Hollow Knight: Silksong

• 1. Introduction

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  Hollow Knight: Silksong, a 2025 Metroidvania from the Australian independent studio Team Cherry, spent years as a game people talked about more than played. On the 16th of January 2021, a YouTube fan channel called Daily Silksong News began uploading a short video every day. Nearly every upload followed one script. The host stated the date, reported that there was no news about Silksong, and repeated the date as a sign-off.

  By the end, the channel had passed 1,600 uploads. Only 48 of them reported anything real. The final tally landed on day 1,693, the day the game came out.

  Behind the running joke of Daily Silksong News sits a genuine puzzle. Why did a small studio need so long to follow up Hollow Knight? Who is Hornet, and what is she doing in a kingdom called Pharloom? When the game finally arrived, did it earn the wait?

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• 2. From Expansion to Sequel

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  Even before Hollow Knight reached players in 2017, Team Cherry was working on a piece of downloadable expansion that would put Hornet in the player's hands. The plan was to set it in Hallownest, the original game's kingdom. The team found that fitting her into that world would be difficult, because Hallownest was designed around the Knight's scale. So they imagined a new world instead. Given their habit of letting things grow quite large, the project eventually became a full standalone sequel.

  Team Cherry co-founders and co-directors Ari Gibson and William Pellen described this process to Edge magazine as a kind of controlled scope creep. Gibson said their games begin as a web of ideas and notions, filtered through bugs, caves and ruined civilisations. Pellen added that they aim for destinations they are comfortable not knowing for a while, building toward them from above or below.

  In August 2025, the two talked to Bloomberg about how the game had changed. Their first vision was a smaller world than Hollow Knight's, paired with a quest system that would give players reasons to revisit areas. The map kept growing as development went on. They also chose to say little about progress, partly to protect their focus and partly to keep Silksong's secrets intact.

  Bloomberg suggested that the studio's small size and its devotion to a finely tuned result explained the long timeline. Pellen indicated that the last year or two went to polish and added detail. Gibson called the work enjoyable and very satisfying. Both admitted they could have gone on expanding, but they forced themselves to stop so release would not slip further. Extra material, as with Hollow Knight, would arrive in later updates.

  An exhibit called Game Worlds, held at ACMI in September 2025, showed how late the changes ran. Additions to the map continued until the 7th of August 2025, and an area called Red Coral Gorge was cut midway through. A zine released on opening day quoted Pellen: "we have a plan... but the plan is never so calcified that it can't bear a change of course two weeks later, or two months later, or two years later."

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• 3. Hornet's Toolkit

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  Silksong plays much like Hollow Knight, with 2D platforming and combat, but Hornet moves with more acrobatic flair than the Knight did. Side-quests, which the game calls Wishes, are tracked in a menu. Non-player characters hand them out, and others sit on quest boards around the kingdom.

  Equippable Tools come in three colours. Blue and yellow Tools are passive and support-oriented, while red Tools are mostly offensive weapons. A red Tool is triggered by hand and holds a limited number of charges. Those charges are refilled with Shell Shards, the in-game currency, at Benches.

  Hornet can only carry so many Tools of each colour, and that limit shifts with her Crest. A Crest is a playstyle. Each one changes the speed and range of her attacks as well as her Tool capacity. Each also carries a unique mechanic, such as extra damage when she avoids being hit, or the ability to refill Tools without resting at a Bench.

  Striking enemies or interacting with certain objects feeds Silk into Hornet's reservoir. Spending Silk on a heal restores three hit points, which the game calls Masks. Silk can instead power Silk Skills, extra attacks tied to finding remnants of the Weavers and their society. Tools, Crests and Silk Skills can all be adjusted at a Bench, which also heals her and serves as a respawn point after her hit points run out.

  Movement grows as the story goes on. The Clawline works like a grappling hook. The Drifter's Cloak catches wind currents, lifting Hornet over updrafts or slowing her fall. Cling Grip lets her climb walls, and Silk Soar launches her upward with her Needle.

