The line to play Hollow Knight: Silksong at Gamescom, the world’s premier video game conference, spilled over the markings on the concrete floor. Attendees stood patiently for hours, scrolling through their phones while waiting for their opportunity in the poorly air-conditioned halls of the exhibition center in Cologne, Germany.
That uncomfortable wait last month was nothing. Millions of fans have been waiting more than six years to play Silksong, the sequel to the 2017 indie hit Hollow Knight.
With a gloomy world inhabited by infected insects, featuring fluid combat and a haunting score, Hollow Knight has come to be regarded as a modern Metroidvania classic. And its sequel, which will be released by Team Cherry on Thursday, has become mythologized before even a single copy of the game has been downloaded.
“I’ve never seen a product that had this kind of enthusiasm for it,” says David Kazi, the technical director of Hollow Knight and the owner of the studio Ember League, just down the street from Team Cherry’s office in Adelaide, Australia. “The level of demand and hype they have is immeasurable.”
The adoration for Hollow Knight, which began as a modestly successful Kickstarter project, came slowly at first. But its charming and detailed hand-drawn animations, difficult boss battles and twisting, secret-filled corridors captured the attention of gamers, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. Team Cherry says it has sold more than 15 million copies.
The enthusiasm for the sequel, which will feature a new protagonist, a larger game world and faster combat, manifested organically but atypically. Major video game releases are typically inescapable, with billboards plastered along highways and advertisements blaring on YouTube. Any way to generate noise is seen as a necessity in an ultracompetitive landscape.
Not so for Silksong. After announcing the game in early 2019, Team Cherry — made up of the co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen, alongside the programmer Jack Vine — provided sporadic updates for 10 months. Then they disappeared. For 2,706 days.
In the silence, a mythology materialized around Silksong, spurred by a community of obsessed fans known as “Skongers.” It seemed the less that was said about Silksong, the more attention it accrued. On Steam, it has been added to more than five million wish lists, the most ever for a game.
Even so, the half-decade hush began to worry the most ardent supporters.
Some who lost hope argued that the game had become “vaporware” unlikely to see the light of day. Others dissected every detail they could find online, desperate for signs of life. Brief glimmers that the game was not dead — a magazine feature in 2020, a fan’s unexpected meeting with Gibson at an Adelaide pie shop this year — helped keep the faith.
While fans speculated about what the silence meant, the real explanation was fairly benign. “We felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing,” Gibson said in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “Because all we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it.’” (Team Cherry did not respond to requests for comment.)
On Aug. 21, the game emerged from its chrysalis with a release date. Silksong was finally coming, and soon.
Though the studio has garnered a reputation for being reclusive and mysterious, Kazi, who is a friend of Gibson and Pellen, says that is not deliberate. Team Cherry has always been focused on making video games. “The work ethic is off the charts,” he said, adding, “If they’re not talking to anyone right now, I bet they’re over at the office working on stuff.”
Why Silksong’s extended silence was so effective is hard to pin down. Matt Trobbiani, an Adelaide developer behind the indie darling Hacknet and a play tester on Silksong, suspects that it may just come down to how polished Hollow Knight was.
“I think just that execution made people really fall in love with the first game,” he said.
Although the surprise reveal of Silksong’s release date excited fans, it created a black hole on the calendar that other independent studios were desperate to avoid. Many cited concerns around visibility and discovery, the long shadow of Silksong’s horned protagonist proving too overwhelming.
At least seven games have been delayed in the past two weeks, including the walking sim Baby Steps and the tactical role-playing game Demonschool. Fernando Sánchez, the chief executive of Aeternum Game Studios, made the decision to postpone Aeterna Lucis until 2026.
“If our game were in a different genre, we might have postponed it just a few days or a month, but since we share the same genre we felt it was necessary to step further back,” he said.
As the wait for Silksong ends, a new conversation is likely to begin: After six years in development, is it any good?
Trobbiani, one of just two play testers who have finished the game, said Team Cherry had tuned everything “almost to perfection” by the time he played. His feedback, he joked, may have helped alter the difficulty of some of the game’s boss battles.
“Once people finish it, they’re going to have no complaints,” he said.
The post Thought Hollow Knight Was Hard? Try Waiting for Its Sequel. appeared first on New York Times.
