery missions, one that’s arguably unique to them among Silksong sidequests: they make you appreciate just how vast, diverse, and interconnected Pharloom is. We all moan about backtracking in Metroidvanias but it’s only when we hoof it from distinct region to distinct region, with no hitching a ride on the Bell Beast or being shunted around (conveniently Hornet-sized) pneumatic tubes, that Silksong’s marrying of scale and detail appears its most vividly successful.
It hurts more to lose a package in the final stretch because you have a sense of how far you’ve come with it on your back, and a successful delivery seems to grant more than just rosaries when it feels like a real journey’s end. Yes, these are still easier than Silksong’s boss fights and jumping puzzles, and that’s why I came to them to start with. But ultimately, they’re worth doing because of how they showcase this massive, lovable, hateable bundle of contradictions at its expansive best. And how often can you say that about delivery sidequests, even the ones where you’re Peter Parker wielding a double pepperoni?