Hollow Knight: Silksong is officially vaporware - and no one is surprised
When Team Cherry released Hollow Knight back in 2017, it was instantly met with critical acclaim, sold 3 million copies in 3 years, and was named one of the best games of the decade by Polygon.
According to the Wikipedia page, its sequel, Hollow Knight: Silksong, is “currently in development.” That’s it.
Search up “Hollow Knight: Silksong”, the long-awaited DLC-turned-sequel to Hollow Knight, and you’ll find a common thread: “where the hell is it?” Dozens of articles about “everything we know so far”, release date speculations, and an endlessly watched and rewatched reveal trailer from 2019 (though the game has been promised since as early as 2014, alongside the original game’s Kickstarter) litter the Internet like bloody footprints. And with the coming and going of major events like The Game Awards (three of them!), Nintendo Indie Showcases, and radio silence from the development team themselves, gamers are starting to worry they’ll never find the corpse.
Nintendo’s April 19th Indie Showcase conjured many feelings. Excitement, confusion, rage at slighted expectations. The one major undercurrent, though, was the dejected sigh of thousands of Hollow Knight: Silksong fans. Gamers across the spectrum have been clamoring for a release date, trailer, or even a measly tweet reading “We’re still here!”. Unfortunately, besides the original reveal trailer in 2019 and the occasional reassurances, Team Cherry has kept their cards very close to their chest. Almost…too close.
Development hell, game limbo, another Star Citizen scenario - no matter which way you slice it, gamers know the feeling of seeing a game announced but never seeing it released. It could be production issues, shifting trends in the industry, or even a studio simply halting work on the project. Once a game is declared “vaporware” - a term describing a product announced to the general public that never sees the light of day - that’s usually a death knell. To the dismay of many and to the surprise of literally no one, Silksong may have hit that point.
Dozens of online forums and gaming publications are raising the red flag on its development. Team Cherry hasn’t updated their official blog since 2019 - with a post reaffirming fans that production was still underway. It’s gotten so bad that according to Game Rant in March of this year, Team Cherry accidentally let the Silksong website expire. The domain expired. If that’s not irony, I don’t know what is.
So, things are looking bleak. With E3’s unfortunate demise (or fortunate if you’re Geoff Keighley) and at the time of this writing, Summer Games Fest 2023 is the next big venue for Team Cherry to miss another update on. That may sound bleak and pessimistic. But in reality, it’s a defense mechanism. I want the game to be alive and kicking as badly as possible. I played and loved the OG Hollow Knight. It reimagined and rebuilt the Metroidvania as a genre, and in some senses defines it. But at this point in its life cycle, with Silksong having been originally promised as a stretch goal for the Hollow Knight Kickstarter in 2014 - and I don’t need to do the depressing math on that one - Silksong is legally dead. Please resuscitate.
Of course, if and when Team Cherry finally releases new information, or even a new look at the game itself, this piece will be obsolete and we can all breathe easy. But that remains a big “if”. And even when that fabled gameplay trailer drops, with the release date on the backend and a full formal apology from the people at Team Cherry for making the world wait so long, people won’t forget. They’ll remember the nine years of radio silence that accompanied Team Cherry’s second game ever(!). And those long nine years will forever color the memory of the game itself. It’ll impact how fans view Team Cherry’s next game, wondering if it won’t come out until well into the 2030’s. And Hollow Knight: Silksong will be a game that, though there is no doubt that it will be brilliant, is haunted by its time as nothing but a vapor.