  Every Silksong enemy was tuned around that speed. In Edge, Gibson and Pellen noted that more enemies strike for two points of damage than in Hollow Knight. Pellen explained the goal: players should spend more time at full health or nearly dead, with play snapping between those states. To balance it, Hornet's heal is faster and stronger than the Knight's.

  Pellen insisted they were not trying to build a harder sequel, only a comparable test of skill. Gibson later argued that Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight, so even basic enemies had to be smarter. He also said players can soften the challenge through exploration, learning, or sidestepping a fight entirely. How well that promise held up became one of the most debated questions after release.

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• 4. Pharloom's Haunting

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  A group of veiled bugs seizes Hornet and carries her to Pharloom, a ruined religious kingdom. The story takes place after the events of Hollow Knight. Pharloom suffers from the Haunting, a madness that afflicts bugs and revives their corpses through Silk. Hornet is a descendant of the Weavers, which matters more as the story unfolds.

  She escapes her captors and drops into the Moss Grotto. There she learns that they served the Citadel, a supposedly holy institution at Pharloom's summit that draws crowds of pilgrims. To find out why she was taken, Hornet resolves to climb all the way up. Along the route she meets pilgrims and other characters. In the Deep Docks she meets Lace, a being strung entirely from silk. Lace tries to block the way, loses the fight, and retreats to the Citadel.

  The Weavers, it emerges, were spider-like bugs lifted up by Grand Mother Silk, a godlike being. They first believed they were divine descendants and served her. Then they discovered they could never be the kingdom's true gods, and they rebelled. They trapped her and lulled her to sleep in the Cradle. Even so, she reached out to other bugs over time, which caused the Haunting. Some Weavers left for Hallownest, and one of them, Herrah, eventually gave birth to Hornet.

  Inside the Citadel, Hornet reaches the Cradle and defeats Lace again. Lace turns out to be another of Grand Mother Silk's creations. She is disillusioned by that origin and thinks her own existence unnatural. Then Hornet faces Grand Mother Silk herself. In one ending, Hornet defeats the deity, binds her power and becomes Pharloom's new monarch. In the other, a parasite inside Hornet overwhelms them both.

  A third path exists for a player who has completed most Wishes and other key objectives. Hornet can then join the Caretaker, who keeps a shrine-turned-sanctuary in the Citadel, to craft a Soul Snare. This trap is meant to destroy Grand Mother Silk, and it is the only route into the game's third and final Act. Hornet holds the goddess still and sets off the trap, only to find it is a portal to the Void. The Void drags Grand Mother Silk through and tries to take Hornet with her. Lace pulls Hornet clear out of spite for her mother and is dragged in herself.

  When Hornet wakes, Pharloom is in an apocalyptic state. Grand Mother Silk and Lace lie in a cocoon at the bottom of the Abyss, beneath a sea of Void. Because Grand Mother Silk resists, the Void spreads along the threads the Haunting once made, filling Haunted enemies with Void. Hornet deduces that the strain will bring Pharloom down. The Caretaker is revealed as one of the Snail Shamans, a group of spellcasting bugs. Hornet and the Shamans theorise that Grand Mother Silk resists the Void to save Lace, and they set out to retrieve a Void-warding flower called the Everbloom from her memories, by seizing the hearts of fallen rulers.

  Carrying the Everbloom, Hornet dives through the Void and defeats the corrupted Lace, which purifies her. The fading Grand Mother Silk hands over the last of her power so Hornet can flee with Lace. They fall short of the surface when the Everbloom disintegrates. The Knight, hero of the first game, arrives and carries both of them out. With Grand Mother Silk dead, the blackened threads fall away, and Pharloom is freed from the Haunting and the Void.

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• 5. Seven Years of Teasers

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  Silksong was announced in a trailer on the 14th of February 2019, with a developer diary video alongside it. GameSpot later described the updates that followed as sporadic and infrequent. In March 2019 the team posted descriptions and images of characters who would appear, and thanked fans for their support.

  At E3 2019, players could try the game at the Nintendo booth, and a Nintendo Treehouse livestream showed it off. A blog post soon after called the area Greymoor one of the biggest Team Cherry had ever built. In December 2019 came another post, with a two-track preview of the soundtrack by composer Christopher Larkin. It also said 165 enemies had been developed so far, spotlighting a trio called members of a scholarly suite. Players who tried that E3 demo reacted warmly. Tom Marks of IGN said he liked its combat and movement even more than the original's.

