Hollow Knight: Silksong Finally Has A Release Date And It’s Very Soon
Silksong is real and it’s almost here.
The wait is finally (almost) over. Six years after Team Cherry announced that Hollow Knight: Silksong would be a standalone sequel rather than simply the DLC it was originally imagined as, one of the most anticipated games of the decade has a release date, and it’s soon. As a new trailer reveals, Silksong will be in players’ hands on September 4.
Aside from that important date, the new trailer didn’t reveal much new information about Silksong — not that it needed to. The hype for the game has grown to such a fever pitch over the years that its mere existence is cause for celebration. What we can glean from the trailer is that Silksong is going to be huge.
Silksong’s release date trailer is full of stylish action.
According to the trailer, the game has more enemies and almost as many bosses as the previous game, and a glimpse at its map shows a sprawling world as least as large as Hollow Knight’s. What’s most notable, though, is how many towns and friendly NPCs we see. Where Hollow Knight had just one friendly settlement, there are multiple towns to visit this time, as Team Cherry also notes in an interview with Bloomberg that was published when the trailer dropped.
That interview also points to “an elaborate quest system” to guide players through the game, in contrast to Hollow Knight’s figure-it-out-yourself structure. Other than a few sparse details, the interview is as devoid of new information as the trailer, which continues the pattern of secrecy that Team Cherry has maintained throughout development. Team Cherry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Instead of popping up and bugging people for the sake of it, it felt like our actual responsibility was just to work on the game,” Pellen said. “Probably at the time we thought we’d go quiet for a year or two, then the game would come out.”
Silksong is building on its predecessor with new ideas and perhaps an even larger world.
That, obviously, didn’t happen. Over the years, Silksong has taken on a strange status halfway between a legend and a meme. Debates raged over whether it was ever coming out and what was causing the long development time, while every games showcase imaginable had its chat flooded with calls for Silksong to finally be revealed. At this point, it’s impossible to pull apart genuine excitement for the game from people just wanting to be in on the joke.
Even if the hype for Silksong is largely performative now, it’s easy to understand why players were so eager for it at first. Hollow Knight surprised almost everyone on release. While it was funded by a successful Kickstarter, it would have been hard for even its backers to expect that a tiny, unknown team could release one of the best Metroidvanias of all time. Then, years after Hollow Knight’s release, a promised DLC stretch goal became an entirely new game.
The wait is nearly over for one of the most anticipated indie games ever.
On the most basic level, Hollow Knight just feels great to play, from its combat to traversal. But what really makes it special is its atmosphere. It nails the sense of exploration and mystery that are central to what makes uncovering a Metroidvania’s map enjoyable, and extends that sense of uncovering secrets to its narrative. Its insectoid kingdom, from verdant gardens to crumbling palaces, is just as much fun to theorize as it is to navigate through.
On top of that, its thick-outlined cartoon art style and moody soundtrack, full of strings and keyboards, set the game’s dark, adventurous tone perfectly. It’s impossible to say yet how Silksong’s gameplay will compare, but the trailer suggests it will look and sound even better, with more detailed environments and a thrilling theme song that I’m already listening to on repeat.
After six years, maybe the most surprising thing about Silksong is how chill Team Cherry still seems about it. According to the studio, its long development time wasn’t due to any catastrophe or difficulty, but because its creators simply kept adding everything they wanted to Silksong, and the massive success of Hollow Knight allowed them to do it. That’s a rare story in the increasingly turbulent games industry, and a process that few developers are lucky enough to get to take part in. And players will finally get the chance to see how it turned out very soon.
