A Silksong gumshoe meticulously pixel counted both games to directly compare the size of their worlds, and Pharloom looks twice as big as Hallownest
Reddit user Karmyuh has produced one of the first major works of Silksongology: A direct size comparison of Pharloom and Hallownest, taking into account that Silksong's world has been scaled up to account for the taller Hornet.
"By overlaying screenshots of Hornet across both games, I found out that Hornet actually takes up the exact amount of space across the screen," Karmyuh wrote. "So the heights of corridors can be compared one to one."
Pharloom vs Hallownest: Properly scaled from r/Silksong
In both games, Hornet takes up 225 pixels on screen—absent clarification from Karmyuh, I'm assuming this is at 1080p. "I tried finding the smallest corridor that is represented with the 'thin corridor' graphic on the map, because they are represented by the same height on both maps," Karmyuh wrote.
To that end, they used a corridor on the way to Nox in the Deepnest area of Hallownest, and part of the path to Pinmaster in the Blasted Steps of Pharloom. The Blasted Steps corridor had a 12.5% taller pixel count than the Deepnest one in-game, so Karmyuh scaled Pharloom's map up based on that difference.
I've included Karmyuh's side-by-side comparison of the two in the gallery below after a little spoiler protection image, in case you don't want to see the overall shape of the map yet. From everything I've heard, Pharloom is already a bigger map than Hallownest to explore gameplay-wise, but Karmyuh's calculations make it look around twice as big in terms of pure volume. Getting the map slightly spoiled has also shown me just how little of the game I've even seen yet.
This isn't the first time we've seen size comparisons between disparate games based on common elements. FromSoftware dataminer Zullie the Witch has found that Armored Core 6 and Elden Ring were made to the same scale, despite vastly different levels of detail. In addition to imagining Radahn getting demolished by an AC, I've loved seeing how Armored Core 6's biggest bosses and background models dwarf Elden Ring's entire map.
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