As a long-tenured fan of the Metroidvania genre, I was always going to love Hollow Knight, but it was the quiet, little interaction with the singing of Myla —a young miner in Crystal Peak, that locked me into the world of Hallownest. It is these quaint moments in Team Cherry’s underground nightmare that allows light to glimmer through the darkness. Fittingly, Team Cherry has taken a similar approach to their reveals concerning Hollow Knight’s follow-up, Hollow Knight: Silksong —occasional beacons of hope across an otherwise-dreary landscape of radio silence. Now almost five years since Hollow Knight, here is everything we know so far about its sequel, Silksong.
From DLC to Full Game
Hollow Knight was partially crowdfunded via Kickstarter. Through that crowdfunding, Team Cherry initially planned to release Silksong as a DLC (Downloadable Content) to the original game, at least as much as making Hornet, the ”princess protector of Hallownest," and frenemy throughout Hollow Knight, a playable character. They subsequently announced that they would be expanding Hornet’s adventure into a whole game via the reveal trailer for Silksong back in February 2019. Apart from the reveal trailer, we also got a more in-depth look at the gameplay during Nintendo Treehouse: Live at E3 2019. In this nearly-twenty-minutes of gameplay, we see Hornet fighting her way through Moss Grotto and Deep Docks. While the flow of Silksong looks almost identical to Hollow Knight, Hornet noticeably moves more fluidly than The Knight, opening up new opportunities for playstyles and abilities (Team Cherry refers to this as "lethal acrobatic combat").
Despite being aesthetically similar to Hollow Knight in many ways, Silksong leaves Hallownest behind for a brand new world called Pharloom, a “whole new kingdom haunted by silk and song.” The scaffolding of the game will be to help Hornet, who has been “captured and brought to an unfamiliar land,” ascend from the bottom (the aforementioned Moss Grotto) to Pharloom's peak (The Citadel).
Silk is the New Soul
Where charms were crucial to The Knight’s development in Hollow Knight, Hornet will instead use a new crafting system. While many details of this system haven’t been revealed, Team Cherry mentioned to Edge Magazine that Hornet will use shell fragments, and the familiar rest benches, as a means to craft and restore various types of equipment and items, including bombs, spike traps, and the like. Hornet has been revealed to be much more agile and acrobatic than The Knight, something that will come as no surprise to anyone who battled her in Hollow Knight. Agility and rhythm seem to be recurring themes in the revealed details, both in how Hornet plays, as well as the mentions of Pharloom being haunted by “song,” and the appearance of bells in the Nintendo Treehouse demo. That thematic focus filters all the way down to replacing Soul with Silk as a means to heal (which Hornet can do instantly) and use abilities. Hornet also wields a needle and thread, as opposed to the Nail used by The Knight. Instead of a sphere of liquid soul, we see Hornet with a spool of unwinding silk.
Everything is Bigger
Silksong, described by Team Cherry as a “very large” game, will feature more than 165 new enemies. Several bosses and NPCs are present in the demo, as well as the announcement trailer. Lace, a featured boss fight in the demo, is “part of a group who is going to impede Hornet’s journey.” While there is no shortage of discourse about how these bosses and NPCs fit into the wider picture of Silksong based on trailer breakdowns, at this point, such analysis remains speculative.
Hollow Knight featured plenty of objectives to complete and secrets to explore, but no formal quest log was present. Though such a log may not have been necessary then, Silksong, given its increased size and scope, contains a larger web of quests, enough to warrant the ability to track them more efficiently. Team Cherry elaborated, via the aforementioned Edge Magazine feature, that while the quest line structure would not be totally different from the previous game, the presence of noticeboards will serve as a means to organize/locate additional side quests. Just how deep this system goes is still unknown. This growth in quests is no doubt linked to other indicators about the game's size, like the reference to “new towns” in the reveal trailer. Notice that its plural, as Hollow Knight only featured Dirtmouth as a fully functioning settlement.
Hornet is Not A Silent Protagonist
The world of Hallownest was intentionally desolate, a quality that was reinforced by the decision to make The Knight a silent hero. We received nothing from him, nary a grunt, or Link-like “Hiya! Eeeya!”. Team Cherry has decided to change that in Silksong. During the Nintendo Treehouse demonstration, it is shown that Hornet not only replicates her battle sounds from Hollow Knight, but also engages in dialogue. According to Katie, a member of the publisher and developer relations team at Nintendo (and our guide through the demo), Hornet has “a voice, an opinion, and a really fun personality.” We see her vocally interacting with NPCs, as well as bosses, an aspect that will undoubtedly be one of the most differentiating from Silksong's predecessor.
No Release Date Has Been Announced (But One Might Have Been Leaked)
Despite some significant development updates and hands-on demonstrations, Team Cherry has been mostly silent since the Edge Magazine story in February, and as such have not given us any concrete release date. While there was hope that E3 2021 may provide new information on Silksong, Team Cherry announced that they would not be presenting anything. One detail that we have been given concerning the release is that, at least at launch, Silksong will only be available on PC and Nintendo Switch. While release on additional consoles “may happen,” Team Cherry has only committed to the above platforms at the time of this writing.
The wrinkle to this lack of release date is that on September 13, 2021, a major leak in Nvidia’s GeForce Now database revealed that Silksong may be set for release on February 1, 2022. Nvidia, while acknowledging the leak as legitimate, has clarified that the list included “released and/or speculative titles, used only for internal tracking and testing,” and that “inclusion on the list is neither confirmation nor an announcement of any game.” Stay tuned.