There’s not much in the way of training in Hollow Knight: Silksong. Whether Team Cherry has assumed you already know enough from the original game, they simply trust you to figure things out, or a couple of things have been forgotten, you’re going to have to do some work on your own either way.

Desperate to sharpen your needle? Well, figure it out, bub.

Sometimes, that means learning mechanics and ideas on the fly. The good news is, you usually have enough context clues in things like the option menus and the world itself to piece together what everything does, or what something’s purpose is.

But one that’s left many people stumped is the R3 (PlayStation) or RS (Xbox) button input where you click in the right joystick. What does this move actually do? Well, it’s actually called “Challenge,” and I’m here to tell you all about it today.

How To Challenge Enemies

Strangely enough, R3 has no listed use in the Controller Options menu of Silksong. In fact, if you go to rebind your controls, there’s no description of what’s going on with R3 either.

But if you’ve happened to press the button during the actual game, you’ve then also noticed that R3 does something. If you’re like me, you’ll still have no idea what it actually is, however.

Once pressed, R3 causes Hornet to throw a quick moving string of silk around her head for just a short second. If you try this on an enemy, it won’t cause damage. So, what’s going on here?

Turns out, according to the PC keyboard button mapping, this move is called “Challenge,” and is the default move set to the V key. Great! So now we have a name, but what does Challenge actually do?

Uses For Challenging

Challenge is used to aggro/activate enemies. So, why would you actually want to Challenge an enemy and draw its attention to you? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

1. You can use Challenge to try to isolate members of a crowd. Say you walk up on a group of multiple enemies, but they haven’t seen you yet. Try to use Challenge from a distance to see if you can lure in the enemy closest to you and get it alone for easier enemy management.
2. You can also use Challenge to get an enemy out of your way while platforming. For example, say you need to jump onto a tiny platform, and some little enemy is standing on the same platform, blocking your safe landing. Challenge it to try to get it to move out of your landing space. You may need to think quickly to attack it if it’s now coming towards you, but at least you have somewhere to jump!

The name “Challenge” also implies that there could be some more uses for the move yet to be discovered. For example, could we possibly “Challenge” other characters in the world that would otherwise never turn hostile? If that’s the case, we’ll be sure to let you know!

Till then, at least the mystery of that R3 animation has been solved!