Silksong is one of the new bestsellers but I didn’t play the original, do you need to to enjoy the second game?
If you like
Samus Returns, you can think of either
Hollow Knight or
Silksong as that sort of game — exploring one large interconnected map, gaining abilities that improve your combat capabilities and/or allow you access to new areas, occasionally running into bosses, etc. — but on a somewhat larger scale.
Samus Returns might take around 12 hours to finish, and
Hollow Knight might take 30-40, depending on how "much" you want to do. The original
Hollow Knight is just one of the best games of this type that I have ever played. So far, I feel like
Silksong holds up to it.
You do not need to have played
Hollow Knight first to enjoy
Silksong. Even though Hornet (the character you play as in
Silksong) also appears in
Hollow Knight, there isn't really a narrative connection, or if there is maybe it is something that won't be "realized" until towards the end and I haven't run into it yet. I think that you could easily enjoy both of those games played in either order.
One thing that I will "warn" is that the bosses seem to get pretty tough quickly in
Silksong. But the bosses all have very good "telegraphing", that is an animation or sound that warns what specific attack that they are about to do. Once you get those down and know how to "move out of the way" to avoid taking damage, and learn when is a good time to strike, when is a good time to heal, etc., a boss that seems impossible at the start becomes pretty easy to beat over the course of maybe 20 minutes of practicing.
(
Hollow Knight also had some tough bosses but I felt like it took longer to get to ones that I couldn't finish in like 1-3 attempts. I just finished the "last judge" boss in
Silksong, which is not near the end, and it took me probably in the range of 12-15 attempts. That's a lot of failures, but I could tell that I was generally getting better at it as I went through those, and I definitely didn't finish it by "luck".)