  In June 2020, Team Cherry began posting riddles that revealed characters and short videos once solved, and the riddles ran into July. One revealed character, Seth, was created by a fan named Seth Goldman, who was battling terminal cancer and had wished to meet Team Cherry. In December 2020, Edge published screenshots and quotes from Gibson and Pellen. By May 2021, marketing and publishing director Matthew Griffin said work continued and nothing was planned for E3 2021.

  At the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase in June 2022, a new trailer confirmed that Silksong would be on Xbox Game Pass at launch, for PC and Xbox Series X/S. It gave no date. But Xbox president Sarah Bond tweeted that every showcase game would release within twelve months, and the Xbox account confirmed that this implied a release by the 12th of June 2023. In September 2022, Sony confirmed PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions. On the 10th of May 2023, Griffin announced a delay. "We had planned to release in the first half of 2023, but development is still continuing," he said, adding that the game had "gotten quite big."

  On the 14th of February 2024, five years after the announcement, Griffin posted on Discord that the team was "still hard at work on the game." After almost a year of silence, he responded to online rumours in January 2025 by saying Silksong was still in active development and still planned for release.

  Then the pace changed. A Nintendo Direct for the upcoming Switch 2, on the 2nd of April 2025, showed a sizzle reel with new footage and a 2025 release date, and Nintendo sent screenshots to the press. On the 1st of May, IGN reported that Silksong would feature at the ACMI Game Worlds showcase, opening on the 18th of September 2025, with sprites, boss fight information and a playable demo. A partial spritesheet of Hornet was shared too. On the 8th of June, the game appeared in the Xbox Games Showcase reveal for the ROG Xbox Ally, and was confirmed for that console on day one. Griffin soon clarified that the game would arrive before Christmas 2025 and was "not tied to a console release."

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• 6. The Waiting Game

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  A cartoon clown wig and red nose became the symbol of the Silksong wait. Whenever a showcase passed without news, fans grew to see their hope as illogical. They signalled that by pasting clown imagery onto edited screenshots and fan art of the Hollow Knight protagonist.

  In January 2025, Pellen posted a cryptic tweet, switched his profile picture to a slice of cake and overhauled his whole account. A reverse image search traced the cake photo to a recipe posted on the 2nd of April 2024. Several details of the account change seemed to point at the 2nd of April generally, so fans suspected an alternate reality game hinting at news in the Nintendo Direct on that date in 2025. Griffin later indirectly denied that the changes meant anything. Silksong did appear in that Direct, though, and some people kept believing Pellen had dropped hints.

  On the r/Silksong subreddit, long stretches without news produced a meta culture of jokes, memes and factions. Members became known as Skongers. They wrote elaborate fake announcements, called Silkposts, meant to trick readers into thinking real news had landed. In July 2025, the subreddit "sacrificed" four users by banning them in order to "secure Silksong release." The stunt drew press coverage for its absurdity.

  The daily news channel won attention of its own. Its main host, Araraura, was interviewed by Harvey Randall of PC Gamer and Megan Farokhmanesh of WIRED, and other social media personalities guest hosted many videos. By late August 2025, roughly 5.2 million Steam users had wishlisted Silksong, by far the most of any game on the service at that time. Launch day would show what that number meant for the storefronts.

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• 7. Launch Week

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  On the 28th of July 2025, a new Silksong demo was announced for the Xbox booth at Gamescom, which opened on the 20th of August. On the 7th of August, the same demo was confirmed for the Nintendo booth. Early impressions were glowing. Adam Newell of Destructoid called it stunningly beautiful and said he was hooked from the start. Josh West of GamesRadar+ praised the smooth play and attention to detail in its visuals and audio.

  On the 19th of August, Team Cherry broke its radio silence to promise a special announcement for the 21st. A Bloomberg interview with Gibson and Pellen was set for the same day, billed as an exploration of why Silksong had taken seven years. That night's Gamescom Opening Night Live brought fresh footage. Two days later, the interview ran and the announcement aired on YouTube. It was the release trailer, and it ended by revealing the date: the 4th of September 2025.

