Silksong has the most insane secret bragging rights reward I've ever seen_ A special red or purple i

"I played for 20 hours without mapping for this," wrote user on the Silksong subreddit. "I stole Trobbio's edgy purple quill, cause he doesn't deserve nice things."

It took a second for it to sink in: Silksong makes you pay for everything, including a —without the quill, you're just left with the vague outlines of each area to navigate by, as opposed to a proper metroidvania automap.

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If you simply refuse to [[link]] buy the plain [[link]] white quill at the beginning of Hollow Knight: Silksong, the game will eventually provide you with a free one, and it'll be a snazzy red quill to boot! [[link]] The red quill alone requires many hours of normal gameplay to reach⁠—fewer, but still a chunk of time if you just make a beeline to it⁠—while the purple quill won by JessieWarren09 requires a true commitment. 20 hours to reach it is rushing. Spoilery specifics below the jump:

According to the independent , the red quill can be acquired from the main quest boss, , in Act 2 of Silksong. For a frame of reference for how much time that might take to reach at a normal, first playthrough pace, I'm 20 hours deep and still quite a ways away from fighting Trobbio. As for the purple quill, you have to take on the more difficult reprisal version of him, , in Silksong's expansive Act Three late game.

Denying yourself an automap until these fights, just to be clear, merely results in a cosmetic change to your map and quill's inventory icon. It is such a tiny, absurd detail, and seeing it requires either a huge oversight or deranged self-imposed challenge on the part of the player. I love that Team Cherry did this.

It's the sort of craftsman attention to detail you get from a seven-year development cycle, and it reminds me of the surprise reactivity, "I can't believe they anticipated I'd do this" moments in Baldur's Gate 3. On the player side, such a minor cosmetic requiring so much commitment feels strangely fitting, the sort of memetic badge of honor that real Silksickos would go ga-ga over.

And hey, there's always the possibility that some players simply miss the first quill by accident and go through most of Silksong thinking it has a deliberately unhelpful in-game map. I have a friend who beat all of as a heavily encumbered, fat rolling wizard with minimal HP. A year later, he got dozens of hours into Baldur's Gate 3 before asking if "the goblin lady from the intro" ever showed up again⁠—he was referring to Lae'zel, who is presumably still stuck in that hanging wooden cage on the starting beach to this very day.