LogInThe solution to the game's parallax effect is as elegant as it is simple.
What do Shrek and Hollow Knight: Silksong have in common? No, it's not that both of their protagonists are defined by two protruberances on their heads, nor that the second installment is arguably better than the first. Instead, it's that both Silksong and Shrek have layers – a point highlighted in this neat demo shared recently by Twitter user sammwy.
Leveraging UnityExplorer – an in-game UI by sinai-dev for exploring, debugging, and modifying Unity titles – to showcase the acclaimed metroidvania from a different angle many players would otherwise never see, the user demonstrated that Silksong's world is actually composed of multiple layers that produce the game's parallax effect.
Besides just looking cool and being a solution that is both simple and elegant, this also means that, despite appearances, the game actually takes place in a 3D world rather than a 2D one, with layers arranged along a real Z-axis so that when they move, they line up with the camera's 3D angle. "Many 2D games are actually 3D, but they only use two of the three available axes," sammwy comments. "Sometimes this third axis can be used to create layered visual depth effects."
The user also showed that a similar technique was used to set up Silksong's main menu:
Notably, this isn't the first Silksong-related demo to grab the community's attention lately, with another coming from Illustrator Wallace Pires, who noticed that Hornet's moveset is strikingly similar to Alucard's from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, with jumps, dashes, and attacks being nearly identical:
In case you've been living under a rock for the past week and somehow missed one of the biggest game releases of 2025, Hollow Knight: Silksong finally launched on September 4, 2025, and immediately dominated the gaming world – drawing so many players at release that it temporarily crashed multiple online stores, including Steam and Nintendo's eShop. Almost a week later, the game is still going strong, easily hitting peaks of over 450,000 concurrent players on Steam every day.
When it comes to reviews, Silksong is also performing exceptionally well, becoming the only game on OpenCritic with all 100s, which may yet change, but nonetheless. On Metacritic, it holds a user score of 8.8, while Steam is the only outlier – sitting at just 76% positive, mainly due to mass downvotes from Chinese players frustrated with the poor quality of its localization.
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