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Buggin’ out for ‘Silksong’ [1]
['Diego Jiménez', 'Please Enter Your Name Here']
Date: 2025-09-04 14:09:49+00:00
How long have you waited for something you’re excited for?
“Silksong,” the long-awaited sequel to the independent video game “Hollow Knight,” is set to release Sept. 4, after being initially announced in 2019. This sequel comes almost eight years after the release of “Hollow Knight,” leaving fans clamoring for more for nearly a decade.
Team Cherry, an independent game studio, was formed when Ari Gibson and William Pellen put up a Kickstarter for their game “Hollow Knight” in 2014. The game is a 2D sidescroller: a video game where the player sees the action from the side with the screen rolling left to right. This one is known as a “metroidvania,” where you play as a bug exploring the dilapidating kingdom of Hollownest.
The initial Kickstarter campaign surpassed its goal of $35,000 and ultimately raised $57,000 from its backers. The game was in development for several years, getting an official release in 2017. By 2018, “Hollow Knight” had sold over 1.2 million copies.
In 2019, Team Cherry announced they had begun development on a sequel to “Hollow Knight,” under the title “Silksong.” Originally, “Hollow Knight” had a second playable character as part of the crowdfunding goals, which became additional downloadable content and finally turned into the full-fledged sequel “Silksong.”
As of Aug. 22, “Silksong” is the most highly wishlisted item on Steam, an online game store, with 371,915 people. The “Silksong” subreddit has 163,000 members posting about waiting for the game to release, sharing hype, fan art, and speculation for the new game. This fandom is impressive, as it has existed for years around the still-unreleased game. The subreddit, having suffered through years of little to no information on the game, has developed a culture of posters baiting each other with fake news. The years-long radio silence Team Cherry maintained made these false announcements believable. “Silksong” fans have been fed empty promises and were led to question whether the game would ever be released.
This is not the first time gaming fans have gotten excited about an unreleased game. CD Project Red, another game studio, garnered a lot of attention with the hype surrounding the game “Cyberpunk 2077.” When “Cyberpunk 2077” was delayed before its eventual release in 2020, some fans went so far as to send death threats to the developers online, demanding that they release the game. When it was finally released, it was plagued by bugs, and on some consoles, the game would crash regularly, making gameplay difficult. Fans got what they asked for, but not what they wanted, while developers were harassed for trying to match impossible expectations under tight deadlines.
Valve, a company now famous for Steam, produced the series “Half-Life,” which has made three games over 20 years in development. Valve began as a development company with iconic titles for PC gamers, such as “Portal,” “Garry’s Mod,” in addition to “Half-Life.” Now, Valve is a digital distribution company that no longer needs to make games to profit. In comparison to the “Siksong” subreddit, most of the posts on the “Half-Life 3” subreddit are years old and share none of the camaraderie or excitement for the unreleased game.
Even for those who haven’t played the original, the “Silksong” subreddit has an infectious, excited energy that convinces people that if not now, there will soon be new information on “Silksong.”
Independent developers often get their games funded on Kickstarter and then sometimes go on to make millions in sales afterwards. This means there are massive stakes to deliver on what fans want. It’s really the fan communities that dictate whether games live or die in the years after they’re released. If a game fails to meet fans’ expectations, it will sour their sentiment for years to come. In the case of “Half-Life 3,” it might even lead to a community dispersing after years of neglect.
Though it’s uncertain if “Silksong” will deliver on all the expectations it’s grown in its years-long development, it’s clear that the fans haven’t given up hope. On Aug. 21, 315,000 fans held their breath after Team Cherry scheduled an announcement on their YouTube page. After years of waiting, the radio silence was broken with the release date of “Silksong” slated for Sept. 4, 2025.
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