nah, he's some sort of bug Battletoad
Edit:
Anyway I just re-finished HK1, apart from doing Godhome.
I'd say Silksong is overall a lot stronger. Hollow Knight starts out with a lot of really dense and fun Metroidyness, but for the entire second half of the game the outer areas are basically just peripheral levels with barely anything to discover. The map isn't meaningfully interconnected in a way that you really need to traverse them to get anywhere else, and you had all your abilities on the first visit so aside from one DLC quest you're never going back.
Silksong doesn't have that distilled indie mini-metroidvania (which are fun) phase where you get a lot of stuff in rapid succession, but it's a lot more consistent throughout. Everything's much more detailed, there's discoveries basically everywhere even if it's just some shards, and the map layout is far better thought-out.
Double-damage enemies are like the one exploration threat in HK too, I think people forgot. There's fewer types but they're somewhat frequent and they're actually kinda worse because half of them are suicide bombers with an explosion that seems to teleport onto you if you attack. Others have post-death explosions that linger for a week. It's irritating. If you get hit in Silksong at least you feel like it was your own fault.
The DLC difficulty theory scans. Silksong starts out at about the level HK ends.
Most foes in HK are pretty simplistic and kinda generic (I wish Silksong had weirder stuff like Brooding Mawlek, which was a highlight, but that's pretty much the one exception HK has anyway). They're a lot more complex in Silksong even if they tend towards standard Souls-style bosses. I love that even most regular enemies have miniboss-level AI and movesets.
She moves better and you can finesse Hornet a lot more, but we all knew that.
