Silksong has the most insane secret bragging rights reward I've ever seen: A special red or purple inventory icon for beating at least half of the game without a map

"I played for 20 hours without mapping for this," wrote user JessieWarren09 on the Silksong subreddit. "I stole Trobbio's edgy purple quill, cause he doesn't deserve nice things." Jessie, what the fuck are you talking about?

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

I played for 20 hours without mapping for this from r/Silksong

If you simply refuse to buy the plain 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! 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 Hollowknight.wiki, the red quill can be acquired from the main quest boss, Trobbio, 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, Tormented Trobbio, 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 Elden Ring 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.