Gamer Beats Silksong and Hollow Knight Bosses at the Same Time with One Controller — And It Only Gets Harder

Speedrunners love a ridiculous challenge, and now that Hollow Knight: Silksong is finally real and in our hands, the series just doubled its potential for truly unhinged feats. Case in point: a Silksong-focused YouTuber is already playing both games at the same time. Yes, literally at the same time.

The two-games-at-once thing is a real subculture

There is a small but legendary corner of the speedrunning world where people run two versions of the same game simultaneously, often on different platforms. It is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and somehow even more impressive. Past highlights include folks clearing Dark Souls 3 on PC and PS5 at once and doing the same with Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree - games most of us struggle to finish a single time without multitasking.

Now it is Hollow Knight and Silksong at once

Spotted by PC Gamer, YouTuber HandowShandowed is pushing the new metroidvania hard by pairing it with the original. Their latest party trick: fighting Silksong's Bell Beast while simultaneously bullying Hollow Knight's Massive Moss Charger, a mini-boss that is basically Bell Beast's mossy cousin in how it moves and attacks. If you are thinking that syncing two similar-but-not-identical fights sounds like a nightmare, you are correct - and that is the point.

• Who: HandowShandowed, a Silksong-centric YouTuber
• What: Controlling Silksong and the original Hollow Knight at the same time
• The match-up: Bell Beast in Silksong vs Massive Moss Charger in Hollow Knight
• Context: Follows the tradition of two-at-once runs like Dark Souls 3 and Shadow of the Erdtree on PC and PS5 in parallel

The inside baseball bit

The weirdest wrinkle here is arena size. Keeping two bosses in rhythm is hard enough, but when the spaces they fight in are different sizes, your timing and spacing go out the window. That is not something you notice until you try mapping the same inputs to two screens and your muscle memory betrays you.

"I did not predict how bad having differently sized arenas like this is," HandowShandowed wrote alongside the video. "In fact, if you could not already tell, I am pretty... not good at the Bell Beast fight currently, but MMC is just easy enough of a boss that it did not matter so much."

"I think it probably just gets harder from here on out, so I would do well to actually get good at Silksong's bosses before I venture into anything crazy like Trobbio + Grimm."

Personally, if you can juggle two boss fights from two separate games without your brain melting, you already count as "good" in my book.

What is next

If this keeps escalating to stuff like Trobbio + Grimm, it is going to get spicy fast. Silksong's bosses are already mean. Add in the original game's nastier fights and the difficulty curve turns into a wall. Still, the fact that someone is doing this a few breaths after Silksong launched says everything about how quickly the community is testing its limits.

For what it is worth, I finished Silksong 100% and landed in a familiar place: I still prefer Hollow Knight. But watching someone fuse both games into one chaos stream is a pretty great argument for the duo as a package deal.