Nick Fernandez / Android Authority
When the first ASUS ROG Ally dropped back in 2023, Hollow Knight was the very first game I played on it. I know, the game had been out for more than five years at that point, but it was my reintroduction to handheld gaming after nearly a decade of nothing but online live service games. And I was hooked.
Now that Hollow Knight: Silksong is out, I wanted to continue the trend of playing on a handheld rather than my gaming PC. But the landscape has changed since then, and now phones and Android gaming handhelds are more powerful than ever. Before I dusted off my chunky ROG Ally, I thought: Can I play this on my Android phone?
The answer is yes. It was actually even easier than I imagined.
Jumping platforms
Nick Fernandez / Android Authority
Hollow Knight: Silksong isn’t a particularly demanding game, but I wanted to see just how far I could push it. I pulled out my trusty REDMAGIC 10 Pro, with a powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC, and snapped on a Backbone Pro telescopic controller. I’m already bad enough at this game, so I don’t need the extra handicap of touchscreen controls.
Silksong is available on a wide variety of platforms, but I chose to play via Windows emulation. There are a few key benefits here, but for me, the big one is having full control over the resolution. Other options, like emulating the Switch version or even streaming from the cloud, force a 16:9 aspect ratio. That’s fine for a gaming handheld like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2, but phones are much wider and I want to take advantage of all that screen real estate.
The DRM-free GOG version is the easiest to set up for Windows emulation.
The next step is obviously to buy the game, and there I made a conscious decision to avoid the most popular platform, Steam. You can definitely emulate the Steam version on your phone, but there are a few extra steps, and you’ll have to log into your Steam account. I’d rather keep my credentials to myself, so I picked up the DRM-free GOG version.
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