  The short notice rattled the release calendar. Several other indie games planned for around then were pushed back for fear of being overshadowed. Others, including Hell Is Us, Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion and Cronos: The New Dawn, held their dates. Review codes were never sent. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said Team Cherry told him that organising them was hard for a small team, and that critics getting the game before Kickstarter backers and other players seemed unfair.

  Silksong launched on the 4th of September 2025 for Linux, macOS, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. With huge anticipation and no pre-orders, buyers all arrived at once. Steam, the Nintendo eShop, the Microsoft Store and the PlayStation Store all threw errors. Steam went down temporarily, leaving many users unable to buy or download the game.

  The game still passed 100,000 concurrent players within 45 minutes. It peaked above 500,000 on the first day, placing third among the most played games on Steam and, at that point, 29th of all time. It also topped the sales charts on Steam and the eShop. Over its first three days, more than five million people played, including one million through Xbox Game Pass and three million on Steam. By mid-December 2025 it had sold over seven million copies, with millions more playing through Game Pass.

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• 8. The Verdict

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  Metacritic recorded universal acclaim for Silksong, and OpenCritic reported that 97 percent of critics recommended it. In Japan, four Famitsu critics each scored it 8 out of 10, for a total of 32 out of 40.

  Many critics called it a worthy sequel and praised its bigger, more ambitious scope, and several liked the modest price for something so expansive. Reviewers described the art as beautifully crafted. Ashley Schofield of Video Games Chronicle admired the layering and the intricately placed background details, which gave Pharloom a strong sense of scale and depth. Christian Donlan of Eurogamer called the soundtrack "haunted, playful, and endlessly beckoning." Simon Fitzgerald of Push Square noted how well the music set the mood for very different situations.

  The writing earned praise too. Tom Marks of IGN found it consistently strong and called Hornet an excellent hero with a tone clearly different from the original's. Will Bedingfield of NME favoured her "sharp, amusingly standoffish dialogue" over the first game's silent protagonist. Schofield picked out the humour and characterisation in side-quest characters as highlights. On the movement side, Bedingfield pictured Hornet "slashing her needle in bouncy flourishes," and Schofield praised the fluid, exact controls. Tyler Colp of PC Gamer liked how world design supported the broader story and rewarded curiosity, and Oscar Taylor-Kent of GamesRadar+ found the boss battles universally well designed, with varied fight structures.

  Difficulty split opinion. Critics agreed Silksong was harder than its predecessor, and four elements drew particular argument: the long runbacks to reach bosses, the increased enemy damage, the scarcity of currency, and the diagonal pogo ability, especially during platforming. Some reviewers said the challenge gave the game character and tied play to story and world, with a real sense of mastery when beaten. Schofield found it tiring and demoralizing, and felt it hurt the pleasure of exploring. Side-quests divided reviewers as well. Some were lauded for building the world, while others were called "uninspired" and "monotonous." Players reacted in a polarised way, and mods to make the game easier appeared a few days after launch.

  On Steam, Chinese players first posted negative reviews because of serious problems with the Simplified Chinese localisation. An update to the translation was still criticised, so Team Cherry opened a public beta using a fan translation by Team Cart Fix. As with Hollow Knight, a speedrunning community formed at once, and someone finished the game in under an hour in less than a month.

  At the end of 2025, the awards lists reflected the attention. The Game Awards 2025 listed Silksong in categories including Game of the Year, Best Art Direction, Best Independent Game, Best Action/Adventure Game and Best Score and Music for Christopher Larkin. The Golden Joystick Awards listed it for Ultimate Game of the Year, and the 22nd British Academy Games Awards for Best Game Animation, Artistic Achievement and Music.

  On the 15th of December 2025, Team Cherry announced the first free DLC, Sea of Sorrow, in an animated teaser. It is scheduled for 2026 and follows Hornet's voyage across and beneath the salt-stricken seas, with new areas, bosses and tools. The trailer sparked speculation that some cut Silksong material might return.

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