Destructoid Checkpoint: The Hollow Knight: Silksong situation is weird, but that’s not a bad thing

People have waited for years for news on Silksong, the follow-up to Team Cherry’s much-beloved Hollow Knight. The original has only grown more beloved over the years. 

Starting life as a Game Jam effort, multiple similar experiments eventually coalesced to form the game that everyone knows. I’m pointing this out because it will be important later, a valid piece of history to consider when approaching a very simple question.

What exactly is going on with Hollow Knight: Silksong?

It’s been a while

It has been eight and a half years since the original Hollow Knight was released, and Silksong eventually began life as a DLC for the game. As the scope of that project grew, Team Cherry called an audible, announcing in 2019 that this would actually form the nucleus of a sequel. 

Since then, things have been pretty quiet. Team Cherry didn’t talk much and they didn’t overcommit to conceptual release dates. They just worked on the game, and due to the perceived silence, the tension slowly built. As industry events loomed on the horizon, everyone became convinced we would eventually get a release date for Silksong.

Then, they would pass, and we would have nothing, and people would go back to waiting. The only times the team ever really spoke was to shut down rumors that the game was cancelled. Then, in 2025, things started to roll. An April Nintendo Direct gave a glimpse of the game, implying a 2025 release date. It also appeared in the June Xbox Showcase.

Then, this week, we saw it at Gamescom, and shortly after, we had a release date. Nope, not 2026. September 4. This year.

Two weeks.

We had gone from years of not knowing anything to suddenly being a mere two weeks away from release. 

The weight of the art

My biggest concern in gaming is a pretty human one, which is the somewhat self-cannibalistic nature of it all. Game dev eats game devs; make no mistake about it. The tales of crunch are endless, as is the incredible cost on people’s health and personal lives. The games industry, despite being such a money spinner, enjoys the same thing that all creative industries enjoy: an easily abusable supply of talented people who will feel “lucky to be there”.

It’s the same in movies, literature, music, and TV. Artistic pursuits with an easy path to monetization are happy to burn human capital if it means more money at the end of the day. 

I think, like many others, I was worried that Team Cherry was feeling some monumental weight in the process of making Silksong. The first game was the result of creative ideation and iteration, but that can feel different for a sequel.

The idea of the sophomore slump cannot just be confined to academia. Writers can have the same issue with books, bands, and singers can struggle with their second album, etc. 

Were Team Cherry struggling under the weight of expectation around Silksong? Were they finding it hard to swim through large piles of money to their PCs every day to work on the game? Had creative differences struck, turning former friends into bitter enemies who were no longer doing their best work with each other?

Nope!

In an interview for Bloomberg, Team Cherry co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen have been very clear that developing Silksong has been a very enjoyable experience. The game was never bound up in any kind of issues, and the team was just having fun making it. 

If anything, the problem has been a wealth of ideas that they liked and wanted to put in the game. My favorite quote from the interview (which you should go read) is when Gibson says, “We’ve been having fun. This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

What an absolutely belter of a quote that really turns the entire story on its head. The only people waiting for the game were the consumers; the developers had what they needed all along, which was the process of creativity. 

They did not feel rushed to get the game out because the game is the product, Silksong, as it exists on the servers that we download it from, will be art, yes, but it is not artistry. Artistry is what Team Cherry has been enjoying each day of development, the process of creation, or turning ideas and sketches into things within the world they have created. 

The healthy option

The take-home lesson here is for us all, as the people who buy things, and maybe for those who create them, is that a healthy attitude to work is possible. 

Team Cherry has even opted not to send out review copies, under the belief that it would be “unfair” for critics to be playing the game before Kickstarter backers and other fans. Even as someone who critiques games, I don’t really have an issue with that. It’s a sword you live or die by. The game is good and people like it, or the game is bad and you were trying to hide something, that is the only way this ever goes. 

I cannot say that Team Cherry has given us any reason to think that they might be working on a bad product, so I am very happy to take them at their word. 

So, we have a game that was seemingly made without stress, if the developers are to be believed. They seem pretty chill in the run-up to release, are avoiding the additional work of managing things like press access, and are trying to just make good art and put that out into the world. 

So, why am I calling that weird? Not as in “wrong” but “unusual,” in the sense of something that doesn’t normally happen. It’s not often teams have the financial independence and the mental wherewithal to keep themselves insulated from the more toxic elements of the industry that are too often just seen as par for the course.

I’m eager to see what Team Cherry has done with Silksong, and I look forward to diving into the game with everyone on September 4. I just wish that more developers and creatives had what they need to find a similar level of joy and comfort during their creative processes.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Scott Duwe and Adam Newell have been chatting to Motoi Okamoto and Al Yang from the Silent Hill f team about the game, and it’s a very interesting chat. - “The concept of female societal pressures is something that was decided on very early on. This was a theme that the script writer wanted to work with. So the early rough drafts for the plot were actually completed very early on and built on from there. And of course, the plot did undergo some additional revisions, so we added more to the plot and that connected to having even more endings than we initially expected, which probably led to a lot of extra work.”

Andrej Barovic and Adam have a piece on The Blood of Dawnwalker, where they chat with Patryk Fijałkowski, the game’s senior quest designer, about the game. - “And we wanted the players to feel the urgency of the main goal, but we didn’t want to stress them out, because, as a player myself, I don’t like timers in games. Sometimes the time ticking is stressful in an unfun way, so we didn’t want to do that.”

Bhernardo Vianna makes the case for a Pokémon horror game - “A horror game is what Pokémon needs as a franchise. It’s been a long time coming, and you Pokémon fans out there know that. The game and anime have always been kid-friendly, which is shown even in this Legends: Z-A Mega Victreebel trailer where, in the end, there’s nothing dark or haunting about the Pokémon, just a trainer’s Victreebel that Mega-Evolved and got a bit too excited with it, but quickly dismisses any perception of bad will by smiling in the very end of the trailer.”

And that’s it for this week. Stay gold.